3 Narratives That Shape Our Career Growth

Evaluating the different career narratives that shape our views on our careers

One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately are narratives. By the book, a narrative is defined as a spoken or written account of connected events, or a “story.” Narratives rule our lives and help us make sense by providing context on a topic or subject we are trying to analyze. We rely on these to help us not only understand what’s going on, but to use that information to construct our own thought process and decisions, and no narrative is as interesting or important as the career narratives we hear and tell ourselves.

The Traditional Career Narrative: The Corporate Ladder

Narratives are important in our lives, and especially when it comes to our careers. For a long time, the narrative about career success was around the corporate ladder. Get a good job, and in exchange for loyalty and hard work and delivering outcomes, you’ll rise up over time, get promoted, get more responsibility, make more money, and gain better titles. As a self-proclaimed millennial, I entered the workforce out of college at a time where the narrative of the corporate ladder began to shift – After employees, families, and bank accounts were decimated after the 2008 Great Recession (not to mention, downsizing, rightsizing, outsourcing, optimizing, whatever else of the 2000’s and 2010s) the idea that you would climb the ladder began to be less achievable and believable for all employees, so much so, that for the  past 10-12 years, we’ve been high on the narrative that the corporate ladder no longer exists.

In 2011, Deloitte’s Cathy Benko wrote about the Corporate Lattice, where she encouraged people to think about building their career and making career decisions as not a straight linear path (ladder) to a lattice, or one that that offers multiple options. Instead of just a series of linear paths, lattice organizations offer more flexible options for growing and a multitude of opportunities to develop.

I’m inclined to think that much of this narrative was well intended to encourage job seekers and career driven professionals to take ownership and agency around their careers, and to encourage them to define a career journey on their terms, versus defining it on a title, role or leaving it up to chance with an employer. The cynic might also argue it was a way for employers to encourage their employees not to care about promotions and raises they couldn’t (or wouldn’t give) but I’ll leave that for you to decide.

If you look for career advice on the internet, you’ll find a lot of articles and a lot of ideas and narratives around how you should think about and develop your career. As someone who has read a lot of these as well as coached hundreds of people through their career, I can understand how difficult it sometimes is to understand which of this advice applies to you. Understanding narratives, and the underlying stories that shape the advice we get can often be helpful, and over the years, the ladder and lattice are underlying what a lot of the advice that we get.  Nuance can be hard, especially on the internet, but after talking with hundreds of professionals I wanted to come up with a few mental models of how we can think about our careers, to better understand what applies to us, and how we might be able to use these narratives to make better decisions in our career.

The Ladder

The term "corporate ladder" is a conceptualized view of a company's employment hierarchy in which career advancement is considered to follow higher rungs on a ladder, with entry-level positions on the bottom rungs and executive level positions at the top. Traditionally, “climbing the corporate ladder” was the phrase and model that professionals used to understand progression and development. You started your career (entry level) at a bottom rung, and progressed your way upwards over time.

Different companies have different corporate ladders, some having narrower paths to promotions, based on company culture or turnover.

One unsaid but often known element of the ladder: they can lead to interpersonal conflicts as employees can have self-serving interests to move up the ladder that lead to zero-sum games (I win you lose) In this model, Individuals desire to move up the corporate ladder to increase job satisfaction and salaries.

The Lattice

The  lattice model, as mentioned, was coined around the early 2010s and in contrast to the ladder, is more adaptive and expansive. It represents the multidirectional ways in which employees can find and progress in their own development within the organization and in their career.  Instead of just simply climbing upwards, they can climb across, horizontally, downward, etc. In this model, the desire to move around the lattice is not just for compensation (although it could be a motivator) but rather growth and development – instead of just trying to earn more money or increase your responsibilities, it means growing in other ways, such as skillsets, new opportunities, new experiences, etc.

The Wave

The final model is the wave, which was coined by Josh Bersin. This model encourages us to think about our careers just like a surfer would – we can catch a good wave early in our career, ride it out, and once it fails, spend some time looking for the net wave.

The purpose of the wave is meant to illustrate the fast-changing nature of the work environment and industries and market’s in today’s technology driven age. Or, we have events like global pandemics, which both start new waves to catch (where jobs are plentiful) and crest certain waves (where jobs wash ashore) Each wave gives us the chance to gain something new – new skills, experiences, as well as a chance to re-train and train. Furthermore, in between waves, we have a chance to figure out how we want to prepare or train for the next wave – unique to this is that it makes training (or perhaps education) continuous and lifelong, which is different from our traditional high school to higher education model which we have today.

A few governing thoughts

None of these are going away

All of these models exist right now for professionals at large, and I don’t see them going away anytime. If we assume that the percentages are split between the three models, I think there will be shifts in the percentages especially given the transformation that has gone on in companies and in minds of employees over the past two years, but none of them will go extinct.

Some industries + functions have models that are more likely than others

Some models are more amenable and doable in certain industries. For example, industries that tend to be hierarchical and slow to make changes will probably have more of a ladder model. For example, investment banks as well as law firms – Generally speaking, in those industries, the predominant model is the ladder – in order to advance, you put in your dues at each of the levels before you make managing director or partner. While some of this is changing (ex: law firms that have specialist tracks, boutique investment banks) generally speaking, there is a model that tends to win out

What this means for you

1) Employees - What narrative makes sense for you and your current industry or function? – What is the prevailing narrative in your industry or function, and what is the narrative that you want for yourself (these may not be the same) Furthermore, as you evolve through your career and are at different stages in life, the model or narrative that is prevailing to you may change over time. Admittedly, when I started my career the ladder made the most amount of sense. As I got older, I moved into more of a lattice model.

2) Managers – What narrative are your people on, and how are they progressing towards it – There’s a chance they may not know, so the next time you have a career conversation, these models may be good to evaluate and walk through

3) Leaders – What you give your employees as part of the deal for your employer-employee contract is your views on career development – the model that is prevalent in your company will alter how your employees think about their own engagement and development. Furthermore, research tells us that learning and opportunities for growth are critical components to talent attraction and retention, all of which are considerations as you develop your own narrative.

I would love to hear what you think about these narratives and models, and which ones of these resonate most with you.

Additional Reading and Listening

- The 21st Century Career (Fuel 50)

- Ladder or Lattice (TalentGuard)

- Ditch The Career Ladder for a Career Lattice (Bigthinkedge)