Impress Next Business Trip, Get Promoted

Remote workers: Managing upwards IRL has far better ROI than you'd expect.

After the initial rounds of layoffs in 2023 and budget cuts, business travel is back at many companies. For remote workers or those working on teams split across many offices, this means a critical window for career advancement has opened again.

Whether a team meeting, division summit week, or internal conference, business travel is much more than an expense-paid well-liquored trip. It's a chance to advance your career in person, with 10x the opportunities – and risks – as meeting with colleagues on Zoom.

This post will cover how you can leverage business travel for far more than just credit card points (for points, check out

BowTied Bum

).

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Why go at all?

Especially for some new hires, this question comes up. Sometimes they don't even have a family or wife that they don't want to leave, they may just not be used to or like travel, they like their routine.

And to be sure, business travel has its expected frustrations, from the regular airport security harassment, to occasional flops with food or hotel choice by your boss's executive assistant, or the expected drug, crime, and homeless tent filled American cities.

But, it's not usually always all bad.

Especially for most big tech companies, there will be silver linings.

Higher budgets for daily food, hotel, and Ubers mean for parts of the trip within your control, you can often make it a pleasant experience. Toss them on a premium or new credit card, and you can use reimbursed business expense spend to help churn credit card points for your next vacation. Book on a premium card, and you can enjoy the hotel status upgrade and free dining credits that improve the ROI on your card annual fees.

Beyond the materialistic consumption and setting, the career advancement opportunities are much more important and alone are worth the hassle to business travel.

Social Capital

Especially for primarily remote workers, your ability to build social capital, credibility, and trust will always be stunted while your colleagues', manager's, and executives' experience of you is limited to the Zoom window on their screen.

FaceTime will never replace IRL face time.

And you need face time to build social capital. Without it, even the best promo packet will fail. I’ve seen it happen.

You need to take social interactions as seriously as you iron out the bugs in your PRs.

This will come as a surprise or nuisance to some of my more introverted readers, but it is the unfortunate truth that the AI isn’t yet setting your pay, some emotional human is, which means you still have a shot at manipulating their emotions to get promoted.

Are you ready to learn how?