Career Ladders: Misunderstood and Misused

Whether it’s called a competency matrix or a career ladder, the idea is the same: a structured path for career progression. These documents outline the skills and behaviors required to move up the ranks. When a mid-level engineer wants to figure out how to get promoted, they look at the senior level on the career ladder, and work with their manager to make a plan for progressing. That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. The expectation is that when promotions are discussed, a manager will show how someone meets enough of the career ladder’s criteria for senior level—and they’ll get promoted.

That’s the theory. But in reality, promotions don’t work this way and they shouldn’t. Having participated in many hours of promotion calibration meetings over the past ten years or so, I can say that the way people are evaluated is quite difference. This gap in expectations is often painful for line managers who nominate people for promotions but aren't in the room for the promotion calibrations where the final decisions are made. Often you have an individual contributor and their manager, both of whom are making plans and working through feedback based on the career ladder, who ultimately feel blindsided when the promotions they propose don't go through.

A career ladder is, at its core, a model for classifying people by level. But like any model, it has limitations. The goal of promotions is to identify who is ready to create value at the next level—yet there is always a gap between what the career ladder predicts and what truly matters. This gap becomes a problem when people anchor their behavior too much on the model, they overfit their behavior to the career ladder. In machine learning, overfitting happens when a model is trained too narrowly on specific data and fails to generalize. The same thing happens with career ladders—people optimize for the model instead of maximizing their impact.

The clearest sign of overfitting is 'box checking'—when people treat the career ladder as a checklist of tasks rather than a path for growth. I've often seen copies of the career ladder where people have literally highlighted all the boxes they feel they've covered. The problem is that this pursuit of box checking can also come at the expense of focusing on deepening one's strongest skills by taking on challenging work.

Another issue is that many career ladders are overly complex, forcing managers and teams to spend more time navigating them than developing talent. Instead, that time should be spent guiding people toward high-impact growth opportunities.

To compensate for the limitations of career ladders, any well-run organization will have a promotion calibration process. In these meetings, leaders compare promotion proposals against each other and against the broader peer group. The goal? To prevent overfitting and ensure the career ladder is applied consistently.

Meanwhile, line managers rely heavily on the career ladder when making promotion proposals, while leadership takes a broader view of what promotion readiness looks like. This disconnect is painful. The typical response? A pledge to make the career ladder more accurate. While it's certainly true that every career ladder has its limits, I think the better solution is to help people understand the role that the career ladder plays.

Leadership teams are judged by how their promotion decisions are perceived. Career levels don’t just define roles—they help shape company culture. When leadership decisions contradict that culture, credibility suffers. This is why promotion calibration goes beyond just checking someone against the career ladder—it incorporates broader context.

This can create a fundamental misalignment. The individual, their manager, leadership, and the broader organization all define 'promotion-ready' differently. The career ladder is meant to connect them—but too often, it creates friction instead of alignment. As the saying goes, all models are wrong, but some are useful. The real test for leadership isn’t perfection—it’s whether the career ladder drives real growth and impact.

My practical tips are:

• Reframe the career ladder. Use it as a growth framework, not a promotion checklist.
• Calibrate early and often. Have line managers align on promotions before leadership weighs in.
• Pull back the curtain. Make sure ICs understand how decisions are made.
• Focus on growth, not just criteria. Push people to stretch their skills, not just tick boxes.