Is the Traditional Career Ladder Becoming a Lattice?
For as long as the concept of a career as we know it today has existed, climbing its ladder was treated as a given that came with time and patience. You started in an entry-level role, you stayed loyal, invested X amount of years at a company and over time, through increments and annual reviews, you climbed up rung after rung. But when you speak to early-career professionals today, or even mid-career workers re-evaluating their paths, that model feels increasingly out of step with how careers actually unfold.
Upwards progression is not as structured or guaranteed as it once was, and with this change, the workforce looks laterally and diagonally as well as vertically. This is the modern career lattice. Unlike the ladder, the lattice doesn’t assume upward movement is the only direction that matters.
As we’ll explore, business qualifications like commerce degrees, postgraduate diplomas and MBA programs are playing a major role in enabling this shift, equipping people with transferable skills in finance, strategy, marketing and leadership that can be applied across sectors rather than locked into one narrow career path. Let’s take a look at what movement in the current workforce looks like.
A workforce that no longer moves in straight lines
As tempting as it may seem, it’s not as possible as it used to be for managers to simply hand out promotions to high-performing employees. These days, there are constraints to consider like organisational structure, the makeup of the existing employee base, low staff turnover and company policies limiting the number or timing of promotions.
For years now, org charts have been flattening rather than growing in height. This has partially come from the deep analysis of what management should really be – something that is there to provide answers and support, but ultimately trusts employees to do their job in their own way.
What has remained, though, is the perception that a promotion includes climbing the corporate ladder, and in turn, being handed more responsibility that often involves managing people. It’s quite a restrictive and outdated model, that, to progress in your career, you need to move up a hierarchy because it assumes we’re all more alike than different and want the same things. In reality, it’s our differences that make up a powerful team.
To oversimplify it, let’s compare a business development professional with a subject matter expert. Business-savvy folk generally desire upward progression where they can make influential decisions and drive the business forward. But not all technical personnel have an interest in staff oversight or ever-increasing responsibility, but they still might want visibility, value, influence and pay growth. Yet, also, those with business roles can move laterally to different industries, so both positions benefit from a lattice-like structure.
What is a career lattice?
To follow the imagery the name suggests, instead of moving up the career ladder, a lattice includes lateral movement, too. It involves flexible career progressions that support employees to take the steps in their career that suit them, whether to move across different departments or skill areas, re-skilling, cross-skilling, etc.
The career lattice acknowledges that the workforce might want to assess different roles and their suitability for it in real time, and make reflective decisions based on more knowledge. Careers can zig and zag, stop and start, and they can descend in stressful times of life or when people grow and gain additional experiences outside of the workplace.
The career lattice also reflects a broader change in how we work. It is a reaction to the fact that our work is no longer as tied to a physical space as it once was. This flexibility has enabled new ways of working, and the team and management structure is less structured, making way for a flattened org chart and lateral career moves.
The new value of sideways moves
For a long time, lateral moves were seen as risky or even slightly suspect. Why leave a role unless it comes with a higher title or pay rise? But increasingly, lateral moves are being recognised as strategic investments in long-term career growth. Moving from a finance role into operations, for example, might not immediately change seniority, but it broadens commercial understanding. Shifting from sales into client strategy builds depth in customer insight that pure sales roles may not provide.
These transitions often build what hiring managers now describe as T-shaped professionals, which are people with depth in one area and breadth across several others. In practice, that breadth often becomes the difference between mid-level and senior leadership roles.
What to stay wary of with this flexibility
While this new structure, the career lattice, that has emerged, offers freedom, it also introduces ambiguity, especially when movements are not done with intention or commitment. Without clear steps, some professionals struggle to measure progress and explain to hiring managers their intent and outcomes. A sideways move can feel or look like stagnation, even if it does build long-term value.
There is also the challenge of identity. In a ladder system, your role often defines you. In a lattice system, your professional identity becomes a lot more fluid, and sometimes less certain. In interviews, it’s harder to answer questions about your desires, passions or long term goals if your path has shifted regularly. And while employers increasingly value breadth, deep expertise is still essential in many fields. The risk for some workers is becoming a generalist without a clear anchor point.
A lattice still has structure, but offers more directions to move
The career ladder hasn’t disappeared entirely, but due to a range of factors in the corporate landscape and workforce goals, it doesn’t really reflect what’s happening as closely as it once did. What has replaced it is less tidy but more reflective of the modern workforce, a lattice of opportunities, detours, resets and intersections.
For workers, this means letting go of the idea that progress must always look like upward movement. For employers, it means recognising that value is often built across roles, not just within them. And for everyone navigating this system, the challenge is about how to move intelligently in multiple directions at once, while holding on to long-term intent and what a career success story looks like to you.
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This story was distributed as a release by Jon Stojan under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program.
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