Can’t get enough of the Sims 4? We don’t blame you: The EA Sims game remains one of the most popular thanks to its free download (for the base game) on multiple devices. The neverending stream of new content and events doesn’t hurt either, especially for casual players.
But if you’re serious about getting your Sims 4 sims as far as they can go, you’ll want to specialize in Career. The Career is what you choose for your sims to do, setting the trajectory of their lives for many years to come. In Sims 4, Careers also lets sims earn in-game money which allows players to buy certain items to decorate their home or buy more stuff. If you’ve never tried it before, make your sim access their phone or a nearby computer and select Find a Job.
Career types vary greatly in Sims 4. You can be an athlete, lawyer, detective, astronaut, soldier, cook, artist…and even more careers are added over time with expansion packs and other add-ons. That gives you a ton of choices, which is what the Sims is all about. But there’s a problem with getting your sim into a Career: It takes a lot of player time, and that gets tiring.
The Sims 4 Career track allows promotions to level up their position, which rewards more money and other advantages. Sims need to be on top of their careers, constantly healthy, happy, and ready to work hard if they want a promotion. That means a lot of background management for a player along with some decisions about what Career branches to choose.
We’re going to make all that work a lot easier with a popular Sims 4 promotion cheat to help zoom your sim to the top of their career! Here’s how the process works, what catches you should know about, and other tricks that can help out.
Pick the Right Career for Your Goals
The Sims 4 has a number of Career types – not the specific jobs, but different ways Careers function when you are playing. Original Careers tend to simply make your sims disappear for a while during their digital days and return. The City Living expansion allowed remote work from home for many jobs (just like us!). The Get to Work expansion allowed players to choose new Careers where they could follow their sims to work and actually manage the jobs. There are even freelance jobs and part-time jobs for sims at different stages in their lives.
So, which should you pick for the best rewards and easiest promotions? We’ll suggest several different choices if
- Secret Agent: Traditionally one of the highest paying jobs for a standard sim. The operative in the Military career path is a similar option if the secret agent isn’t available.
- Criminal: Promotions in a criminal gang yield some of the best bonuses in the game, so it combines well with using promotion cheats.
- Space Smuggler: This astronaut path takes a lot of work but yields all kinds of interesting ways to earn money. The grind makes it a very popular choice if you’re planning on using promotion cheats to save lots of time.
- Scientist: Scientists make a fair amount of money, but the real value of promotion is all the stuff you get. That includes the ability to get cool gadgets for your house, mess with sim mind control, clone sims, and develop drugs that can give you powers or immortality. Pretty neat!
- Botanists: Botanists make pretty good money, but like scientists, their promotions unlock the best abilities. That includes growing special plants that grant immortality and other fun tricks.
- Social Media Influence: This job is exhausting to manage by has high payout if you get lots of followers and juggle advertisements correctly. Progressing fast is key!
The exception is if you absolutely want an active Career type where you manage your sim at work. In that case, your choices are a bit more limited. You may want to become a scientist, social media star, actor, follow a tech guru track, or a similar option.
Use the Console Promotion Cheat
You can directly impact promotions by inputting the right codes into the Sims 4 bug console. Usually, opening up the bug console and entering a direct line command is a cheat only usable on PC, but Sims 4 is a rare exception. Here, you can usually access this console on PC, Mac, and even gaming consoles. Here’s how.
- PC: While in the Sims 4, press the CTRL + Shift + C buttons at the same time to open the console window.
- Mac: While in the Sims 4, press the Command + Shift + C buttons at the same time to open the console window.
- Game Console: While in the Sims 4, press all four trigger buttons on the top of the control at the same time to open the console window.
Now, you’ll need to follow some basic steps to get your on-demand promotions:
Enable Cheat Mode
With the console window open, type “testingcheats true” and enter the command (without the quotation marks. This enables all console cheat commands.
Promote a Career
Now use the console window and type the command “careers.promote x” but replace the “x” with whatever Career your current sim has. For example, if you choose the Astronaut career, you would type in, “careers.promote astronaut” and then enter the command. If the job is multiple words like an adult freelancer artist, you’ll have to type it in like, “careers.promote adult_freelancer_artist.” This should automatically promote your sim in their career. You can exit out to check your work, or you can enter the command a few times and promote them immediately. If your promotion isn’t working, try looking up the exact command for promoting your Career path to see if there’s anything you missed.
Other Promotion Cheat Options
If your sim has a part-time job, it doesn’t quite count as a career. You’ll have to enter a slightly different command. Type: “careers.promote PartTime_X” and replace the X with the sim’s part-time job. For example, you could type, “careers.promote PartTime_Lifeguard” and it should work.
Likewise, with the right expansions you can send young sims to school. To speed that process up, you can use handy commands like “careers.promote gradeschool” and “careers.promote highschool” to speed things up a lot. If your little sim is starting a job as a teen, you can use the promotion commands above, but substitute “adult” for “teen” or add “teen” to the beginning of the career.
Final Notes
Please note there are some important caveats to using these console promotion cheats. First, they and other console commands may not be available in all Sims 4 modes or activities. It’s a huge game, and sometimes these kinds of cheats are blocked for different events or other purposes.
Second, you’ll need to have an applicable expansion pack to use a promotion cheat. You can’t promote a Career that you don’t have access to. Some expansion packs may cost real-world money to get the Careers you want. The newer expansion packs tend to have the best Careers with the most complex promotion paths and abilities. Since there are a lot of expansion packs, you should look up the specific Career you want to make sure you have it and all related upgrades to its promotion paths.
Third, using these promotion cheats may have unintended side effects on other parts of the game. It may block certain options to grow your sim or participate in events. It some cases it could cause your game to crash. Certain items that are usually available with promotion may not be available if you use commands.
Other Important Sims 4 Career Cheats
The promotion cheat can get you a direct promotion, but it’s not the only useful career cheat in the Sims 4. Let’s look at some other cheats that work well in combination with it!
An extra console cheat: If you’re still using console commands, you may want to enter “bb.ignoregameplayunlocksenttitlement” as well. This takes all the buy requirements off items that you get through promotions and other means. Basically, it means you can use promotion abilities immediately without needing to save up enough money to buy them.
Manage your Aspirations: Pick Aspirations early that align with the career path you want to save time. Then choose the specific skills you need to get into a Career. Once you start progressing, remember to complete your daily tasks for the most efficient progression. Working on your skills is especially important, because promotion cheats won’t necessarily affect them. Mastering skills will help you make more money in less time at the job of your choice.
Watch your Ideal Emotion: Every Career has an Ideal Emotion that sims should have when they go to work. This helps the sim gain more on their performance meter and get ready for a promotion faster if you aren’t using a console command right now. You can switch work tasks or at-home activities to help get your sim in the right now for a specific Career path as you progress. Even if you’re using promotion cheats, keep an eye on your sim’s mood and emotion. Poor behavior here can negatively impact your rewards.
Don’t Stop After Reaching a Final Promotion: Even after getting their dream job and all the stuff that unlocks, sims can still fill their performance meter over and over. That helps earn more money to buy some of the best rewards.
Quit Careers Easily: You can quit a Career at any time, but it’s a huge waste of time to choose a different Career and level it up again. You can make this a bit easier with console commands. Use “careers.add_career {careername}” to immediately add a career whenever you want.
You Can Demote Too: Why would you want to demote a sim? Sometimes promotion via cheats moves your sim along too fast and blocks certain parts of the game you didn’t want to miss. Other times, all the unlocks and active Career management becomes too much, so players want to slow things down. Either way, demoting is easy. Simple exchange “promote” with “demote” in any of our commands above, and your sim will lose a Career rank.
Get More Money: If you want more money right away, you can get simoleons with simple commands like “rosebud,” “kaching,” and “motherlode.” These instantly add large amounts of simoleons so you can start buying the stuff you want.
Now you’ve got all the tools you need to speed your sim along the best Career path and unlock all the cool goodies you get at the end! Just remember to download the best expansion packs for the Career you want. Keep an eye out for new expansion packs that add more Careers or update an old Career with new promotion options.