Higher pay, better title – but do promotions actually help your career?

There’s a big problem with how we approach job promotions that we really need to talk about. Tell me if this sounds familiar: you start working at a company and slowly build up skills to get better at your job. Eventually, you become good enough that you’re offered a promotion into a more senior role.

In your new position, there are more things to master, and in time you get better at them too, until you eventually get promoted again. This repeats over and over, with each move bringing new capabilities to perfect before you leapfrog over them. In short, every time you get good at something, you get promoted out of it.

A promotion with better pay is often highly sought after, but it may not be all it seems.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

I know this trap well. When I began my career, I started writing on the side, eventually turning that into a full-time job as a music journalist.

I adored interviewing artists, writing features, and listening to new music for hours to try to help others figure out if they should do the same. Writing was my therapy, helping me collate fragmented thoughts into coherent sentence structures.

Then, after a few years, I co-founded a website and started hiring journalists to write. In a twisted way, I promoted myself away from something I loved into new areas like managing people, finances, deadlines and clients.

They were not fields I initially enjoyed, and it took me years to figure my way through them. For a decade, I hardly wrote a word but ironically managed hundreds of people who did.

Instead of promoting a worker away from their skills, why don’t we let them stay in their jobs, and just pay them more to do it?

The same thing happens in most workplaces. As soon as someone shows signs of success in mastering a role, they are promoted away from the very skills that got them noticed in the first place.

There’s an official term for this, it’s called the Peter principle. It states that you get promoted “to the level of your incompetence”. That might sound a bit harsh, but when you’re good in a role, the default is to keep moving you until you reach the highest level that you can reach. To put it into blunt terms, that’s the level of your incompetence.

This principle was first proposed in 1969 by Dr Lawrence J. Peter. He originally wrote a book about it as a satire to comment on the hierarchy of large organisations, but the idea hit such a nerve that it soon morphed into a proper management theory.

But this problem with promotions is strangling our productivity, and I want to propose a new way of thinking about it: when you become excellent at something you enjoy, you should be allowed to continue doing it for as long as you want.

Instead of the usual counterproductive method of promoting a worker away from their skills, why don’t we let them stay in their jobs and just pay them more to do it?

This challenges the entire concept of a career ladder, where the only way to move forward is up. Some of the blame for this can be attributed to a culture of always wanting more: a bigger job title, higher salary and extra recognition.

We need to move past the idea of a career ladder to think of a more fluid way of progressing at work. Instead, we should think of it as a career web, where you can move in any direction that you want.

This simple reframing of how we approach promotions is one way we can help more people spend more time doing exactly what they love.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

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