McMaster-Carr Career Growth & Development

What makes promotion criteria feel fair and clear — and what evidence supports it? 

I’m never surprised when I see someone get promoted. I’ve usually heard about the work they’ve been doing and the impact they’re making in our department, or someone I know has. It really makes me feel like a promotion is a reward for consistently doing good work. On top of that we have a set of competencies that we use to guide reviews and help determine when someone is ready for a promotion. The competencies build on top of each other as you advance through the roles and act as guidance for how to grow yourself and your career.

Which program most improved your capability in your role — and what changed after?

While I have participated in a variety of different programs outside of my project work at McMaster, I think my project work is actually the main way that I’ve been able to grow here. We structure our teams around our project work, so in the last five years I’ve worked on several different teams and have been given a variety of different opportunities based on the needs of each project. This has provided me time to focus on skills like communicating with non-technical stakeholders, coaching engineers, modernizing legacy systems, designing greenfield systems, and many more. All of these opportunities have allowed me to expand my impact in our department and advance my career.

What manager or mentor behavior consistently accelerates growth?

All of my managers at McMaster have consistently made an effort to assign stretch work to ensure I’m learning new things and developing my skills. Now that I’m in management I’ve carried this into my planning meetings too. Every couple weeks when we’re deciding how to assign project work, one of the factors we consider is whether any of the work items represent a good growth opportunity for a member of the team. This allows us to consistently give people growth opportunities that align with our competencies and allow them to take steps forward in their careers. This practice is widespread in our department and reflects our high expectations as well as the support that we want to provide our team members. My managers have also generally been open to me initiating work based on needs that I see in our project or the department as a whole. Designing and implementing features and tools that I’ve advocated for has been a great way for me to learn and benefit our department.

Career growth can mean different things to different people. For some engineers and managers, it means growing their impact in the organization and contributing to larger projects. For others, it means building more depth in new technologies or becoming an expert at a particular skill. At McMaster-Carr, individuals can try out both managerial roles and engineering roles rather than needing to commit to a path, so growth can also look like preparing for a different role.

What new skill or role did you want to learn, and why was this important to you?

After three years as a systems engineer at McMaster-Carr, I wanted to move into an engineering management role. Two things drew me to it. The first was impact. I wanted to move beyond shipping individual features to shaping the direction of a project by translating high-level goals into achievable objectives, creating work plans and evaluating technical design. The second was the people. I had previously enjoyed being a peer mentor and a new-hire orientation lead, and I wanted a role where I could spend more of my time coaching and developing others.

Though I had some mentoring experience, it would be different to be responsible for development of engineers on my team. To be successful, I wanted to build my skills as a coach and manager: giving technical feedback, selecting appropriately sized features and setting others up to do their best work.

How did McMaster-Carr help support this time of learning and/or professional development?

McMaster-Carr helped me build these skills in a couple of ways. First, I was given the opportunity to coach a new engineer on my project by helping her with technical designs and performing the first reviews of her code. After that, I led a cohort of new engineers through Tech Training, a multi-week program where we taught the fundamentals of coding at McMaster-Carr and delivered a capstone website. Through these experiences, I had the opportunity to provide feedback, scope work and lead a group through delivering a product. 

I also participated in McMaster-Carr’s mentoring program, where I worked with an assigned mentor on my development goals. Since my mentor was an engineering manager, she was able to provide helpful insight into the role and act as a sounding board while I worked through these new experiences. Her feedback and coaching helped me feel prepared to take on management responsibilities.

What was the outcome of this experience? How did it impact your future growth in your profession?

Not long after leading Tech Training, I was promoted to engineering management. I led a team focused on building software to prepare our receiving operation for a transition to a more automated warehouse. In that role, I got to work directly with operational partners to describe how our day-to-day operations would change with automation and create a technical plan for incorporating our existing software with the automated system. I enjoyed thinking through the project at a high level and found it especially rewarding to be a major part of improving productivity and ergonomics for our entire distribution operation.

Since then, I have continued to grow as a manager. I spent two years as the operational manager for our receiving department, a role that pushed me to develop my ability to lead through others as I managed a larger team. Now, I’m a senior manager responsible for helping operations around the company use LLMs to improve customer experience and productivity. This ambiguous project has helped me grow in shaping work and setting direction amidst uncertainty. Each of these roles has felt like a natural progression of the management skills I started building years ago.