Your manager calls you into a quick chat. The data platform group needs someone with your background for six months while they rebuild their ingestion pipeline. Would you be interested in a secondment? You would keep your job, your pay and your manager, and then come back.
It sounds simple. It is a good opportunity, and also one of the easiest career moves to get wrong, because most of the risk sits in the details nobody writes down.
Start with the return. Ask what happens to your current work while you are away, and who will own it. Ask what you are coming back to. The same role, the same team, the same projects? Teams change a lot in six months, and the person covering your work may become its owner. Get the answer in an email, not just a nod.
Then ask what the secondment is actually for. Is the other team short of hands, or do they need a skill nobody there has? Is there a chance they will want to keep you? Knowing that lets you decide in advance what you would say if they asked.
Agree how your performance will be judged. Your home manager will barely see your work for six months. Ask them to agree, before you start, that they will collect feedback from your temporary lead, and put a short check in every month or two. Otherwise your review may quietly describe the work you used to do.
Decide what you want to bring back. A secondment is one of the few times a company lets you learn a different part of the business on full pay. Name two or three things you want to understand by the end. How that team plans, how their data really flows, who makes decisions there.
Keep one thread to home. A short message to your old team now and then, a lunch once a month. You will be returning to people, not just a role.
And when it ends, write a one page summary of what you did and what you learned, and send it to both managers. It is the easiest way to make sure six months of work counts.
– Asael Shinder
