How Shata broke out of a senior manager plateau into a Director of IT Applications role

Shata had been stuck at senior manager level for some time, looking for a step up that her company simply did not have to give. Her background is enterprise applications, specifically SAP.

We landed her a Director of IT Applications role in a large company environment, and along the way a VP-level interview as well. She turned that down: she felt more aligned with director level and wanted to grow steadily rather than overreach in one jump.

Turning down the bigger title is the interesting part

A search that produces an option above your target is doing its job even when you decline it, because declining is only possible if the option exists. She now describes feeling more confident than before about taking that next step when she chooses to.

Why finding contacts is the hard part

Her clearest observation is about the work that sits underneath hiring-manager outreach, and it is a good corrective to the idea that this is just LinkedIn effort.

“Finding contacts is not easy either. It's not like you go to LinkedIn and getting an email is a different thing. You need to find, for example, whether they're using an mc.com or a bosch.com address.”

Working out the address pattern for one company, verifying it, and doing that again for every target is the unglamorous labour that makes direct outreach possible at all. It is also exactly the part that does not scale for someone doing it alone after work.

The search in numbers

• Stuck at senior manager level for years with no internal route up
• Director of IT Applications at a large company, plus a VP-level interview she declined
• Level: Director. Function: IT and Enterprise Systems