Start showing ever greater levels of incompetence ! Seriously, I'm not trying to be a troll magnet. When you are very good technically your management will ke

Start showing ever greater levels of incompetence ! Seriously, I'm not trying to be a troll magnet. When you are very good technically your management will keep you down in the mines to keep doing great work and preferably without too many pay rises. Working in support is especially bad in the sense that it is not an area that attracts many good engineers, thus you are probably indispensable. If you are seriously keen on moving up into management you could study one of the many DIY MBA courses around. If that still looks like where you want to be, then depending on the size of your organisation you could start applying for promotions into team leader roles and possibly low-level management roles.