How To Create a Career Ladder for Vertical and Lateral Movement

Many career ladders assume that people have linear careers. They move “up” to a new role. However, many people don’t have linear careers. They bounce between a technical role and management—often several times. Even after they bounce, they might not make a permanent career decision. Worse, most career ladders nudge technical people into management. Instead of pushing people “up” into management, why not support people as they experiment in their career, such as “over” to a different role?

Contents

1. Identify the problems when organizations push great technical people into management, especially without training.
2. Assess how resource-efficiency thinking limits career options for everyone.
3. Identify what a valuable career looks like to the person and the organization
   (increasing influence).
4. Rethink valuable careers: from linear to bouncing back and forth between various influence areas
5. Consider the “agile” behaviors that enhance collaboration
6. Construct just one alternative for a three-track career ladder that enables career agility.

About the Speaker
Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams do reasonable things that work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.
With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. Her most recent books are the Modern Management Made Easy series, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby) and Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver.
See all her books, blog, and other resources at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com.