In 2024, a survey of more than 800 companies from different fields found that 90% of HR leaders said their employees do not know what their career path is. Two-thirds of them said that the paths that are available are not even interesting. That is not a gap in growth. That is a design flaw. And most businesses are still making the mistake of using a career model that assumes everyone grows the same way: straight up, one rung at a time.
For a long time, the career ladder was the most common way for people to get ahead in their jobs. It made things clearer, and it still does in industries where job levels are stable and hierarchies are clear. But most businesses today need more than one vertical track to help their workers learn new skills, move up in their careers, and switch to different roles quickly. By 2030, 39% of the most important job skills will have changed. This means that a company that keeps its workers in one narrow lane is making them less flexible at the worst possible time.
Another choice is a career lattice framework. It outlines the fact that career growth can happen in a lot of different ways. You can move up, sideways, diagonally, or into short-term jobs that teach you new skills that you would not learn on just one job track. This is why non-linear growth paths make sense: they know that the best leaders do not come from one path and that the strongest organizations are the ones that let their employees move around.
In today’s job market, where career trajectories are less certain and employee satisfaction is more dependent on visible career progression, every company that creates nonlinear career paths on purpose has an advantage. Companies and their employees can embrace change more easily when they have flexible career paths.
Why the Ladder Is Breaking
The corporate ladder was made for a time when job descriptions did not change for decades, companies could guess what skills they would need in ten years, and workers expected to stay in one job for most of their careers. You can not trust any of those ideas anymore. Even though the industries that most companies work in have changed a lot, the way people move up in their careers is still based on the older standards.
About half of the world’s workers have completed employer-sponsored training as part of long-term development plans, which is up from 41% two years ago. A lot of money is being spent on skill sets that the current job market was never meant to handle. Companies are spending a lot of money to help their workers learn new skills, but then they put them back on the same narrow career path that does not take into account what they just learned.
Data on employee engagement makes things clearer. An annual survey of 160 countries found that only 21% of employees were engaged, which cost the world about $438 billion in lost productivity. At the same time, managers became less involved. The second number is the one that really worries me because managers are in charge of coaching and moving people around. When they stop caring, everyone below them stops getting better, and growth opportunities disappear across the board.
A survey of workers under 40 from all over the world in 2025 found that only 6% said their main goal was to become a senior leader. Most of them said that personal growth, being able to change, and having a good work-life balance were the most important things to them. Some people will say that this is just a sign of a weak generation, but a better way to look at it is that younger workers have seen the last generation of workers climb ladders that led to burnout and jobs that went away overnight. They want personal and professional growth, not just a new job title every few years. For a lot of people, personal fulfillment and job satisfaction matter more than a corner office.
What a Lattice Looks Like in Practice
A career lattice is a set of moves that are all connected, as opposed to a single-track climb. It does not get rid of the hierarchy. Promotions are still important. It just changes the idea that the only way to get ahead in your career is to move up.
A lateral move in a lattice is a planned step in a plan for career growth. A finance leader who spends 18 months in operations learns a lot about how cost decisions affect people on the ground. When a product manager moves to customer success, they learn what it is like to be on the other end of the company’s promises. These are the kinds of diverse experiences that help a senior director do their job better. They also help you improve your soft skills, like effective communication and making decisions across departments, which you can not do by staying in one lane.
Thinking of the lattice as four different kinds of movement can help. Getting a promotion to a higher job level is what it means to move up. Lateral moves are when you change job roles at the same level. A diagonal move is when you switch jobs and levels at the same time. Project-based moves are short-term jobs in fields like project management that let workers pick up new skills without having to quit their current position. A lattice can help people grow in their careers by giving them a variety of options, but it needs a strong system that works well.
The Business Case
It is important to note that the business case for nonlinear career paths is not about being progressive. It is about money, keeping employees, and having a resilient workforce. Companies that let their employees move around the organizational structure benefit in all three areas at once, allowing employees to build the diverse career trajectories that lead to career success.
A big professional networking database found that employees who moved around the company in their first two years had a 75% chance of staying with the company, while those who did not had a 56% chance. Companies that let their workers move around a lot kept them for 53% longer and saw 17% more hours spent on developing their skills. When someone quits because they do not see advancement opportunities or a way to move up in their career, the company has to pay twice: once for the person who left and once for the person they have to hire.
People do not talk about this part of the argument as much, but a lattice also makes organizations stronger. When employees switch roles, they share what they know with the rest of the company. This creates the kind of cross-functional awareness that helps people make informed decisions. Someone who has worked in sales, operations, and finance knows that changing the price in one area can make it harder to get things done in another. Finding people with that kind of judgment is hard, but if your career architecture lets you, it is surprisingly easy to build. A lattice fosters creativity in the same way, not by holding workshops but by giving people different problems to solve over time.
One of the best ways for a business to protect its future is to keep the top talent, knowledge, experience, and skills it has already paid to build by making career paths that are not straight. The difference in success between companies that do this and those that do not will only get bigger.
How to Design a Lattice: A Practical Blueprint
Most of the writing about nonlinear career design is only about ideas that are not real. But in this case, the next section is more specific because companies often have trouble turning theoretical ideas into something useful. They may agree with the lattice idea but not actually build one.
Begin with Skills, then Use a Readiness Matrix.
The first step is to stop planning career development around job descriptions and instead plan it around the skills needed to do the job well. Make a list of your most important roles and the skills they require. Then, look for those skills in different parts of the company. That is where your company’s lattice shows connections between skills in a better way. A skills-first view shows links that a title system does not.
Once you have that skills map set up, use a simple readiness matrix. For each role family, you should think about two things: how ready the employee is to move into roles that are close by and how much the organization needs people to move into those roles. If both are high, go now. Give employees project-based tasks to keep them growing when they are ready but do not have much to do. If there is a lot of need but not a lot of readiness, you should spend money on training programs, mentoring, and targeted professional development to help people learn the skills they need. If both are low, check back later when your priorities change.
Think about a mid-level operations manager to see how this plays out. The next step up the traditional career ladder is senior operations manager, then director, and finally vice president. In a lattice, that same person might see four possible career paths: moving up to a senior operations role, moving sideways to supply chain strategy to gain business skills, moving diagonally to regional general management after a stretch assignment, or leading a digital transformation workstream on a six-month project. Each one helps you learn something new. Each one leads to a different kind of senior position. The key is to make sure that all four are clear in the company’s career development plans so that employees start to look into other roles instead of just thinking that the only way is up. Seeing these diverse opportunities early on can help someone in an entry-level position because it shows them that the company cares about professional growth in a lot of different development areas.
That visibility gives workers a lot of career options and makes them feel good about themselves. It also gives the company a steady stream of high-performance leaders who are ready to take on jobs all over the business, creating a path for a successful career at every level.
Plans for Growth, Managers, and Rewards
Many companies say they value mobility, but their plans for career growth are either unclear or rely entirely on one manager’s willingness to let people go. That is a structural failure, and it happens a lot. A good plan tells employees what their next development opportunities could be in different situations, what skills and development areas they need for each step, and how to weigh the pros and cons of timing, pay, and personal priorities.
Even the best lattice design will fail if managers do not keep their best workers. Most businesses do not think about this barrier. People naturally want to keep their best workers, but performance management should help them change. When judging a manager’s skill, you should look at more than just how long they keep their team. You should also look at how well they build it. A manager should see it as a sign of success if one of their team members gets a better job in another part of the company. By letting employees move around, the company keeps its best ones for a long time. Senior teams also need to check to see if moving around is good for everyone.
Risks Worth Naming
There are trade-offs with a lattice model, and it would be wrong to act like there are not.
- The first point of friction is pay. If your pay structure only ties salary increases to moving up, a lateral move will always feel like a step back, no matter how much you talk about career growth.
- The second risk is that roles are unclear. Every move needs to have a clear reason for why it is happening now and how it fits with the person’s goals. If you do not have that, sending workers in different directions only makes things more confusing, not more fun.
- Workload is the third thing, and it is the thing that will most likely kill a pilot before it proves anything. If you give someone a project-based assignment that turns into an unpaid second job, the other employees will see moving around the company as a punishment instead of a chance to learn new skills.
A career ladder still works well in fields that are regulated or where deep technical skills are the most important thing. Both models can help with a good career strategy, but the most important thing is knowing when to use a ladder or lattice. The important thing is that the current workplace backs up the model it chooses with real structure and real follow-through.
A 12-Month Pilot
This is a step-by-step guide for leadership teams that are ready to go beyond theory and put nonlinear career paths into action.
Months 1 to 3
Pick two or three talent pools where working with people from other departments is the most important thing for the company’s future. Map out current roles by skill set, look for the strongest sideways and diagonal adjacencies, and set standards for how long employees stay with the company before making their first internal move, how engaged they are, and how many people are filling open positions.
Months 4 to 6
Give pilot groups access to internal job postings and project-based assignments. Show managers how to have career talks that talk about moving up, sideways, and down. In career development plans, make it clear how to move up in your job by giving at least three possible next steps for each role.
Months 7 to 9
Find out about application rates, moves that have already been made, manager support scores, and early signs of retention. Compare how happy and engaged pilot groups are at work to a control group. Find out which adjacencies are really helping things grow and which ones are not going anywhere.
Months 10 to 12
Change the design based on what the data shows. Changing the rules for pay in places where pay friction made things move more slowly. To build credibility for a wider rollout, add one or two more talent pools and share the results with everyone in the company.
The most important thing is not how many people moved, but what happened after that. Did they stay for a longer time? Did they do better? Those results show that a real career development system is different from just changing the names of internal transfers. If the answers are good, you have something worth scaling.
Where This Leaves Us
This is not an argument for killing the career ladder. However, it is too narrow and too far from how skills really grow to be the only way to show how talent grows in a company. Nonlinear career paths help companies better match what people need with how they grow. They make your employees stronger, give you more hiring options, and help you get more out of the talent you already have. Wanting to make the future one where growth goes in all directions is not idealism. A group of leaders should do this.
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