The corporate ladder is dead, but your career doesn’t have to be
Over the past few years, I have mentored hundreds of smart, ambitious professionals who were in the depths of an existential career-related crisis. Conversations often go something like this: “I’m going crazy because people around me are getting laid off,” “I’m burned out and fed up,” and “I can’t trust my job anymore with security, help!”
And honestly, I understand.
The traditional career progression model that underpins working lives – get a degree, get a job, climb the ladder, earn more money, have more responsibilities, climb some more, earn some more – is becoming more unstable by the day.
We are experiencing the biggest change in the way people work since the industrial age. Technology has jumped decades with a few keystrokes, layoffs are sweeping the job market and roles are being rewritten faster than educational institutions can keep up.
The promises of stability, security, and safety of a traditional career can no longer be held by businesses that rush just to stay in the same place.
The corporate ladder is collapsing economically, and it is no exaggeration to say that it is also losing its cultural significance. Trends like the Great Millennial Career Crisis and silent turnover have leapt onto the internet and infiltrated cold conversations everywhere. In the post-COVID world, people are exhausted.
Many high performers who were once focused on money and status now prioritize autonomy, creativity, and alignment between how they work and how they want to live.
At the intersection of these changes, a new working model emerges; a more flexible, fragmented and individually driven model. We see this in the growth of the creative economy, the rise of freelancing and gig work, and the move of portfolio careers into the mainstream.
Whether by choice or necessity, more talented professionals are jumping up the ladder and so we need a new way to think about careers and success.
Enter: Career Network.
Career The web is a new way of thinking about how we add value to the world and how we earn. Instead of being tied to one niche, one employer, one revenue stream, or one trajectory, you build an interconnected ecosystem of skills, relationships, audiences, and revenue sources around you. You are in control with this model. Builder. Creative. Producer.
It allows you to strategically design multiple income streams and leverage points to reduce risk, create long-term security, and allow you to express a variety of skills, passions, and interests. It has several defining features:
- Radial stripes: These represent your core skills, talents, knowledge, and income streams and serve as the foundation for everything else.
- Connective tissue: This represents how value moves, travel signals and opportunities emerge. Your conversations, relationships, connections, networks, referrals, collaborations, visibility, personal brand and reputation are available here.
- A surface area: The more you spin, the more you weave, the wider your net expands and the more opportunities fly by.
- It’s always changing: The network is in a constant state of flux. Not static, not tangled, elastic.
- Always growing: As you change, change, and expand, your web changes too. You build a new radial strip. You make new connections. New opportunities are emerging.
In practice, this might look like a marketer who consults three days a week, mentors a few founders, and writes at Substack. This might look like a finance manager doing a partial treasurer job while also running a cash flow workshop for small business owners.
The web can take many forms, but it’s all about building personal resilience; It’s a way to keep winning and expanding even when the ground shifts (or bottoms out) beneath you.
We’re still early in the rise of independent work and multiple income streams, but what if the way we work, earn and live is fundamentally reimagined as the current system crumbles?
What if the way we have historically structured our careers becomes the exception rather than the rule?
What if our income, identity, and sense of advancement depended not on an employer or the market, but on the strength and resilience of our own network? What if the death of the corporate ladder represents the birth of something else?
Anna Mackenzie is a start-up consultant, mentor and creator of the Portfolio Career Building Method. Writes a weekly newsletter annamackstack.substack.com.
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Anna Mackenzie is a startup advisor, portfolio career advisor, and author of the popular newsletter Anna Mack’s Stack.
