Progression Is Not the Same as Promotion
For most of modern working life, professional progress has been imagined vertically. A bigger title, a larger team, more responsibility, more pay. The logic is so familiar that we rarely question it: to move forward is to move up. But extend a career across 50 or 60 years and the model begins to strain. There are only so many rungs, only so many senior positions, and not every stage of a long working life calls for greater managerial responsibility. Some people want to deepen their expertise rather than lead larger teams. Others want to move sideways into a new field, reduce intensity for a period, return after caregiving, build a portfolio career, or exchange status for autonomy. If longevity is changing the length and shape of working life, then one of the questions we need to ask is deceptively simple: why is promotion still our primary measure of progress?
The first problem is structural. Organisations are pyramids, which means upward movement inevitably narrows as careers advance. OECD research shows that promotions decline with age, while workers aged 55 to 64 are less likely than those aged 35 to 44 to feel comfortable asking for one. Yet a decline in promotion is often interpreted as a decline in career progression itself. That is a category error. Internal mobility, including horizontal moves, can allow experienced workers to find roles better suited to changing skills, circumstances and organisational needs, while helping employers retain knowledge and capability. A longer career therefore needs more directions in which to move. The problem is not that everyone cannot continue climbing indefinitely. It is that we have built too few respected alternatives to climbing.
The second problem is cultural. Promotion carries signals that other forms of development often do not: status, recognition, compensation and proof that a career is still advancing. A lateral move can broaden skills, expose someone to a new function, geography or industry and create the conditions for future growth, yet it can still look like standing still. Research by Monika Hamori into the careers of more than 14,000 executives found that only around 40% of job changes were promotions. Another 40% were lateral moves, with the remainder involving downward moves. Successful careers, in other words, have always been less linear than their retrospective biographies suggest. Longer working lives make those sideways, exploratory and transitional movements more necessary, not less. If careers are becoming more varied, our definition of advancement needs to become more varied too.
A third problem appears when promotion and management become synonymous. In many organisations, the clearest route to higher pay, prestige and influence is to manage more people. That can push exceptional specialists into leadership roles they may neither want nor be suited for, while suggesting that remaining an individual contributor reflects limited ambition. Dual career ladders were developed precisely to challenge this assumption by creating parallel advancement tracks for managers and technical or specialist experts. In principle, both can achieve comparable seniority and reward. In practice, the distinction remains unresolved. A 2026 working paper analysing personnel records from 43 medium-sized and large firms found that individual contributors were present throughout corporate hierarchies but tended to earn substantially less than managers in comparable positions, with the gap widening higher up the organisation. The message remains difficult to miss: expertise may be valued, but management is often valued more. If organisations genuinely want to retain deep experience across longer careers, they will need to separate advancement from headcount and make mastery, judgment, influence and contribution legitimate destinations in their own right.
The fourth problem is that a long career will not move at one speed. The traditional promotion model assumes increasing scope and responsibility over time, but longevity introduces decades in which personal capacity, ambition and priorities will change. There may be periods when someone wants greater responsibility and others when they want fewer hours, more autonomy, a specialist role, a different sector, a return to hands-on work, or time to accommodate responsibilities outside work. None of these necessarily represent retreat. OECD work on career mobility argues that later-life progression can take the form of mentorship, project leadership or lateral movement, not only formal promotion. This distinction matters. A career that moves sideways, deepens into expertise, changes pace or takes a different form may still be progressing if it is building capability, agency, relevance or contribution. Progression is not the same as promotion.
That distinction matters because the career ladder is more than a metaphor. It shapes how people judge themselves and how organisations allocate opportunity. If the only respected direction is upward, every lateral move risks looking like compromise, every reduction in intensity like decline, every return to individual contribution like loss of status, and every pause like a gap to explain. Longer working lives require a broader understanding of what it means to move forward.
In a Perennial Career, progress may mean greater mastery rather than a larger team. It may mean wider range rather than a higher title. It may mean more autonomy, more flexibility, deeper expertise, renewed purpose or the freedom to move into work that fits a different stage of life. Some chapters will involve promotion. Others will not.
A 50-year career cannot keep moving up forever.
The more useful question is whether we can learn to recognise progress when it moves in another direction.
References
OECD, Promoting Better Career Choices for Longer Working Lives: Stepping Up Not Stepping Out (2024).
OECD, Promoting Better Career Mobility for Longer Working Lives in the United Kingdom (2024).
Monika Hamori, “Managing Yourself: Job-Hopping to the Top and Other Career Fallacies,” Harvard Business Review (2010).
Christy H. Weer and Jeffrey H. Greenhaus, “Dual Career Ladders in Organizations,” Wiley Encyclopedia of Management (2015).
Nicola Bianchi, Lydia Cao, Benjamin Friedrich and Kieu-Trang Nguyen, Dual Career Ladders: Individual Contributors in Modern Corporate Hierarchies (working paper, 2026).
