The 5 myths of career progression

As you get older, you begin to realise that careers are seldom a measured climb up an undulating slope.

They are more like a game of Super Mario Brothers – dodging pitfalls, moments of rapid acceleration followed by obstacles you can’t get past, wild creatures jumping out at you from unexpected places, and occasionally running out of lives and having to start again.

Here are a few myths around career progression from the Worknado files.

1. Careers just keep advancing with time and experience

If the career progression line we imagined in our youth was accurate, we would just keep getting promoted every few years and retire at 65 as the CEO.

The reality is not that simple. Careers can go up and down and barely 15 percent of the workforce is in senior management.

Most people flatline eventually, often deliberately. That is okay. The notion of continuous advancement simply doesn’t match the workplace maths.

2. You should go into management to advance your career

One of the saddest things you see in corporations is a miserable manager. These are typically people who loved their vocation, accepted a promotion into a management role because they wanted the money and status and then endured a working life of total misery.

One of the hardest truths for any ambitious person to face is that they are not cut out for management – they either dislike or get stressed by managing others or they just don’t have the emotional intelligence to deal with people.

These people need to realise that being in senior management and success do not necessarily go hand in hand. The world is full of very successful lone wolfs or people who work for themselves rather than face the constant challenges of human foibles.

3. Changing jobs equates with rapid advancement

This is actually seldom true. Job changes that allow people to use their experience to take a logical next step in their career (and when they are blocked in a lane at their current organisation) have positive results. So do job changes that give you a lot of stretch and growth room rather than just replicating what you are already doing.

Beyond that, plenty of people lead stellar careers through long stretches at the same organisation. In fact, Jim Collins’?Good to Great?research suggested the most successful company leaders were generally internal appointments with a very good knowledge of the business and its history.

4. There is always a logic to what people get paid

You would generally expect in a marketplace that similar jobs get similar pay. In most companies, it is not that simple. For example, very talented individuals with unique or special skills very often get paid more than the people who are managing them.

Companies rely on supply-demand discussions with non-award staff being secretive, so the value placed on an individual does not have to follow a hierarchy of logic. They also often pay more to bring in a new person (due to prevailing market conditions) but that seldom means all the existing people in the same jobs get increases as well.

Even between organisations there are vast differences. International firms will quite often pay more because they have equity in salaries across geographies. Others pay more simply because they increased the scale at some stage of their evolution to attract better people and that just locked in.

5. You need to work for someone else

I sincerely hope this has changed now, but when I went through the education system, every career conversation was about working for somebody else. I never once heard anyone discuss the genuine career option of starting a business. When I look back at my cohorts, the only ones who went into business in their 20s and 30s came from families with a history of running businesses.

Thankfully a lot of people opt to start businesses later in life or as a retirement wind-down strategy. There is also a rising entrepreneurial culture among the Gen Z group. There is still a dead zone in the peak working years when people want to start businesses, but the risks are too great against the drain of mortgages and school fees. But it feels like this is changing.

Shane Rodgers is the author of Worknado - Reimagining the way you work to live. Available through Amazon globally.

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