Didn’t get promoted and am devastated - please help

Same.

Do you feel the manager is good at their job, has experience/knowledge you lack? If so, take the feedback, preferably last thing on a Friday so you have a couple of days to digest and regroup.
Then you will know where you stand within this company. Are you part of their succession planning and would taking X or Y course cement that.
If not then look elsewhere, and look at expanding your skill set.
Constructive feedback leading to you making a plan is great. Useless bumbling in order to avoid your resignation is not.

I get it is disappointing - I have been there! My advice would be to absolutely go for the feedback - you can never improve on what you aren't aware of and make sure you are open to feedback (eg. don't be overly emotional or defensive etc - making it easier for people to give you feedback means you are much more likely to get honest and constructive feedback). That your manager offered feedback and continuing support rather than you asking, really speaks volumes. Lean into that support if you are interested in progressing your career. It sounds like you enjoy your work and the company - don't throw that away because you didn't get one promotion.

People will be watching how you respond to the set back - if you show maturity, accountability, interest, resilience you will be displaying behaviours very useful in more senior roles. If you show the opposite of those it might affect how you are seen in the organisation.

Chalk it up to experience and see it for what it is an opportunity to learn and develop. Good luck!

This

Did you get a better job and promotion?

Terrible advice.
They clearly do think she's good and value her as her manager is trying to help her.
They just don't rate her interview well, she probably didn't do a good job but they're offering her help to improve which she would be crazy to turn down.

I get it your feelings are hurt op but don't make this something it isn't.

I think you need to have an open mind to what your manager has to say. I have seen my husband have this predicament in his job. He will have people who he sees as having potential but when a role comes up, he has to balance their potential with their ability to actually get the job done. I hope your manager is the type who can give constructive feedback.
I understand you feel disappointed but I always say there’s a reason why things happen. Something better is out there for you. I remember years ago not getting a job I had set my heart on. I was in tears. Then I met the person who got the job and I could see how she was better suited than me. I then got another job which turned out to be one of the happiest periods of my life.

Accept the feedback.

It was probably something to do with the interview, maybe you didn’t expand on your answers enough, I think this is something that is very easy to do if you are an external candidate because you are making sure the interviewers know as much as they can about you, but as an internal candidate you perhaps the assumption that the interviewers know a lot about you so you don’t need to sell yourself so hard. You do !

You also haven’t had an interview for at least three years so maybe need to sharpen up your interview techniques, lots of advice online , or get a friend to help you to develop interview confidence.

Take the feedback, clearly you're good at your job but not as good at interviews as the others. There must have been a fair process, your manager can't and shouldn't give you the job just because he likes and knows you, it would be very unreasonable to expect that.

You clearly have good experience so once you get help with interview technique (which is always saying lots of things so you can get lots of points) then you can get the next promotion opportunity.

Sorry you didn't get the promoting. But it makes a change, tbh, that it went externally and not to a "pre-approved but doing interviews for appearances sakes" that so often happens.

This is going to sound harsh if you are still feeling raw but you must get used to knockbacks like this. Many people change jobs every 3-5 years to get the promotion/pay-rise they may not get if they stay where they are.

Your manager encouraged you to apply, so that is good, (although maybe he also had to put up an internal candidate to please HR?). He has offered feedback which is good. But you don't want to hear it? That is a bit weak. Are you always resistant to advice and coaching? You need to stop that and listen for constructive feedback. And then you can decide in your own time if you want to stay or look elsewhere.

It is always easier to find a job while you are in one.

Get the feedback. I was outstanding at my job but hopeless at interviews so got promoted internally having failed catastrophically at some interviews.If there were more people than your manager interviewing you, you might need the feedback. My friend asked for feedback and was told her IT skills weren’t as good as needed. She addressed that and a year later reapplied and got the identical role.

Everyone has these disappointments so don’t feel too bad, although when it’s where you work it is extremely disappointing.
It’s happened to me and then the following year I got a bigger promotion at the same place of work.
Go for your feedback, it should help. Psych yourself up for it - tell yourself you are really good at your job but want to know the ‘why’s’.
Start looking elsewhere, I got my first promotion after a year and I’m sure it was because I looked for jobs in my lunch hour - it was newspapers back then so it was easier to do that in those days!

@pinkdelight but this is what we see time and time again.

When I see people as flawed themselves it helps me move on. A little anger for the OP might rev her engines to look for another post which is exactly what she needs to do to regain her self worth and belief in herself.

Yes feedback is essential but it’s no good if you’re not in the right headspace. If it were me, feeling so devastated and imagine almost a little ‘betrayed’, I would definitely need some wind down time/processing space. So I’d just ask to have the talk a little later as you want time to note down some personal observations/Qs of your own relating to the interview - to ensure the talk with him as meaningful an interaction as possible.

I had a situation where I was part of an interview panel and we had an internal candidate who was good at her current role and thought she would be a certainty for the promotion to a vacant role. We had reservations on her capability in a key area of this role that would have been a big step up for her. We focused a lot of her interview on this and could tell she didn’t fully grasp how much of a step up it was.

We hired external and our internal candidate was devastated, crying, etc. We really wanted to explain why, but she didn’t take up any offer of feedback from multiple people of varying seniority.

We would have fully understood if she’d said yes she wanted feedback but wasn’t ready yet, but not even wanting to know our feedback didn’t come across well and backed up another lesser concern we had on how she doesn’t tend to take feedback onboard.

My suggestion is to give your manager an idea of when you’ll be ready to have the conversation and maybe take a day of leave in between to process and think about your next options.

Just a thought OP - maybe you did very well at interview, and your manager has you in mind for a slightly bigger step up than you originally went for? Worth going for the feedback I reckon, while keeping in mind that it is now up to them to make some effort if they want to retain you. Good luck.

Your boss is offering you valuable feedback on why you didn't get the job. Take it! Wait until you are a bit more on top of your emotions, and then thank him for the offer of advice and mentorship. Come ot the meeting with a notebook. listen, take notes. Let it sit for a few days as it's normal to feel defensive and dismissive of criticism. Then process the advice. If it is sound, act on it. If it is word salad platitudes, look elsewhere for a more senior role. Or take his advice and apply it, to get a more senior role elsewhere.

Yes and also this.

some posters on here must be incredibly unprofessional and entitled to expect to win everything. It's jarring to manage those types of people.

I think you should say yes to the chat and that you’d like some time to reflect on the experience yourself first - and schedule for a couple of weeks/a month off. You’ll feel differently in time - less raw and likely to cry - and your boss may have some good advice for you. Give yourself time to be in the right mindset to hear it.

I'd suggest this as well.

Even if the advice isn't good it can be telling one of DH female colleges had been doing role for 18 months and they went with less experienced outside man - the feed back was she needed more expeirence. She took it as a sign and left doing much better for herself.

Guy who came in didn't stay long and was a lot of work - he was using it as a stepping stone in his career. The concensus was it was because she was female - not many women in field and office and they'd all had similar - and she's just had kids in last few years- her DH was main carer but that didn't seem to matter.

It's perfectly possible you just came up against unexpectedly strong outside candiates - I think the feed back could be useful to work out what happened and if you'd be better off looking elsewhere.

This is ridiculous. Not everybody will get the promotion. Do you always throw your toys out the pram when you don't 'win?'

you're not always going to get what you want OP. This is a really extreme reaction. Disappointing, yes, but you can't go through life expecting to win every time. Listen to the feedback, hear the manager out and take it on board. You don't even know what they're going to say yet!

I totally agree with this. It is an extreme reaction and you need to learn to be more resilient. Book the meeting with your head held high and make it very clear that you love your job but that you're ready to move onto the next stage of your career now. This gives them the opportunity to over you either a promotion or a path to getting that promotion, if they value you and want to keep you.

I feel so upset and almost like I have to do something. I don’t really want to meet with my manager because as I say, I don’t feel up to it mentally

I wonder if this is something they've identified and want to support you with so that you can progress - though if so it might have been best to suggest before encouraging you to apply for the promotion

Of course your disappointment's natural and leaving's always an option, but is it possible you could feel equally crushed by a setback elsewhere?

Have the feedback meeting and if you don’t agree with any of his reasoning and comments say so! Don’t be rude or aggressive but point out how he encouraged you to apply (you could add at this point ‘did he want you there to simply increase the numbers). State how disappointed you are to not get the promotion you had worked so hard for and felt was a good fit for you.
I did this with a previous manager and he was like a rabbit caught in headlights…..it was quite a nice feeling watching him squirm when I asked questions that he clearly wasn’t expecting.

This happened to me in March 2021. Found a new job august 2021 with a 5.5k payrise.

When I told my manager I was leaving he said would I stay if they paid me more. I laughed and said if I’d been promoted I’d have had the exact same payrise as I’m getting now in my new role.

I too like you was completely broken as my manager had also bigged me up for the role to then be told I wasn’t promoted. He told me on Teams and once he told me that I had to ask to leave the call as I couldn’t stay on the call and not be in tears.

But now I’m still in that new role I applied for and loving it! So as rubbish as it feels now a new role somewhere else will come up that’s even more perfect.

Perfect!

This goes to show while some organisations have good intentions, some will just continually sell you down the river.

Id go to the feedback session after reading all these experiences OP much wiser to the fact that humans are good and bad and a mix of the two.

He may have your best intentions at heart or he may not.

The big learning from this is to separate your self worth from your manager’s opinion of you. some will treat you fairly and responsibly, others won’t. And it doesn’t matter how much you work, they’ll still take the piss if they’re a piss taker.

I can count on one hand the good managers I had in my career. Honestly I think they’re rare and you need to be on the lookout for yourself !