The other option is to leave Target to another company and then come reapply back. External experience on top of previous experience can give you more leverage to position and pay. It's risky of course, but it might be worth it for those who see stagnant movement in their store or district.
If you really want to be an ETL, this might actually be the more sound advice if your district is more common.
Believe it or not but external hires cost the company a lot less time than an internal because they make it such an involved process promoting internal ETLs due to how much studying they do on you in leadership roles and checking on how you're progressing.
Now - this is also why the internal hires generally work out better than the external. You're already accustomed to the basic practices and the sometimes chaotic nature of the business. You aren't hit by shock as bad when dropped into your full role after completeing "business college". So in the end, internals probably end up costing the company less since in my experience they are more like to succeed.
There's a lot less red tape and attention required by upper management with external hires. Since the external hire is hired over 2-4 interviews in less than a month's time usually and boom they're right in business college and an ETL. There's about 2-4 more stages that go on before an internal TM promotes to ETL.
Now that said - this is all me assuming a fairly typical environment. In my district my DTL and the leadership teams love internal promotions for the right people and w ill fast track you if you're amazing and passionate about what you're doing. A girl who was a TM at my store for 6 months and then graduated with her BA in Communication, super sweet and a super great worker and leader even as a TM but not in a bad way. Always dominated her workcenter. We promoted her to TL at request of our STL/DTL even though we didn't have a free TL allocated spot. She absolutely excelled at it and within 3 months we made her an SrTL as our DTL/STL wanted to see her in an LOD role. It's 6 months later now and she's still completely killing it and traveling to support a red store for most her shifts and she is killing it there too and really turning around their logistics process with only being 3-4 days a week. She is now on the bench set to take the ETL-Salesfloor at my current store as ours is leaving in December due to promoting to an STL.
That all said - THAT is being fast tracked as an internal. From the time she graduated and began developing to become an ETL, it took her 9 months. By the time she actually assumes her ETL role, it'll be right at a year. That's a fast track. If you hire externally as an ETL, it's 2-3 weeks with 2-4 interviews, and a month of training. So you spend about 1-2 months max becoming an in-role ETL vs the 12 months it's taking our fast tracked TM-ETL. A lot of internal ETL promotions will take longer. I've heard of other districts that want a minimum of 1-2 years in the TL/SRTL role before considering bumping.
