When No One's Climbing The Ladder—How Do We Grow Talent?

Forbes

29-05-2025

When the old career path is no longer traveled, it's time to design new talent strategies.
There was a time when career paths were predictable. You studied a profession, entered an organization, and could see your future reflected in the title above you—your manager, their manager, and the trajectory that awaited you. Promotions and training followed a familiar rhythm. If you stayed on course, your career would rise steadily until retirement.
That career development strategy no longer fits the world we live in.
Careers today look more like rock climbing walls than ladders. On a ladder, there's one way up. But a rock wall offers infinite routes: sideways, diagonal, even temporarily downward. Each move is intentional, based on what you've learned, what you want next, or where life is pulling you.
People managing careers already know this. But the organizations are slow to adapt. And this is causing issues because when people stop climbing the organizational career ladder, the structures and systems built around that ladder become misaligned with how work actually happens. If organizations continue to operate around outdated assumptions of career progression, they risk losing talent, slowing innovation, and struggling to respond to rapidly shifting business needs.
Today's workforce is self-directed. People are making choices at every junction—after finishing a project, encountering a change in leadership, or simply realizing they're ready for something different. They pause to ask: Is this where I want to be? What do I want more of? What no longer fits?
Now couple that with growing employee disengagement—just 1 in 5 employees is engaged at work, according to Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report —and it becomes clear that the systems built to support linear careers are no longer keeping people motivated. They're not always looking for a promotion—or even a new job. Sometimes, they're looking for a stretch. A shift. A skill. Or maybe even more time for life outside of work. And instead of searching for a new job title, they're searching for growth—personal or professional. Often in directions that wouldn't have been considered the natural next step in their profession or career. On their career rock climbing wall, they're looking in all directions and choosing where to place their next step.
Organizations must evolve to meet this moment—not by trying to rebuild the ladder, but by rethinking the relationship between people and work.
That begins with reimagining the ways they allow their people to move internally.
Not just for people, but also for the business. In an unpredictable world, the organization's agility depends on the ability to match people to work more fluidly. We must make it easier for individuals to contribute where they're needed, when they're ready, and in ways that align with both their experience and their aspirations.
We must fractionalize work.
Historically, we've packaged tasks into jobs and aligned these jobs with professions. Now's the time to unbundle work, move away from rigid job descriptions and toward a more dynamic system, where employees can spend part of their time applying deep expertise and another part exploring something entirely new. A stretch project. A cross-functional collaboration. A short-term assignment. The goal isn't to swap one role for another—it's to create space for two-way exploration: where employees test what's next, and organizations discover capabilities they might have otherwise overlooked.
For this to work, visibility is critical. Employees need to know what opportunities exist beyond their current role, and they need to be able to opt in without bureaucratic friction. These don't have to be big moves. In fact, the strength of this model is that it lowers the barrier to try.
You can start by identifying internal projects that can be staffed on a short-term basis—ranging from a few days to a few months. And then ensure employees can assign themselves for a portion of their time to these projects. From a business standpoint, the organization gets to match people with work that needs to get done but doesn't quite fit into regular plans and structures. For employees, it enables them to contribute to what they're passionate about, expand their perspectives on what's possible across the organization. explore new areas and build capabilities without needing to leave their current role. Managers discover talent they didn't know they had. And the organization builds a culture where movement isn't disruption—it's design.
But for this kind of system to scale, we need to look hard at the structures that hold it back. Too often, managers are rewarded for maintaining control, not enabling growth. Headcount is 'owned,' and letting go of talent, even temporarily, can feel like a loss. Meanwhile, we say learning matters—but reward only the delivery of short-term outcomes. If we want to unlock the potential of our people, we need to redesign what we measure, what we reward, and what we value.
This is not just a talent strategy. It's an organizational one.
When careers followed ladders, companies could build for stability. But in a world of rock walls, agility comes from movement. Resilience comes from optionality. And growth depends on letting people explore—before they're ready to leap.
We've entered the era of career agency. The organizations that try to rebuild the ladder will lose people already moving in new directions. The ones that embrace flexibility and fluidity won't just keep up—they'll build the kind of workplaces people want to grow in.