When you work hard at a company and do a really good job, you should get a raise or other reward for the work you have done.

What would you do if after a highly successful year, you only got a small raise and no promotion?

That is what happened to the employee in this story, so rather than continuing to work hard for the company, he took advantage of the training options and built his resume so he could quit and find a better job.

My boss refused to promote me or give me reasonable raises so I developed skills on the company dime that got me a >100% raise at another company.

Early in my career I worked as an engineer for a defense contractor for about 4 years getting my typical 2-4% raises and standard promotions that take years and years to qualify for.

It is frustrating when you do a good job, but don’t get rewarded for it.

I realized that in my current role I was pretty much maxed out for the foreseeable future, and would be scraping by for years more, so I tried to get on the management track and got given a project engineer position to prove myself.

I managed a team of 4 engineers, a designer, and 2 admins and we designed and manufactured a system that made $1.6M in sales in our first year of work.

Wow, this is quite an accomplishment.

We got the company a patent and were nominated by the USAF and became finalists as DoD Contractor Technical team of the year (I don’t recall the exact wording) and were flown to DC for a big awards ceremony.

I spent 100 days away from my family that year, traveling to test locations, customers, vendors, etc. It was brutal but we were wildly successful.

He deserved this perfect review.

When annual performance reviews came in mine was 10/10. I was thrilled, then I found out one of MY team members (who had a different manager) was promoted early to a senior position and that I did not and I just got the standard 3% raise again.

I was livid.

His manager is not really saying anything helpful at all.

I had a meeting with my boss, and his response was that he didn’t think my team member deserved a promotion or a big raise, but he wasn’t their boss so basically, I should try real hard again and we’ll see next year.

No way. I basically quite quit and just barely worked my 40hrs and went home. I never traveled unless I really wanted to, I never stayed late, I took almost every Friday off to burn through my leave. I took all my sick days, etc.

I certainly can’t blame him here.

My mental health was much better. The only thing I really did extra was take advantage of the education budget our group had but rarely got used.

My previously promoted co-worker (who I really liked personally) started taking MBA evening classes, that the company reimbursed him for, but they came with obligations to stay there for x number of years.

This type of training can be very valuable.

They also had a nice budget for software training (without such stipulations), so we both signed up for FEA and 3D modelling classes. We traveled around together taking these classes and building our resumes.

About a month after the classes were finished, I secretly started applying for jobs that required those specific skills and quickly got hired for a position with a base annual income that was 200% my existing rate plus it paid overtime.

Why would his boss be upset? He shouldn’t even be surprised.

I put in my notice and my boss was really upset.

“We just paid for you to travel all over to learn these new skills that we need! “Don’t you have any loyalty or guilt!”

Nope, they should have done this before. Too little too late.

“How much are they paying you, lets see if we can match it”

“That’s more than I make!”

Sometimes, going to a new company is the only way to get compensated.

It was and with OT I made about 3X the following year for a competitor.

Life changing good times.

Too many companies fail to reward their best employees, and they end up losing them to companies that will pay them for their worth.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about this great story.

Here is a commenter with a great quote.

Here is the perfect response.

This person is exactly right.

Why would someone feel guilt for bettering themselves.

Yup, this likely happened.

Never stay loyal to a company that doesn’t value you.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.