Career ladder

Last updated

A career ladder or corporate ladder is a metaphor for job promotion. In business and human resources management, the career ladder typically describes the progression from entry level positions to higher levels of pay, skill, responsibility, or authority. This metaphor is spatially oriented, and frequently used to denote upward mobility within a stratified promotion model. Because the career ladder does not provide for lateral movement, it is assumed to be a singular track with the greatest benefits at the top.

Contents

Job training programs, funded by public sector workforce funds and private foundations, have made attempts to increase the number of career ladders in various sectors, including health care, finance, and hospitality. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and several other foundations funded a series of studies and pilot projects in the early 2000s to expand and build a network of career ladders and mobility for workers through skills training and the use of workforce intermediaries, as described by Robert Giloth. [1]

The California state Employment Development Department (EDD) also in the early 2000s funded a series of career ladder programs, spearheaded by then director Michael Bernick. The programs sought to improve mobility and income of low wage workforces in California. EDD worked with several industry associations in long-term care, hospitality, and even farm work. The career ladder programs had very mixed results. [2]

Contrast to "bridge"

In this usage, the spatial metaphor of "bridge" would describe lateral promotion or entry. A bridged system would more closely resemble a fraternal organizational style, where members of the family are directly offered highly ranked positions. Another example is celebrities being directly elected among the public to political positions. [3]

Dual career ladder

This extension to the traditional career ladder allows employees to be promoted along either a supervisory or technical track. Dual career ladder programs are common in the engineering, scientific and medical industries where valuable employees have particular technical skills but may not be inclined to pursue a management career path. [4] When properly managed, [5] these programs can help companies retain top talent by offering extended career opportunities while allowing employees to remain in their chosen careers and continue to receive salary increases. [6]

Broken rung

In 2023, Forbes writer and author Christine Michel Carter researched the long-term career impact of women not being promoted from entry-level to management positions. [7] Carter said the long-term career impact of missing the promotion opportunity is the "broken rung," a metaphor referencing a missed rung or step on a ladder. The "broken rung" is the biggest obstacle keeping women from advancing in their careers. [8]

Gift exchange

Nobel laureate George Akerlof argued that promotion ladder provides a mechanism whereby a gift exchange occurs between an employer and his workers: a firm pays its workers salaries which are higher than the market-clearing level, and the workers increase levels of productivity for their company. This is especially true for a bureaucracy where officials are loyal to the operation of their firm and exercise an impersonal discipline in return for their promotion ladder. [9]

Related Research Articles

Human resources (HR) is the set of people who make up the workforce of an organization, business sector, industry, or economy. A narrower concept is human capital, the knowledge and skills which the individuals command. Similar terms include manpower, labor, or personnel.

Job rotation is a technique used by some employers to rotate their employees' assigned jobs throughout their employment. Employers practice this technique for a number of reasons. It was designed to promote flexibility of employees and to keep employees interested into staying with the company/organization which employs them. There is also research that shows how job rotations help relieve the stress of employees who work in a job that requires manual labor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Glass ceiling</span> Obstacles keeping a population from achievement

A glass ceiling is a metaphor usually applied to people of marginalized genders, used to represent an invisible barrier that prevents an oppressed demographic from rising beyond a certain level in a hierarchy. No matter how invisible the glass ceiling is expressed, it is actually an obstacle difficult to overcome. The metaphor was first used by feminists in reference to barriers in the careers of high-achieving women. It was coined by Marilyn Loden during a speech in 1978.

Staffing is the process of finding the right worker with appropriate qualifications or experience and recruiting them to fill a job position or role. Through this process, organizations acquire, deploy, and retain a workforce of sufficient quantity and quality to create positive impacts on the organization's effectiveness. In management, staffing is an operation of recruiting the employees by evaluating their skills and knowledge before offering them specific job roles accordingly.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Recruitment</span> Process of attracting, selecting and appointing candidates to a job or other organization

Recruitment is the overall process of identifying, sourcing, screening, shortlisting, and interviewing candidates for jobs within an organization. Recruitment also is the process involved in choosing people for unpaid roles. Managers, human resource generalists, and recruitment specialists may be tasked with carrying out recruitment, but in some cases, public-sector employment, commercial recruitment agencies, or specialist search consultancies such as Executive search in the case of more senior roles, are used to undertake parts of the process. Internet-based recruitment is now widespread, including the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

Personnel economics has been defined as "the application of economic and mathematical approaches and econometric and statistical methods to traditional questions in human resources management". It is an area of applied micro labor economics, but there are a few key distinctions. One distinction, not always clearcut, is that studies in personnel economics deal with the personnel management within firms, and thus internal labor markets, while those in labor economics deal with labor markets as such, whether external or internal. In addition, personnel economics deals with issues related to both managerial-supervisory and non-supervisory workers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Promotion (rank)</span>

A promotion is the advancement of an employee's rank or position in an organizational hierarchy system. Promotion may be an employee's reward for good performance, i.e., positive appraisal.

Social position is the position of an individual in a given society and culture. A given position may belong to many individuals.

In human resources, turnover is the act of replacing an employee with a new employee. Partings between organizations and employees may consist of termination, retirement, death, interagency transfers, and resignations. An organization’s turnover is measured as a percentage rate, which is referred to as its turnover rate. Turnover rate is the percentage of employees in a workforce that leave during a certain period of time. Organizations and industries as a whole measure their turnover rate during a fiscal or calendar year.

The United States federal civil service is the civilian workforce of the United States federal government's departments and agencies. The federal civil service was established in 1871. U.S. state and local government entities often have comparable civil service systems that are modeled on the national system to varying degrees.

The National Skill Standards Board (NSSB) was a coalition of community, business, labor, education, and civil rights leaders. It was tasked with building a national voluntary system of skill standards, assessment, and certification to enhance the ability of the United States workforce to compete effectively in the global economy.

A pay band is sometimes used to define the range (band) of compensation given for certain roles. The range is based on factors like location, experience, or seniority.

Occupational inequality is the unequal treatment of people based on gender, sexuality, age, disability, socioeconomic status, religion, height, weight, accent, or ethnicity in the workplace. When researchers study trends in occupational inequality they usually focus on distribution or allocation pattern of groups across occupations, for example, the distribution of men compared to women in a certain occupation. Secondly, they focus on the link between occupation and income, for example, comparing the income of whites with blacks in the same occupation.

Occupational segregation is the distribution of workers across and within occupations, based upon demographic characteristics, most often gender. Other types of occupational segregation include racial and ethnicity segregation, and sexual orientation segregation. These demographic characteristics often intersect. While a job refers to an actual position in a firm or industry, an occupation represents a group of similar jobs that require similar skill requirements and duties. Many occupations are segregated within themselves because of the differing jobs, but this is difficult to detect in terms of occupational data. Occupational segregation compares different groups and their occupations within the context of the entire labor force. The value or prestige of the jobs are typically not factored into the measurements.

A dead-end job is a job where there is little or no chance of career development and advancement into a better position. If an individual requires further education to progress within their firm that is difficult to obtain for any reason, this can result in the occupation being classified as a dead-end position. Based on human resources and career strategist Toni Howard Lowe, some individuals who have worked for the same company for several years may not be privy to the signs that they are currently employed in a dead-end job.

Harry Joseph Holzer is an American economist, educator and public policy analyst.

Workforce development, an American approach to economic development, attempts to enhance a region's economic stability and prosperity by focusing on people rather than businesses. It essentially develops a human-resources strategy. Work-force development has evolved from a problem-focused approach, addressing issues such as low-skilled workers or the need for more employees in a particular industry, to a holistic approach considering participants' many barriers and the overall needs of the region.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael S. Bernick</span> American lawyer

Michael S. Bernick is an American lawyer. He served as Director of California's labor department, the Employment Development Department (EDD), from 1999 to 2004. He is a practitioner and theorist of job training and employment strategies. For over 40 years, he has developed job training projects on the state and local level in California and written about strategies for expanding the middle class and achieving fuller employment.

Skills-based hiring refers to the practice of employers setting specific skill or competency requirements or targets. Skills and competencies may be cognitive or other professional skills, often commonly called "soft" skills.

The Progressive Wage Model (PWM), also known as the progressive wage for short, is a wage structure in Singapore, advocated by the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC), the sole national trade union in Singapore. The objective of the Progressive Wage Model has been to increase the salaries of workers through the enhancement of skills and improving productivity.

References

  1. ↑ Giloth, Robert (2003). Workforce Intermediaries: For the 21st Century . Temple University Press. ISBN   978-1-59213-204-1.
  2. ↑ Bernick, Michael (2005). Job Training That Gets Results: Ten Principles of Effective Employment Programs. W.E. Upjohn Institute.
  3. ↑ Reichley, James (1987) Celebrity Politicians Elections American style]. Brookings Institution Press. p. 83. ISBN   978-0-8157-7381-8
  4. ↑ Allen, Thomas J.; Katz, Ralph (1986). "The dual ladder: Motivational solution or managerial delusion?". R&D Management. 16 (2): 185–197. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9310.1986.tb01171.x. hdl: 1721.1/2117 .
  5. ↑ Hoffmann, Patrick; Hoegl, Martin; Muethel, Miriam; Weiss, Matthias (2016). "A contemporary justice perspective on dual ladders for R&D professionals". Journal of Product Innovation Management. 33 (5): 589–612. doi:10.1111/jpim.12310.
  6. ↑ LaMont, Rick, Understanding the dual ladder, Computer Science Salary Range, archived from the original on 11 August 2013, retrieved 12 July 2013
  7. ↑ Carter, Christine Michel. "Three Mom Executives Share How They Surpassed The 'Broken Rung'". Forbes. Retrieved 2023-06-21.
  8. ↑ "Women in the Workplace | McKinsey". www.mckinsey.com. Retrieved 2023-06-21.
  9. ↑ Akerlof, G. A. (1984). "Gift Exchange and Efficiency-Wage Theory: Four Views". The American Economic Review. 74 (2): 79–83. JSTOR   1816334. S2CID   153023298.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.