Why your fancy new job title is probably a lie

Let’s begin with a simple three-question quiz, and I don’t want any cheating. First question: if someone has ‘Executive’ in their job title, are they a senior or a junior staff member?

Second question: who is the more experienced worker, an Associate or an Assistant? And lastly, what exactly does a ‘Director of Last Impressions’ do?

Your fancy new job title may sound impressive, but it might actually be complete nonsense.Credit: Tanya Lake

All the above questions are about job titles, the names we give ourselves to try to distil what we do that seems to have spiralled out of control recently. I bet that your answers to these three questions have just proved this point, so let’s go through them.

The first question has two answers, an early indication of the mess that job titles can be. On one hand, a title like ‘Chief Executive Officer’ is obviously the most senior person in the room, but we also use the same term with employees like ‘Marketing Executive’ to describe an entry-level role in many departments.

The second question, if you’re starting to get the drift, also has multiple possible responses depending on which industry you’re in. For example, in law an ‘Associate’ is more senior than a ‘Legal Assistant’, but in retail it’s common for a ‘Sales Associate’ to report to an ‘Assistant Manager’.

Confused yet? Well, wait until I tell you that a ‘Director of Last Impressions’ is a made-up title for someone who works at a funeral company, inspired in part by a re-badging inside some companies of the receptionist as a ‘Director of First Impressions’.

A rule of thumb should be that if a 10-year-old can’t clearly understand your job title, you need to keep trying.

The varying answers to this simple quiz highlight two important things going on in the workplace today: job titles are getting more confusing and are increasingly inflated.

It’s not difficult to see how we got here, as the psychology behind job titles is well studied. They can be powerful words that give us identity at work, are shortcuts to power dynamics, and can have an oversized influence over how we perceive ourselves, our roles and our place within a business.

The confusion arises when there’s a clamour for titles without a set hierarchy on how to progress through an organisation. However, that is nothing compared to job title inflation, where increasingly senior titles are bestowed upon workers, sometimes in lieu of pay rises (and don’t get me started on the problem with promotions).

This is not a new phenomenon, with a 2012 study by a British think tank, the Resolution Foundation, concluding there was a large increase in workers who maintained a middle-ranking wage but were given senior-sounding job titles like ‘manager’.

But it’s now more noticeable. You’re likely to see job title inflation all over LinkedIn, where a worker with a few years’ experience might change their profile to ‘Junior Global Vice President of Operations’, or a technical employee might morph into a ‘Growth Hacker’ before your very eyes.

While it’s easy enough to scroll straight past it, if you’re part of an organisation that has more variations than ice cream flavours, the best thing to do is simplify your options where you can, reducing dozens of permutations towards more manageable names. A rule of thumb should be that if a 10-year-old can’t clearly understand your job title, you need to keep trying.

If we don’t address confusing descriptions and job title inflation before it continues increasing, we risk building workplaces where no one has clarity on who’s doing what.

We don’t want a world where career progression is measured by a garbled collection of words on your email signature instead of by the work that you actually do.

Tim Duggan is 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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