The career ladder is dead. Long live the jungle gym

The career ladder is gone — here’s what to climb instead

WITH THE STATE of the job market, entry level or otherwise, leaders in the corporate system are realizing something: you can’t really call it a career ladder if it no longer reliably points upwards.

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What’s taken its place is a growing arms race for the next metaphor: you could have a career that looks like ‘climbing wall’. Or a ‘jungle gym’. One London Business School professor says it’s more like a woven tapestry. But hey all agree on only one thing: the career ladder is toast.

Corporate executives are grasping for these new expressions as they struggle to explain what a career looks like, right at a time when young people, especially, are looking to the ranks of business leaders to reassure them that careers aren’t completely dead (hence, metaphors like climbing walls).

“Unlike other moments of disruption, it isn’t coming from the top down,” LinkedIn’s Aneesh Raman told Business Insider. “Workers are going to be climbing a wall, not a ladder.”

This is nice branding, but Raman’s metaphor also implies there’s no set path to take you up — it’s something you need to figure out for yourself. “No one is going to come knock on your door and say, ‘We’ve figured out what your job is in the AI era.’ You’re going to have to figure that out.”

Other business leaders have adopted separate metaphors, most of them serving the same rhetorical duty that Raman’s does. Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin, for instance, takes a more playful approach: “Your career is not a ladder. It’s a jungle gym,” she told Reuters. Pfizer’s Anne Kennedy Dotson went with luggage as a metaphor for skills. “Every single thing you learn goes into this suitcase [and] you pull it out at different times when it becomes relevant,” she said at a Charter summit.

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Lynda Gratton, a professor at the London Business School and the author of Living the 100-Year Life, has her own spin. Consider the idea of a career like a woven tapestry: eight threads (mastery, cooperation, calm, adventure, and so on) that you spend a career strengthening and repairing.

“The real fundamental problem with the ladder is that you think the only way is up, and if you haven’t gone up, then you have failed,” she reasoned. “Over a working life you will strengthen these threads, neglect them, repair or reweave them. No one else has your exact pattern. Your fabric is uniquely yours.” Kieran Delamont