The Career Ladder Is Breaking: What Comes Next May Be Better

Why the Traditional Career Ladder No Longer Fits

For generations, the architecture of a successful life seemed reassuringly simple: get educated, build a career, retire. Progress meant moving upward, one rung at a time. But that model was designed for lives—and working lives—considerably shorter than the ones many people can now expect.

Dr. Lynda Gratton believes the implications go far beyond simply postponing retirement. A professor of management practice at London Business School, she has spent decades examining how demographics, technology and organizational change affect careers. Her latest book, Living the 100-Year Life: How to Build a Career That Lasts and a Life You Love, extends that work into a question leaders and employees must confront.

The traditional model divided adulthood neatly into three stages: education, work and retirement. Longer lives disrupt that symmetry. Someone might take a sabbatical at 30, change professions at 50, or launch a company at 60. Education can reappear throughout life.

And Gratton argues that careers were never quite as orderly as conventional wisdom suggested. “The dirty little secret is that careers were never straight lines,” she said.

The Weave Metaphor and the Power of Detours

Gratton invites people to see their working life not as a ladder they are clamoring up, either falling off or getting stuck, but as a weave—something assembled and continually reshaped over time, every day, every week, every year. A ladder offers a prescribed direction; a weave requires choices.

Detours matter because they expose possibilities the ladder obscures. Early in her career, while working at British Airways as a psychologist, Gratton joined a research project involving pilot selection. She found she enjoyed studying data, interviewing people and writing about what she discovered—an interest that eventually contributed to her academic career. Experiments can also reveal what not to pursue: after starting her own business, Gratton discovered that being CEO was not where she did her best work. “I like to be in my study writing,” she said.

For leaders who equate career development with promotions, such exploration can look inefficient. Over a career extending into someone’s 70s, however, the greater danger may be allowing success to harden into identity.

Stretching Expertise Through Adjacencies

Gratton does not argue that everyone should become a generalist. In an age of artificial intelligence, superficial knowledge may be more vulnerable, not less. “You’ve really got to know something deeply,” she said. But mastery has its own trap: a skill that produces success today can become a constraint tomorrow if a person begins to confuse what they do well with what they must always do.

The answer is not abandoning expertise. It is stretching it. Gratton calls this moving into “adjacencies”—applying established strengths in unfamiliar settings. Writing and teaching remain central to her own professional identity, but she has recently experimented with a podcast and a learning journal. “I do think it’s really useful to move into adjacencies,” she explained, “to use some of the strengths you’ve already got, but to play them out in a different environment.”

For experienced executives, this may be one of longevity’s most demanding lessons. Reinvention rarely arrives as a dramatic conversion. More often, it’s accumulated through modest experiments with different roles, projects and ways of working. As Gratton put it, people “experiment with different ways of being, different ways of working, different ways of leading.”

Curiosity, Relationships, and the Need for Calm

Longer careers make static knowledge dangerous, but Gratton distinguishes lifelong learning from endless scrolling. “For me, learning is an active process,” she says—one requiring feedback, reflection and engagement beyond familiar environments. Curiosity is now her top hiring criterion: “If I were now to employ somebody to work with me, that would be my number one criteria.” Yet organizations still signal that success means following a predetermined sequence, suppressing the experimentation they claim to value. They need a more adult relationship with employees, leaving room for projects, lateral moves and sabbaticals.

Relationships matter too. “When I look at the great breakthroughs I’ve had in my life, they’ve almost always come with other people,” Gratton says. Trust enables cooperation, but cohesion carries risk: at Nokia, strong bonds among Finnish engineers became a liability as homogeneity stifled innovation. Leaders must build trust while introducing diversity.

Calm is hardest of all. Early results from hundreds completing her diagnostic show “calm is the most fragile thread”—yet reflection demands it. “Unless you’ve got space and calm in your life, you just don’t have any time to do that.”