Career Lattices vs. Ladders: Making Lateral Moves Valuable

The Ladder's Limitations

The career ladder has been the dominant metaphor for professional advancement for over a century. You start at the bottom, climb rung by rung, and success means getting higher. Each promotion brings more responsibility, more authority, more compensation. The path is clear, linear, and universally understood.

The metaphor served organizations well when work was stable, hierarchies were deep, and careers were long. A ladder made sense when you could reasonably expect to spend decades at one company, gradually mastering your function and earning your way to the top.

But that world is fading. Organizations are flattening, reducing the rungs available to climb. Jobs are changing faster than career paths can keep up. People are staying in roles for shorter periods and with companies for fewer years. And employees—particularly younger ones—increasingly want career experiences that don't fit a simple vertical trajectory.

The ladder metaphor isn't just outdated—it's actively harmful. It devalues lateral moves that build breadth. It creates bottlenecks at the top that frustrate capable people. It defines success in ways that don't match what many employees actually want. And it wastes organizational talent by keeping people in narrow functional silos.

The Lattice Alternative

A career lattice offers a different model—one with movement in multiple directions, not just up. In a lattice, lateral moves are legitimate career advances, not detours or demotions. Diagonal moves that combine functional change with advancement are common. Even downward moves can make sense when they position someone for better opportunities.

The lattice metaphor better reflects how careers actually work for many people. A marketing manager might move laterally into product management, building skills that eventually enable a senior leadership role she couldn't have reached climbing the marketing ladder alone. An engineer might step back from management to return to technical work, finding greater fulfillment and impact as an individual contributor. A finance analyst might move sideways into operations, gaining perspectives that make him a more effective CFO candidate later.

These paths aren't failures of the ladder system—they're successes in a lattice one. They create value for organizations by developing versatile leaders and breaking down silos. They create value for individuals by enabling more personalized, fulfilling careers.

Why Lattices Need Skills

The traditional career ladder worked because it was simple: job titles indicated level, and advancement meant getting a higher title. Everyone understood the system without needing to think about underlying capabilities.

Lattices are more complex. A lateral move from marketing to product management isn't obviously "progress" unless you can articulate what new capabilities it develops and what future opportunities it enables. Without this clarity, lateral moves look like aimless wandering rather than strategic development.

Skills provide the common language that makes lattice careers legible. Instead of tracking progress through titles, you track it through capabilities. A move that adds new skills is an advance, regardless of whether the title changes. A career path makes sense when you can see how each role contributes to an expanding skill portfolio.

This shift has profound implications. Career conversations change from "what's my next title?" to "what skills am I building?" Development planning becomes skill-gap analysis rather than position targeting. Internal mobility opens up because hiring managers can see transferable skills across functions, not just relevant experience within them.

Making Lateral Moves Valuable

In theory, lattice careers sound appealing. In practice, organizations often undermine them through systems and cultures that still reward vertical movement above all else.

To make lateral moves genuinely valuable, several things need to change:

Compensation models. If pay only increases with promotions, people will rationally resist lateral moves that don't come with higher titles. Skills-based organizations decouple pay from hierarchy, creating mechanisms for compensation to grow with capabilities regardless of whether the role changes vertically.

Manager incentives. Managers often hoard talent, blocking lateral moves that would benefit individuals and the organization because losing good people hurts their team's performance. Incentive structures that reward developing and sharing talent—not just retaining it—encourage managers to support lateral mobility.

Career narratives. Stories matter. When the only celebrated career paths are rapid vertical ascents, lateral moves carry stigma. Organizations can shift narratives by highlighting successful lattice careers, recognizing leaders who took non-linear paths, and explicitly valuing breadth alongside depth.

Role design. If roles are defined narrowly around specific experience, lateral candidates will always look less qualified than candidates with direct backgrounds. Defining roles around skills rather than experience opens them to people with transferable capabilities from adjacent areas.

Visibility systems. People need to know what opportunities exist and what skills they require. Internal talent marketplaces that surface opportunities across the organization—not just within functions—enable lateral moves that would otherwise never be considered.

The Skills Bridge

Skills serve as the bridge between different parts of the lattice. When someone considers a lateral move, the key question is: what skills transfer, and what skills need development?

Some skills transfer broadly. Communication, problem-solving, project management, leadership—these apply across functions and industries. A strong foundation in these portable skills makes lateral moves easier and faster.

Other skills are more specialized but still transferable. A data analyst's skills in pattern recognition and storytelling with data might transfer well to customer insights or market research. A salesperson's relationship management and negotiation skills might enable moves into partnerships, vendor management, or even HR.

Some skills genuinely don't transfer and need to be developed in the new context. But even here, skills thinking helps by clarifying exactly what needs development and how long it will realistically take. A lateral move isn't blocked by gaps—it's enabled by a clear development plan to close them.

Skills intelligence platforms can quantify these transfers and gaps, moving career planning from intuition to data. Instead of guessing whether a lateral move makes sense, you can see the skill overlap, identify specific development needs, and plan accordingly.

Lattices and Organizational Flexibility

Beyond individual benefits, career lattices serve organizational needs in rapidly changing environments.

When business needs shift, organizations with lattice cultures can redeploy talent more easily. People who have made lateral moves before are more willing to do so again. People with broader skill portfolios can contribute in more contexts. The organization becomes more adaptive because its people are more versatile.

Lattices also improve retention. Many people leave organizations not because they're unhappy but because they see no path forward—and "forward" in ladder organizations means up. When up isn't available or isn't wanted, leaving looks like the only option. Lattices create alternatives: sideways moves that reignite engagement without requiring vertical openings.

Succession planning becomes richer when lattice careers are the norm. Instead of grooming narrow specialists for leadership, you develop leaders with broad organizational understanding. The executive who has worked across multiple functions makes better decisions than one who has only ever known one part of the business.

Individual Agency in Lattice Careers

Lattice careers put more responsibility on individuals to navigate their own paths. Without clear rungs to climb, you have to figure out where you want to go and how to get there.

This requires self-awareness—understanding your skills, interests, and values well enough to make good choices among many options. It requires strategic thinking—seeing how different moves position you for different futures. It requires courage—choosing paths that might look unconventional by traditional standards.

Organizations can support this individual agency through career coaching, mentoring, and access to skills intelligence that helps people understand their options. But ultimately, lattice careers are more self-directed than ladder careers. For some people, this is liberating; for others, it's anxiety-inducing.

The answer isn't forcing everyone into lattice thinking but enabling it for those who want it. Some people genuinely prefer predictable vertical paths and should have access to them. Others want flexibility and agency and should have that too. The best organizations offer both.

Implementing Lattice Thinking

Transitioning from ladder to lattice doesn't happen through a single initiative. It requires sustained effort across multiple dimensions:

Start with skills visibility. People can't navigate lattice careers if they don't know what skills they have or what skills opportunities require. Building a skills foundation—understanding your workforce's current capabilities and the capability requirements of roles—is the essential first step.

Create opportunity transparency. Make internal opportunities visible across the organization, not just within functions. Help people discover lateral possibilities they might never have considered.

Redesign career conversations. Train managers to discuss careers in terms of skills development, not just vertical advancement. Equip them with tools to help employees explore lattice paths.

Adjust performance systems. Recognize and reward skill development, not just performance in current role. Value contribution to organizational capability, not just individual results.

Celebrate lattice success stories. Publicly recognize people who have built successful careers through non-linear paths. Make breadth as celebrated as depth.

Remove structural barriers. Examine policies around compensation, transfers, and role requirements that implicitly favor ladder thinking. Modify those that unnecessarily constrain lateral movement.

The Future Is Multi-Dimensional

The career ladder emerged when organizations were tall, work was stable, and careers were long. None of those conditions characterize the modern workplace. Clinging to the ladder metaphor doesn't make it relevant again—it just makes us worse at understanding how careers actually work.

The lattice metaphor isn't perfect either. Careers are probably more like networks than ladders or lattices—complex webs of experiences, relationships, and capabilities that defy simple geometric models. But the lattice at least captures the multi-dimensional nature of modern careers in ways the ladder cannot.

For organizations, embracing lattice thinking is both a talent strategy and a business strategy. It attracts and retains people who want flexibility. It develops more versatile leaders. It creates organizational adaptability that matters in unpredictable environments.

For individuals, understanding careers as lattices opens possibilities that ladder thinking forecloses. Success isn't just up—it's in whatever direction builds the skills, experiences, and relationships that enable the life and contribution you want.