Office Politics for Tech Professionals Stop being outmaneuvered: read who really decides, spot the office games, and get your work seen and credited, honestly. 👉 Enroll now on Udemy You are good at your job. So why does someone else get the promotion, the budget or the credit? In most companies, the decisions that shape your career are made in rooms you are not in, by people who have never read your code. This course teaches the part of work nobody teaches: how power, visibility and office politics really work, told honestly and built for people in technology. You will learn to read who really decides, recognize the games being played around you, and get your work seen and credited, without manipulation and without becoming someone you do not want to be. What you will learn Read who really makes decisions in your company, beyond the org chart Map stakeholders and find the silent blocker before they find you Identify influencers, gatekeepers and sponsors, and work with each honestly Understand budget cycles and time your requests when they can still change the outcome Build and spend political capital deliberately Recognize and handle the games of territory, credit, blame, information and meetings Make your work visible with three habits: write it, show it, say it Manage up with a simple weekly update that earns trust and autonomy Navigate architecture boards, RFCs, vendors and shadow IT Translate technical needs into outcomes the business funds Respond calmly to manipulative colleagues, with records and a private conversation script Decide your ethical lines in advance and use a 30-day plan to turn the ideas into habits What is inside The hidden game — why good work is not enough, the unwritten rules, and the two maps of every company: authority and influence Read the structure — org charts and power topologies, culture archetypes and stakeholder mapping Read the people — influencers and the shadow org chart, how decisions really flow, gatekeepers and sponsors Money and capital — budget and resource power, political capital and technical authority The recognition games — territory, credit, visibility and alliances The pressure games — managing up, blame, information and meetings Politics in tech, and playing fair — architecture boards and RFCs, build vs. buy and shadow IT, the engineering-business translation gap, manipulative colleagues, ethics and a case-file lab How the course works Short, highly visual lessons (about 5 minutes each) with animated diagrams of real workplace situations. Every lesson ends with a small action for Monday. Around them: A self-assessment at the start, to see where you stand, and to measure your progress at the end A practice lab in every section — realistic scenes, three options, a pause to decide, and a debrief Nine field notes — real stories from my career, told honestly, including the ones that went wrong Three phrase libraries — word-for-word sentences for pushing back, asking for credit, saying no and repairing Six printable templates — each with a short walkthrough video, plus the slides of every section as PDF A quiz per section, a final exam, three assignments and a 30-day plan In total: 64 videos, nearly 4 hours, in 9 sections. Who this course is for Developers, engineers and architects who are technically strong but feel overlooked Analysts, project managers and consultants who work across stakeholder groups Tech leads and senior individual contributors preparing for bigger scope Anyone who has ever thought “the rules here seem invisible”, and wants an honest map It is not for you if you are looking for manipulation tricks. Every technique in the course is checked against four ethical tests, and you decide where your own lines are. Who teaches it I’m José Cruz, an IT architect with more than twenty years of experience as a trainer, in telecommunications, media, banking and automotive, and as a consultant. Those very different worlds taught me the technical skills and, just as much, the soft skills this course is about. I have made many of these mistakes myself, and nine of those stories are in the course. A note on the narration: it uses an AI voice created from my own voice. The content, the stories and the examples are my own. Technical skills open the door. Knowing how decisions are really made decides what happens next. 👉 Enroll now on Udemy