Career Arcs Explained and Defined ~ A Right Recruiting White Paper, Jan.2012
One of the most difficult concepts around career planning and employment is the concept of a career arc or career trajectory. Your career arc is one of the most important factors in your long-term career success. It is also one of the most elusive and difficult things to explain. In this White Paper, we will try to explain the meaning of a career arc and, in doing so, we may help you better prepare yourself for future stability and career growth. Hopefully, we will also help you understand an element of an employer’s hiring decision that is new to you.
A career arc is a theoretical line on a graph that exemplifies someone’s career to date. Like many graphs, it can be extended into the future. Visualize someone who, for the past 20 years, has been promoted every 5 years. Their career arc would conceivably be a line extending upward at a 45% angle. Let us now imagine someone who was promoted once 15 years ago and has never moved up since. That person would have a short upward line that leveled off into a long horizontal line. Both those lines tell potential employers a lot about the person. To an informed employer, those career arcs speak volumes. To many candidates, the career arc is a data point that they often ignore.
I first ran across the idea of a career arc about 20 years ago. I was working on a major project for a large foods company that was creating a divisional group in the Philly suburbs. They were looking to add about 20 people to the group, professionals in most disciplines. They had an aggressive culture and wanted excellence in all their new hires.
Most of the jobs were Sr. Project jobs. They paid about $70,000/yr., the equivalent of about $120,000/yr. now. These were responsible jobs that paid well and had a high level of visibility. The client wanted people who would be promotable over the next few years as well.
I remember presenting 4 candidates for one of the openings. They dismissed the one I thought was the strongest. Let’s call that person Joe. I was surprised and asked them why. The response from the HR person was that, at Joe’s experience level, he should already be beyond that job. She wanted to interview 2 of the others and dismissed Joe as a candidate.
I was confused. Joe had about 8 more years of experience than the other candidates and it was in the right area. I thought that extra experience was good. They thought it was bad. Where was the disconnect?
I never brought it up with that client again but it stuck in my head. Over the next few years I would occasionally run across similar situations and I slowly began to understand the concept of a career arc. I also saw that a candidate who ignores it can dig a hole for themselves later in their career.
Initially, someone may think that a career arc is a euphemism for age discrimination. It is not. In all these instances the salaries were the same for all candidates. No one wanted to save money by hiring a younger candidate because they were cheaper. In many instances, the age difference was only between 32 and 40 years old anyway. This was much more subtle than that.
Here is what you need to know. A skilled reader of resumes looks at the resume as a life story. It is more than a list of companies and skills. It speaks of success and failures. It speaks of ambition and complacency. It represents a person and the life choices that they have made. A career, and the resume that represents a career, is a purely self-written document. It is, in fact, an autobiography that is written over decades.
To employers, hiring is a risky, imprecise event. They can never really know the people that they consider for a job; no matter how well they interview them and how deeply they test them. Hiring, from an employer standpoint, is a leap of faith. It’s an educated guess and a hope for the future. It’s a projection of dreams of success and competence.
Here is where things get interesting. Hidden within your resume is a fascinating bit of information. Your resume tells the reader what your past employers have thought about you and your work. Think about that for a second. Is there anyone that knows more about your performance and potential than your past or current employer? You’ve already worked for them and they’ve seen your performance. To the company interviewing you, estimating your future accomplishments is an educated guess. To past employers, your past accomplishments are facts.
Imagine if you will two candidates for the same job. One, Sue, has about 10 years of experience and was promoted once, about 3 years ago. The other, George, has about 10 years of experience and was never promoted. Both have the same skill set and both interview well. Do they have equivalent backgrounds? Not according to the career behind the resume.
In ten years of experience, not one employer thought highly enough of George to promote him. Sue, within the same period, had impressed one of her employers enough so that they gave her a job with more responsibility. All things being equal, that’s a pretty important difference, don’t you think?
But wait, you cry, what if George’s employers were not growing firms and there was no room for advancement where he worked? Should he be penalized for that? That doesn’t seem fair. Maybe Sue was just lucky and George is really the better person.
Of course, that may indeed be true. One can never tell but, remember, a hiring decision is a leap of faith and a past employer’s evaluation of a candidate has value. At some point a hiring manager just needs to weigh all data and make a decision. Employment is all about probabilities of success, not certainties. Sue is more likely to succeed at a higher level than George.
Plus, there is another side to this. There is another piece of info that may be gleaned from the resume. George has worked 10 years without a promotion and, if those 10 years have been at the same company, he doesn’t seem too alarmed about it. The question of complacency enters the picture. Can we question George’s ambition? Why hasn’t George realized earlier that he was in a no-growth company and gotten himself back on track? If we visualize both George and Sue’s career arcs, we see that Sue has an upwardly sloping arc and George has a plateau. Now, it’s all well and good for George to say, hey, I am looking for a new job NOW because I am indeed ambitious. Doesn’t that mean something?
No it doesn’t. George is behind the career arc, compared to Sue. It took Sue 7 years to get a promotion. George has yet to get one. He is now catching up to Sue. His place on the career arc puts him at a disadvantage and he is on the defensive. Every employment scenario is a competition between candidates. That is so important I will say it again-every employment scenario is a competition between candidates. It’s the Peter Principal - has George reached his potential already?
I had a call last year from someone who worked at a large auto company for 30 years. The last 15 years had basically been in the same staff function. This person wanted to explore the market and wanted a new job. When I asked him why, he said that because he had no career advancement at his current firm. I was floored. It had taken him 15 years to come to that conclusion! He was long past the point in his career arc where he could position himself as energetic and ambitious. With 30 years of experience, he should have advanced at least two levels beyond his current role. Make no mistake, the fact that he hadn’t, and had done nothing about it for 15 years, has meaning to a potential employer.
Ambition and drive are not things that can be turned on like a light switch. Comfort can lead to complacency in a short period of time and years can become decades. This is the problem that I have seen in many resumes of those downsized from larger firms. Rightly or wrongly, if you plot the career arcs of many in that situation, the last 5-10 years are often a flat horizontal line. A flat horizontal line on your career chart, if it extends for too long, is a warning sign. For an individual, it’s a warning sign that they are a target for a pending layoff, should cost cutting come to their firm. If that unhappy day does come, it’s a warning sign to potential employers that may point to a marginally productive employee who they should avoid.
Does this sound cold? I don’t know but I think it is an unrecognized factor in many employment decisions. The best example I can give is the US military. I think, from an organizational perspective, no institution spends more time evaluating its practices than the US military. Personally, I think it is as pure a meritocracy as you will find in the world today. Unknown to many outside the career military ranks is the practice of “if you are not going up, you are going out”. For a career officer to be kept back from promotion to a more senior rank more than twice is a signal to them to leave and enter the civilian workforce. This is a practice that affects those at the mid-level of their careers, 10-20 years of experience, and is the direct equivalent of the career arc in the civilian sector.
Perhaps now, my food client’s decision 20 years ago makes more sense. They looked at Joe’s background and said to themselves, if he worked for us and had that same flat career arc, something would be wrong. If he were he promotable, in the past 10 years he would have been promoted or he would have realized he was in a dead end sooner and gotten the promotion by changing jobs.
Of course, not every company thinks like that. Some companies are content to find someone who can fit into an existing slot and do a job with an average level of competence. They are not concerned about a person’s drive and ambition because they don’t expect the person to go anywhere anyway. What is wrong with that? Well, two things.
1) If an employer is not trying to hire the best people, its competitor will. This isn’t 1955, where a few large companies can dominate markets or a small firm can hunker down in safe markets. Now, even the smallest of companies compete globally. Ambitious people want to accomplish things and they want companies that will grow to fit their ambition. An employer that settles will be gobbled up over time. Why work for a company whose policies will lead to its demise anyway?
2) Even the best of companies will have some slots that are secondary to their core functions. Perhaps they will fall into the temptation to hire secondary performers in those non-essential roles. What is wrong with taking a job like that- a good paycheck and steady job? Well, it is a ticket to an eventual layoff. Since it is a secondary role, don’t you think it will be the first to be cut in an economic hiccup?
Basically, the best of employers factor in career arc for the best of their jobs. From a candidate perspective, by ignoring your career arc issues you are limiting your potential job pool to second-tier jobs, which by their nature will weaken your career arc even more. The problem with career arc issues is that they develop over time. It starts simply. You wait an extra year to consider leaving and, 10 years later; it becomes a major problem when laid off from the same job you should have left 10 years earlier.
If you graph your career arc now and see a flat line, you have options. You can rededicate yourself to your employer and get yourself into consideration for promotion. If that won’t work, maybe because your firm is stagnant with no upward possibility, look around and see who is growing and make an aggressive attempt to move into a more positive situation…..before it is too late.
The best way to solve a career arc issue is to work for a growing company. Like a rising tide lifting all boats, a growing company lifts all careers. From a personal financial standpoint, a person should be much more interested in promotional opportunities than short term income differentials in a job choice. Two or three promotions over a 10 year period can each bring a 10% or more salary increase added on to a normal 3% average review in more static years. That, coupled with the normal increased bonus potential in more senior jobs, can increase salary dramatically over a 10 year period of 3% raises with no promotions.
Be hungry for promotional opportunities, both within and without your employer. Pay attention to your career arc and, if your employer can’t talk to you about career advancement in your annual review, see it as one of two problems. One, you are not doing well enough to be promoted. Two, the company is not growing quickly enough to open up a slot above you. Let’s hope the problem is the second and not the first.
As ever, thanks for getting this far and remember Right Recruiting for all your employment needs.
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