The Career Ladder Is Broken: How To Remain Relevant for Another 20 Years
One of the most dangerous points in an executive career may arrive while everything still appears to be going well. Results remain strong, professional standing is intact and the individual continues to be valued, but the expertise, relationships and routines supporting that success are becoming less relevant to what comes next.
Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at London Business School, says obsolescence does not begin only when redundancy becomes imminent. It can begin when experienced executives stop being stretched, allow learning to become less urgent and remain known for their present role rather than their ability to grow into new work.
“The warning is not simply that you might be made redundant; it is that as you learn less you become less adaptable and less visible as someone who can grow into new work,” Gratton told Arabian Business.
That danger becomes more consequential if working lives increasingly extend across six decades. A career model built around one period of education, a long middle period of work and an eventual retirement assumes far greater stability than many professionals can now expect.
“We cannot simply add years to the same career,” Gratton said.
The importance of career longevity
Instead, a longer career requires room for periods of stability, learning, reassessment and change. Education cannot remain a one-off preparation for work that then continues largely unchanged. Individuals must return to learning, while employers must make lateral moves and professional transitions normal rather than exceptional.
The first warning signs may be subtle. An executive continues producing good results but relies on the same knowledge and contacts while the field moves forward. New problems are directed elsewhere. The individual is regarded as dependable in their current position, but is no longer an obvious candidate for emerging work.
A rigorous career audit should therefore examine more than salary, status or performance reviews. Herminia Ibarra, Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, suggests asking whether the work that once generated energy still does so, whether a professional has become over-reliant on skills whose value is declining and whether persistent depletion is occurring without renewal.
One question cuts through short-term comfort: can you imagine living and working in this way for another ten or 20 years?
“The mistake is waiting for certainty,” Ibarra said. “Pay attention to recurring dissatisfaction, declining vitality and the interests that keep pulling at you.”
A transition need not begin with a resignation. It can start with a possible future identity, a small project, a new set of contacts or an early account of what the next chapter might become.
Artificial intelligence makes technical fluency increasingly important, but Ibarra argues that durable advantage will not come from trying to compete with machines in processing information.
It will come from knowing how to use technology to amplify work while applying human judgement, curiosity, ethical discernment, collaboration, taste and trust. As information becomes more abundant, the ability to decide what matters, and bring people together around a difficult decision, becomes more valuable.
AI also strengthens the case for what Ibarra calls transition mastery. When expertise has a shorter shelf life, people must recognise when change is needed, acquire new knowledge, experiment with possible futures and build relationships beyond their existing field.
The answer is therefore not to identify a single supposedly future-proof skill and depend upon it indefinitely. The more durable capability is learning how to move between changing forms of work.
Career reinvention need not be dramatic
Career reinvention is often presented as a dramatic break. Leaving an established profession and becoming somebody entirely different. Ibarra is cautious about that framing because it can obscure how much existing experience remains valuable.
“The question is not ‘How do I start again from zero?’ but ‘What can I repurpose, and what do I need to add?’” she said.
Industry knowledge, judgement, client relationships, credibility and leadership ability can travel into a new context. The most effective changes often combine established mastery with a new capability, such as AI, sustainability knowledge or entrepreneurial experience, rather than discarding the professional identity entirely.
For some people, a long career may contain two or three major transitions. For others, renewal will be more continuous. The common requirement is to become skilled at transition before circumstances force it.
The strongest career moves are rarely designed in panic. Ibarra recommends developing them gradually through learning, relationships and small experiments while the individual remains embedded in existing work.
A conversation, short project, course, advisory position, teaching opportunity or side venture can test an interest and develop a network without exposing income, identity or family responsibilities to unnecessary risk.
The experiment is not simply a cautious preliminary step. It creates evidence that reflection alone cannot provide. By trying provisional versions of a possible future professional identity, people discover what they enjoy, where they perform well, who might support the move and whether the original idea needs to change.
“Clarity often follows action rather than preceding it,” Ibarra said.
Responsibility cannot rest solely with the individual. Gratton says longer working lives make it unrealistic to expect employees to remain productive by performing the same job in the same way for decades.
Employers should give experienced people access to education and new challenges, make internal moves easier and redesign positions so established expertise can be used in different ways. Short sabbaticals or periods of reduced intensity may also allow people to renew their skills and energy.
Career retraining opportunities
“The specific measure matters less than the principle: learning, renewal, and transition should be part of a working life, not treated as a sign that someone is falling behind,” she said.
That principle also changes how organisations manage employees in their 50s, 60s and beyond. Development should not be concentrated on younger workers, while seniority should not require somebody to remain on a narrow track. Internal mobility, reskilling, lateral moves, project work, mid-career transitions and phased later careers can all become normal components of employment.
Training alone, however, is insufficient. People also need networks, role models, communities and credible ways of demonstrating progress. Managers should regard experienced employees as adaptable assets and help them build bridges between current capability and emerging work before their existing role becomes untenable.
The challenge has particular relevance to the Gulf. Ibarra says the UAE and Saudi Arabia are not merely responding to a gradual demographic change. They are simultaneously creating sectors, adopting advanced technologies and developing national talent at speed.
The workforce challenge is therefore larger than teaching discrete new skills. People also need help moving into new professional identities and opportunities while the economies around them evolve.
That requires education connected to changing labour-market needs, continuous reskilling and routes that allow people to move between sectors and life stages without losing momentum. Networks, role models, pathways and credible examples of how existing experience can lead into new economic activity matter alongside technical capability.
“The prize is a workforce that is not only employable, but confident, adaptable and creative,” Ibarra said.
For an executive hoping to remain employable and fulfilled for another two decades, Gratton begins by discarding the career ladder: the expectation of successive promotions culminating in retirement.
“That model was designed for shorter lives and more stable organisations,” she said. “A 60-year working life will contain several chapters: periods of deepening expertise, transition, renewal and, often, a different rhythm of work.”
The objective is not constant reinvention or repeatedly becoming somebody else. It is the continued renewal of what remains valuable: mastery, curiosity, relationships and judgement.
That demands what Gratton describes as a longer-life architecture of recurring learning, contribution and renewal, combined with the ability to move through professional endings, uncertain middle periods and new beginnings with awareness, agency and adaptability.
A long career, in other words, cannot be secured by trying to preserve the present. Its durability depends on becoming capable of leaving parts of the present behind before somebody else makes that decision.
Lynda Gratton is Professor of Management Practice at London Business School and Herminia Ibarra is the Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. They are Academic Co-Directors of the SARI Foundation Institute for Work, Careers and Longevity.
One of the most dangerous points in an executive career may arrive while everything still appears to be going well. Results remain strong, professional standing is intact and the individual continues to be valued, but the expertise, relationships and routines supporting that success are becoming less relevant to what comes next.
Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at London Business School, says obsolescence does not begin only when redundancy becomes imminent. It can begin when experienced executives stop being stretched, allow learning to become less urgent and remain known for their present role rather than their ability to grow into new work.
“The warning is not simply that you might be made redundant; it is that as you learn less you become less adaptable and less visible as someone who can grow into new work,” Gratton told Arabian Business.