No Promotions. Getting Raises instead

Jobs (for me at level 9) are not promoting the sim to level 10, instead they're giving them infinite raises infinitely. The sim cannot progress to level 10 of the career. Gameplay is pure vanilla with no mods, cc or anything like that, I've tried reinstalling, verifying cache, quitting and reapplying to the job, leveling through other jobs to see if I could trick the game into remembering how to promote and no dice. I've met all the promotion prerequisites and the daily tasks, etc. (everything mechanical checks out). I suspect this is a new thing because of the recent patch, I haven't experienced this before the new update. Any suggestions or fixes are welcome :)