The secret to career success may well be off to the side
The conventional language of career success moves in only one direction: up. You scale the career ladder or climb the greasy pole. If you do well, you have a rapid ascent.
And if you really succeed, you reach the top. No one ever rings home to share the news that they have reached a plateau. But there is another type of career trajectory.
Sideways moves, to jobs that don’t involve a promotion or even necessarily a pay rise, can be a boon to employees and organisations alike. A study carried out by Donald Sull of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his co-authors in 2021 found that the availability of lateral career opportunities has a marked impact on employee retention. Their research found that chances to move sideways were two and a half times more important than pay as a predictor of workers’ willingness to stay at a firm.
Another paper, by Xin Jin of the University of South Florida and Michael Waldman of Cornell University, concluded that lateral moves did not just benefit organisations: employees who experienced them were more likely to be promoted and to enjoy higher wage growth later in their careers than employees who did not. You can move up by first moving sideways. Lateral moves and good management seem to go hand in hand.
A recent paper by Virginia Minni of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a British think-tank, looked at job moves within a big multinational over a period of ten years. She found that the arrival of a high-flying boss (who had got the job early in their career) was associated with a jump in intra-company transfers, both horizontal and vertical, among employees. Better bosses seem to be good at sorting people into roles that suit them.
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