The career ladder is structurally obsolete. Here is what to build instead — and why a sideways step might be the smartest move you make this decade.
The death of the career ladder
For decades, professional success looked remarkably similar regardless of your sector: a vertical climb up a fixed organisational structure, each rung earned through loyalty, tenure, and the right kind of visibility with the right kind of manager. Stay in your lane. Keep your head down. Wait your turn. The ladder rewarded patience above almost everything else.
That model has not just aged poorly. It has become structurally incompatible with how organisations actually operate today. As companies flatten their hierarchies, restructure continuously, and prioritise agility over institutional seniority, the ladder has lost its rungs. The organisations most professionals work in now bear little resemblance to the hierarchies that the ladder metaphor was built for.
What has replaced it is the career lattice — a multidimensional web of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal movements, in which growth is measured not by title changes but by the breadth, depth, and relevance of the capability you are building. This is not simply a new metaphor. It is a fundamentally different philosophy of what professional development is for.
| Research spotlight Hall (1976, 2004), The Protean Career; Savickas (2011), Career Construction Theory Douglas Tim Hall introduced the concept of the ‘Protean Career’ in the 1970s — a path driven by individual values and self-direction rather than organisational reward structures. Mark Savickas later extended this with Career Construction Theory, arguing that careers are not discovered through assessment or waiting, but actively built through the meanings people make of their experiences. Both frameworks anticipated the lattice model by decades: your career is not something that happens to you. It is something you construct. |
Why a lateral move is a growth accelerator, not a plateau
The most persistent misconception about lateral moves is that they signal stagnation. If you are moving sideways, the thinking goes, you are not moving forward. This is not just unhelpful. It is demonstrably wrong.
Research by Professor Michael Waldman at Cornell University offers a rigorous counter-argument through his theory of task-specific human capital. Waldman’s analysis of career trajectories finds that lateral movers — those who shift to roles at the same organisational level — frequently experience larger subsequent wage growth and faster promotions than peers who remain in a single vertical lane. The mechanism is straightforward: senior roles require a wide but not necessarily deep set of skills. A lateral move today is an investment in the capability set you will need tomorrow.
Waldman notes one interesting exception: highly educated professionals with 18 or more years of formal study are statistically less likely to be moved laterally, because organisations perceive the short-term cost of reorientation as too high given their existing specialised capital. The long-term payoff of breadth, however, remains significant even for this group — a finding that suggests the resistance is institutional rather than rational.
| “The benefit of lateral moves lies in the idea that upper level jobs use a wide but not necessarily deep set of skills, so a lateral move today will make the worker more productive in the future if the worker is promoted.” — Professor Michael Waldman, Cornell University |
Herminia Ibarra’s research on career transitions adds a crucial psychological layer to Waldman’s economic argument. In Working Identity (2003), Ibarra found that successful career changers — including lateral movers — do not start with a clear destination and work backwards. They start with action. They experiment with new roles, test provisional identities, and allow their sense of direction to emerge from doing rather than planning. Ibarra calls this ‘outsight’ — the wisdom that comes from engaging with the new rather than interrogating the past.
The implication for senior professionals considering a lateral move is significant: you do not need to have it all mapped out. You need to be willing to engage, try, and update your self-concept as you go.
| Research spotlight Ibarra (2003), Working Identity; Wrzesniewski & Dutton (2001), Administrative Science Quarterly Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton’s research on job crafting shows that professionals who proactively reshape the tasks, relationships, and meaning of their work — even within a fixed role — report significantly higher engagement, identity alignment, and performance. Lateral moves offer an accelerated version of job crafting: a structured opportunity to reshape your entire professional identity rather than working around the edges of a role that no longer fits. |
The lattice versus the ladder: a structural comparison
The contrast between these two frameworks is not just philosophical. It has practical implications for how you evaluate opportunities, approach performance reviews, and define your own success. Career strategist Cliff Hakim’s analysis highlights that the ladder perspective is increasingly incompatible with modern business needs — and that 76% of employees would leave their current role if they felt stuck without genuine growth options.
| Feature | Career Ladder | Career Lattice |
| Direction of movement | Up or down only | Up, down, across, diagonal |
| Primary rewards | Promotions and job titles | Contributions and measurable results |
| Authority & guidance | The boss provides answers | Collaborative — ‘let’s figure it out’ |
| Basis for rewards | Loyalty and tenure | Skill breadth and impact |
| Work dynamics | Dependence on the hierarchy | Independence, flexibility, teamwork |
| Career owner | The organisation | The individual |
| Risk response | Security through staying | Security through employability |
The most important line in this table is the last one: who owns the career. In the ladder model, the organisation sets the pace and direction. In the lattice model, the individual does. This is not about being self-centred. It is about being strategic. In a world where organisations restructure, merge, downsize, and pivot with increasing frequency, professionals who have handed ownership of their career to their employer are the most vulnerable.
Success redefined: the protean career and career anchors
The Protean Career is driven not by what the organisation values but by what you value. Hall’s framework is named after the Greek god Proteus, who could change shape at will — not out of confusion, but out of mastery. The protean professional does not lack direction. They have internalised their direction so deeply that it can guide them through roles, sectors, and structures that would disorientate a purely ladder-focused thinker.
Edgar Schein’s concept of career anchors offers a complementary lens. Schein identified eight self-concept categories that act as an anchor for professional identity — the things you would be unwilling to give up even if forced to choose. These include technical or functional competence, general managerial competence, security and stability, entrepreneurial creativity, service or dedication to a cause, pure challenge, lifestyle integration, and autonomy and independence.
Understanding your dominant anchor is profoundly clarifying when faced with a non-linear career decision. A professional whose anchor is autonomy will experience a lateral move into a larger, more structured organisation very differently from one whose anchor is entrepreneurial creativity. Neither response is wrong — but both are more useful when understood.
The data on subjective career success is striking. Research consistently shows that professionals who pursue intrinsic goals — growth, connection, contribution, and autonomy — report significantly higher wellbeing and long-term satisfaction than those pursuing extrinsic goals such as status, title, and salary alone. This is not an argument against ambition. It is an argument for directing ambition towards what actually sustains you.
| Research spotlight Schein (1978, 1990), Career Dynamics; Kasser & Ryan (1993), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Schein’s career anchors research found that when professionals were placed in roles that violated their dominant anchor, they experienced profound dissatisfaction regardless of objective success metrics. Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan’s research confirmed this pattern more broadly: people whose life goals are primarily extrinsic (wealth, fame, status) report lower wellbeing and higher anxiety than those with primarily intrinsic goals. The practical implication is clear — knowing your anchor is not a luxury. It is a navigation tool. |
Transferable skills: the currency of the lattice
If the lattice is the structure, transferable skills are the currency that moves you across it. The methodology of terminology mapping — translating past experience into the language of a new role or sector — is a practical and underused technique for professionals considering lateral or diagonal moves.
The underlying psychology here connects to Nancy Schlossberg’s Transition Theory, which identifies four factors that determine how successfully a person navigates any significant career transition: their Situation (the nature and timing of the change), their Self (their psychological resources, resilience, and values), their Support (the people and networks available to them), and their Strategies (how they actively manage the transition). Terminology mapping is a Strategies tool — it reduces the cognitive barrier to a move by helping you see continuity between who you have been and who you are becoming.
Consider how this works in practice. A teacher moving into a caseworker role does not simply describe classroom experience. They surface their ability to ‘support individuals through life stress and trauma’, ‘administer and interpret assessments’, and ‘lead group discussions using motivational techniques to facilitate constructive change.’ The experience is the same. The framing is entirely different, and so is the response it generates.
In technology-adjacent roles, the rise of the tech generalist creates particular opportunity for this kind of mapping. The skill half-life in technology is shortening rapidly, and the integration of AI tools means that professionals who can connect ideas across systems, ethics, and product-market fit, without requiring deep technical expertise in every domain, are increasingly sought after. The generalist who can translate is often more valuable than the specialist who cannot.
| Research spotlight Schlossberg (1984, 2011), Counselling Adults in Transition; Ibarra & Barbulescu (2010), Academy of Management Review Schlossberg’s research on adult transitions found that the quality of a professional’s narrative about their own career — how coherently they can explain who they are and where they are going — is a significant predictor of transition success. Ibarra and Barbulescu extended this with research on professional narrative identity: people who can tell a credible, coherent story of change are not just more persuasive to interviewers. They are more psychologically settled in their own transitions. Your story is not just marketing. It is how you make sense of yourself. |
The industry reality check: navigating constraint with a lattice mindset
The career lattice is an empowering framework. But it exists in a real labour market, and some sectors require particular strategic awareness right now. In life sciences and pharmaceuticals, for example, many firms are in what can fairly be described as survival mode — managing lean teams, navigating the patent cliff (an estimated £240 to £310 billion in revenue exposure), and driving aggressive mergers and acquisitions to secure their pipeline.
In this environment, a lattice mindset is not just philosophically appealing. It is a competitive advantage. Hiring is increasingly mission-critical and niche. Fully remote listings have contracted sharply, with a three-day hybrid model becoming the established norm. And because firms are acquiring innovation through M&A rather than organic growth, a candidate’s demonstrable ability to survive and add value through post-merger integration — adapting quickly to new therapeutic areas, new teams, and new cultures — has become a material differentiator.
The practical lesson: a lateral move that exposes you to a merger, a restructure, or a cross-functional project is not a disruption to your career trajectory. It is evidence of exactly the adaptability that the most sought-after roles now require. Reframe it accordingly.
From job security to employability: the portfolio career
The deepest shift the lattice model represents is the move from seeking job security to building ongoing employability. In a turbulent market, the most durable form of security is not the right role at the right company. It is the breadth of your capability, the strength of your network, and the currency of your skills.
Charles Handy’s concept of the Portfolio Career — developed in The Age of Unreason (1989) and as relevant now as it was then — offers a practical framework for thinking about this. Handy described a complete professional life as a balanced portfolio of five categories of work: wage work (salaried employment), fee work (consulting or freelance), home work (domestic and caring responsibilities), gift work (volunteering and community contribution), and study work (continuous learning and professional maintenance).
Most professionals over-invest in wage work and systematically under-invest in study work and gift work — the two categories that build the long-term capability and human connection that make a career genuinely resilient. A lateral move, especially one that opens up new relationships and new learning, often rebalances this portfolio more powerfully than any vertical promotion could.
| “When it comes time for someone to write my obituary, I don’t want to be defined solely by the boxes I happened to occupy on organisation charts. I want to be defined as the father of my children, as someone who made my community a better place.” — Randall Tobias, former CEO of Eli Lilly |
Tobias’s reflection is not sentimental. It is strategic. Research by Laura Carstensen at Stanford on socioemotional selectivity theory shows that as people develop greater awareness of time’s finite nature, often triggered by career inflection points rather than age alone, they naturally reorient towards goals that are emotionally meaningful and relationally rich. Professionals who deliberately pursue this reorientation, rather than waiting for a crisis to force it, tend to make better career decisions and report significantly higher life satisfaction.
| Research spotlight Carstensen (1992), Psychological Review; Handy (1989), The Age of Unreason Socio-emotional selectivity theory predicts that people become more purposeful and values-driven in their goal choices when they develop a clearer sense of future time. Career inflection points; redundancy, a plateau, a major restructure, often function as a psychological trigger for exactly this kind of reorientation. The professionals who respond to these moments by auditing their values and redirecting their effort consistently outperform those who simply try harder in the same direction. |
PRACTICAL TIPS
- Audit your career anchors. Schein’s free online questionnaire takes 20 minutes and can fundamentally clarify which moves are worth making and which are not. Knowing your anchor is the foundation of lattice navigation.
- Reframe lateral moves in your CV and LinkedIn profile using the language of strategic breadth. Do not simply list what you did in each role. Show explicitly what capability you added and how it prepared you for what came next.
- Apply terminology mapping before any speculative application or interview. Identify the five to seven transferable skills the target role most values, and find the specific language they use to describe them. Mirror that language precisely.
- Build your developmental network deliberately. Research by Monica Higgins and Kathy Kram on ‘personal boards of directors’ shows that professionals with a diverse network of mentors, sponsors, peers, and connectors navigate career transitions significantly more successfully than those relying on one or two relationships.
- Ask the lattice question in every performance review: ‘What cross-functional or lateral experience would best prepare me for the senior role I am aiming for?’ This reframes development conversations from timeline to capability.
- Invest in your study work portfolio. One structured learning commitment per quarter: a course, a certification, a mentoring relationship, compounds your employability far more reliably than waiting for the next promotion.
RESOURCES
- Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra — the definitive book on career reinvention — https://herminiaibarra.com/working-identity/
- Career Anchors Self-Assessment by Edgar Schein — https://psycho-tests.com/test/sheins-career-anchors
- O*NET Online — free skill mapping and terminology translation tool — https://www.onetonline.org
| Reflection prompt If your career were a business, would you invest in its current trajectory? And if not, what is one lateral move, new skill, or relationship that could change the answer? |
