Recently, I sat in a lecture hall with a couple of hundred final-year undergraduate students. Looking around, I thought about my own uncertainty at their age. When I was about to graduate, the future seemed unclear. I didn’t have a place on a company graduate programme like many of my classmates. Decades on, I realised that what seemed like obvious career ladders weren’t so simple.
The job market for today’s graduates seems good. The annual report by the Institute of Student Employers found that graduate recruitment is expected to increase by 5% in 2023-24. Companies continued to struggle to recruit in areas such as digital, engineering and finance. Despite this strong demand, each position was hotly contested – with an average of 86 applications for every opening.
Once today’s generation of graduates find a job, only some of them will find opportunities to advance. The Chartered Institution of Personnel and Development’s good work survey found that only 35% of people said their job offered good opportunities for career advancement.
There are a few reasons why people find it difficult to advance on the career ladder. A recent survey by McKinsey found that one of the biggest drivers of the unequal representation of women in top leadership positions is “broken rungs” further down the career ladder. For instance, it found that for every 100 men appointed in lower-level leadership positions, 87 women were appointed. This meant there was a smaller pool of potential female leaders who might move on to high-level leadership positions.
The second reason many people struggle is that career ladders are becoming smaller. As large organisations have slimmed down, so have the internal paths for promotion. Instead of offering a potential path from the shop floor to the boardroom, many of the largest corporations have outsourced operational activities and effectively closed off many internal career paths.
This means that careers have been replaced with jobs, and jobs have increasingly been replaced with tasks. As work gets outsourced to gig workers, there are few opportunities for developing new skills and stepping up.
The final issue is that increasing numbers of people just aren’t interested in climbing the ladder. The recent iteration of the world values survey found that millennials and generation Z placed less value on work than they used to. A decade ago, 41% of millennials thought work should come first.
Today that number is 14%. Similarly, 43% of Britons said that it would be a good thing if less importance was placed on work. It seems that many of us no longer see ourselves defined by our work – rather, it is what happens outside work that is more important.