My sims won't get promoted

Two of my sims won't get a promotion although they've both have the gold tick next to the bar. To be specific one sim has reached the maximum level of the doctor career and I believed you could get a raise after that (or something similar anyway) and the other is a teenager who is currently stuck in the third level of the retail career. I have tried EVERYTHING I can possibly think of. I don't use any mods or custom content so that should have no effect and I've even resorted to trying to cheat a promotion as after researching this it seemed like the only solution. However, to much irritation, it did not work, which as you can imagine annoyed me even more. I'm stuck for ideas and I really don't want to have to make them quit the career and start again so I was wondering if anyone else was experiencing this problem or possibly has some sort of solution.