Career Tracking Is HR’s Most Persistent Fiction

Why organizations misunderstand how careers actually develop

Ask a room of experienced professionals a simple question:

“Ten years ago, did you expect to be in the job you hold today?”

In most rooms, only a handful of hands go up, if any.

People arrive in their current roles through unexpected opportunities, industry shifts, new relationships, reorganizations, acquisitions, crises, or discoveries about their own capabilities that they could not have predicted earlier in their careers. The colloquial term to describe this is chance – a form of opportunism we would be foolish to ignore. Yet inside organizations we continue to behave as though careers unfold along desirable, predictable tracks.

Companies build career ladders, progression frameworks, competency matrices, and succession pipelines intended to guide employees toward future roles. HR systems attempt to identify where employees are today, where they should go next, and what development steps will move them along that path. The assumption is simple:

Careers can be planned. Furthermore, if you are to be viewed as a credible professional with legitimate career ambitions, you need a career plan.

But the evidence suggests something very different. For most people, careers are not the result of long-term planning. They are the result of capability, opportunity, and circumstance interacting over time.

Career tracking persists largely because it is administratively convenient and psychologically comforting - not because it accurately describes how careers develop.

In the human resource management literature, what many organizations informally describe as career tracking is typically referred to as career pathing or career pathways. Career pathing refers to structured organizational processes that map potential career trajectories for employees by identifying sequences of roles, along with the skills, experiences, and developmental milestones associated with progression through those roles. These frameworks are commonly used to guide employee development, signal advancement opportunities, and help organizations prepare individuals for future responsibilities (Baruch & Rosenstein, 1992; Hall, 2004). Scholars describe organizational career systems as institutional arrangements that guide the “evolving sequence of a person’s work experiences over time” within firms (Arthur, Hall, & Lawrence, 1989; Hall, 2004). In practice, such systems attempt to provide employees with visibility into potential future positions and the developmental steps required to move toward them. In this article, the term career tracking is used broadly to describe these organizational systems for mapping and managing employee career progression.

The Story Organizations Tell About Careers

Organizations actively promote career tracking as part of their employment proposition.

Amazon encourages employees to “build the career you want with career development pathways.” (Amazon Jobs, n.d.).

Salesforce has introduced internal tools that recommend possible career paths for employees; describing the system, one executive explains that it shows employees “your career path… [with] skills interchangeable with other paths” (Business Insider, 2025).

Other companies make similar claims. A CEO describing internal career pathing explains that visible advancement routes give employees “a clear avenue… to management and career growth.” (Business Management Daily, 2024). Another organization attributes improved retention to “the clarity career pathing provides on growth opportunities.” (Business Management Daily, 2024).

Across organizations the narrative is remarkably consistent. Career tracking is supposed to deliver:

• clarity about the future

• structured development pathways

• predictable advancement

• leadership pipelines

• higher employee retention

The promise is appealing: if individuals follow the prescribed development path, their careers will unfold accordingly. But this model rests on assumptions that rarely hold in modern labor markets, even for those individuals who possess the necessary skills and attributes to progress.

The Five Assumptions Behind Career Tracking

Career planning systems depend on several implicit assumptions about work and organizations.  Each of them is increasingly questionable.

Assumption 1: Jobs remain stable long enough to plan toward them

Career tracking assumes that the roles employees are preparing for today will still exist in recognizable form years from now.

Yet occupational research repeatedly shows that job requirements evolve rapidly as technologies, industries, and organizations change. Roles are continuously reconfigured, expanded, or eliminated.

Planning toward a specific future role becomes unreliable when the role itself is changing.

Assumption 2: Organizations can predict future capability needs

Career tracking assumes companies can forecast what kinds of leaders and specialists they will need a decade in the future.

But strategic planning itself struggles with long horizons. Organizations routinely misjudge technological disruption, market shifts, and competitive dynamics.

Expecting talent systems to predict leadership requirements years in advance is an even more fragile proposition.

Assumption 3: Employees will remain inside one organization long enough to follow a path

Career tracking emerged during an era when employment relationships were relatively stable. Modern labor markets look very different.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics longitudinal data show that Americans born in the early 1980s held an average of nine jobs between the ages of 18 and 36 (BLS, 2024). Those born between 1957 and 1964 held 12.9 jobs between ages 18 and 58 (BLS, 2025).

Frequent job transitions make long internal career tracks difficult to sustain.

Assumption 4: Individuals can predict their future interests

Career planning assumes individuals can accurately anticipate the work they will want to do years in advance. Yet experience routinely changes interests and motivations. People discover new industries, capabilities, and problems that engage them only after encountering them in practice.

Career decisions are often made retrospectively rather than prospectively.

Assumption 5: Careers advance primarily through deliberate planning

Perhaps the most questionable assumption is that career outcomes primarily result from deliberate planning. Research suggests otherwise.

Mitchell, Levin, and Krumboltz (1999) introduced the concept of planned happenstance, arguing that unplanned events play a central role in career development. Career trajectories often emerge from unexpected opportunities that individuals recognize and pursue.

More recent research describes career shocks - events such as layoffs, reorganizations, relocations, or technological disruptions that redirect career paths in unpredictable ways (Akkermans, Seibert, & Mol, 2018).

Careers are often shaped by events that no planning system could anticipate.

Careers Are Emergent, Not Engineered

The broader careers literature reflects this shift. Douglas Hall’s concept of the protean career describes careers driven by personal learning and adaptability rather than organizational ladders (Hall, 2004). Similarly, the boundary-less career framework emphasizes movement across organizations and professional domains (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996).

These perspectives treat careers as dynamic trajectories rather than structured sequences of roles.

In practice, most careers resemble adaptive journeys shaped by experience and opportunity rather than planned progressions.

Figure 1 - The career ladder vs career realityOrganizational models portray careers as linear progression. In practice, careers evolve through opportunity, shocks, lateral moves, and capability accumulation.

 

Why the Career Tracking Narrative Persists

If career tracking is such a poor description of how careers actually unfold, why does the idea persist so strongly inside organizations? Part of the answer lies in the incentives of the HR and talent management industry itself. Career frameworks provide structure for a wide range of organizational processes:

• compensation architecture

• promotion governance

• leadership pipeline models

• talent reviews

• succession planning systems

These processes require classification and structure, and career frameworks provide both. The problem arises when administrative structures are mistaken for realistic models of human development. Career tracking simplifies talent management, but simplicity does not make it accurate.

There is also a psychological component. Career planning provides reassurance to both employees and leaders. It suggests that professional progress can be engineered through careful planning and disciplined development.

In uncertain environments, that narrative is comforting - even when it is misleading.

At best, the concept of career tracking promises something extremely modest: that at some point in a person’s working life they might become a manager and, beyond that, a very small number may eventually reach executive leadership. These are broad and unsurprising outcomes that hardly require elaborate planning frameworks to achieve. Most organizations will naturally produce managers and a few senior leaders simply through experience, turnover, and opportunity over time. Yet companies invest enormous effort constructing detailed career pathways as though such outcomes require careful engineering. In reality, these systems often add little value while consuming significant time and administrative energy. The language of career tracking sounds positive and encouraging - it signals support for employee development and ambition. But that rhetorical appeal can disguise the fact that the concept itself is often little more than organizational pretense. Rather than perpetuating the illusion that careers can be mapped years in advance, HR would create far greater value by doing the harder work of identifying, strengthening, and deploying the real capabilities employees possess. Building capability is difficult and requires judgment, feedback, and sustained development effort. Talking about career tracks, by comparison, is easy.

What Actually Drives Career Progression

If career outcomes are not primarily determined by planning, what explains why some careers accelerate while others stall? The most consistent answer across research is capability development.

Human capital theory argues that individuals increase their economic value by developing knowledge and skills that enhance productivity (Becker, 1964). Contemporary research extends this concept through career competencies, portable capabilities that enable individuals to navigate complex work environments (Akkermans et al., 2013).

Opportunities tend to accumulate around individuals who consistently demonstrate strong capabilities. Careers advance because capability attracts opportunity.

The Importance of Dominant Capabilities

Career planning frameworks often encourage employees to develop broad competency portfolios aligned with hypothetical future roles. But high performance rarely comes from general competence alone. The most successful professionals tend to develop dominant capabilities - areas where their ability significantly exceeds that of their peers.

Research on expert performance shows that sustained deliberate practice produces extraordinary capability advantages over time (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993). Strengths-based research similarly shows that individuals perform best when they build on their strongest capabilities rather than trying to eliminate every weakness (Clifton & Harter, 2003).

Dominant capabilities become the foundation of professional reputation. Examples include:

• exceptional analytical reasoning

• structuring complex strategic decisions

• translating technical insight into business outcomes

• building trusted client relationships

• designing scalable systems or processes

These capabilities create value across many roles. They are far more durable than any particular job title.

Capability Compounding

Capabilities also compound over time. Each experience deepens judgment, expertise, and pattern recognition. As capabilities strengthen, individuals become increasingly valuable to organizations. That visibility generates opportunities - often unexpectedly. Many career breakthroughs occur not because someone followed a plan but because their capabilities reached a level where others sought their contribution.

Career acceleration is frequently the by-product of capability compounding.

The Weak Evidence Behind “Key Experiences”

Another common claim within career planning frameworks is that certain “key experiences” are necessary prerequisites for future advancement. Leadership development programs frequently identify assignments - international postings, cross-functional rotations, P&L responsibility, or crisis leadership - as critical experiences that prepare individuals for senior roles.

The logic appears intuitive: exposure to particular challenges supposedly equips individuals with the judgment and perspective required for leadership. Yet the empirical evidence supporting these claims is surprisingly limited.

Much of the literature on leadership development describes the potential value of challenging assignments but provides little rigorous evidence demonstrating that specific experiences reliably produce better leaders. McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison (1988), for example, argued that executives often report learning from difficult assignments, but their conclusions were based largely on retrospective accounts rather than controlled evidence of causal effects.

Subsequent research has reinforced the idea that experience matters but has struggled to demonstrate that particular experiences consistently lead to superior leadership outcomes. A further complication is that the impact of developmental experiences may depend heavily on the capabilities individuals already possess before those experiences occur. Research on leadership and performance consistently shows that individual differences - including cognitive ability, personality traits, motivation, and interpersonal orientation - play a significant role in leadership effectiveness (Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt, 2002). Yet many models of leadership development implicitly assume that exposure to certain experiences will produce similar developmental outcomes across individuals.

In reality, the same assignment may accelerate the development of one person while having little effect on another, depending on their underlying capabilities and dispositions. Some individuals may possess natural strengths - such as social perceptiveness, learning agility, emotional regulation, or strategic reasoning - that allow them to extract far greater developmental value from challenging assignments. Others may not benefit in the same way. Surprisingly, many organizational models of “key experiences” pay limited attention to these underlying individual differences, even though they may be among the most powerful determinants of leadership potential. As a result, career development frameworks often attribute leadership growth to the experiences themselves while overlooking the capabilities individuals bring to those experiences in the first place.

Reviews of leadership development research suggest that the relationship between experience and leadership effectiveness is highly contingent, influenced by individual differences, organizational context, and the quality of reflection and feedback accompanying those experiences (Day, Fleenor, Atwater, Sturm, & McKee, 2014).

In practice, the emphasis on predefined “key experiences” may therefore reflect a form of organizational storytelling rather than robust evidence. Certain assignments become culturally associated with leadership preparation, and individuals who follow those paths are later viewed as successful examples - even when many others who had similar experiences do not advance.

This does not mean experience is unimportant. Challenging work undoubtedly contributes to learning and capability development. But the assumption that organizations can reliably specify a set of experiences that produce future leaders remains far less substantiated than many talent systems imply.

Once again, the focus on career pathways risks oversimplifying the messy, contingent reality of how professional capability actually develops.

The Constraints Most Careers Cannot Escape

One reason career planning frameworks are so misleading is that they ignore the real constraints that shape most careers.

Career development literature often emphasizes agency - the idea that individuals can design their own careers through planning and development. In reality, career possibilities are always bounded by structural and personal constraints that are rarely acknowledged in organizational career discussions.

These constraints influence not only what opportunities individuals pursue, but also which opportunities are realistically available to them.

Academic Background and Credentials

Educational background often shapes career trajectories in ways that are difficult to reverse later in life.

Many professions impose formal credential barriers that strongly influence career mobility. Law, medicine, engineering, and academia are obvious examples, but credential effects extend far beyond regulated professions. Employers frequently use academic pedigree as a screening mechanism for access to elite firms, leadership development programs, and high-status occupations.

Once individuals enter a particular educational pathway, their career options can become significantly structured by that early decision.

This phenomenon reflects what labor economists describe as path dependency, where early career choices influence the range of later opportunities available.

Narrow Technical Specialization

Another constraint arises from deep specialization. Technical expertise is often necessary for early career success, but it can also create limitations later in a career. Specialists build deep competence within a particular domain, but their expertise may not transfer easily to other contexts. This creates a paradox.

The very expertise that enables advancement early in a career can eventually restrict mobility across domains.

Engineers, scientists, financial analysts, and other technical professionals frequently confront this challenge as they attempt to transition from specialist roles into broader leadership positions.

Geographic Constraints

Careers are also shaped by geographic realities. Many industries cluster in particular regions - technology in Silicon Valley, finance in New York or London, entertainment in Los Angeles, energy in Houston. Advancement often requires mobility across organizations, and those organizations may not exist in every location.

Individuals who are unable or unwilling to relocate may find their career opportunities constrained regardless of capability or ambition. Family obligations, immigration status, or lifestyle preferences frequently limit geographic mobility in ways that career frameworks rarely acknowledge.

Personal Dispositions and Talents

Perhaps the most under-discussed constraint is the set of personal traits that influence career suitability. Not everyone is equally suited to every type of work or leadership responsibility. Differences in temperament, interpersonal orientation, cognitive style, and risk tolerance shape the environments in which individuals perform best.

Some people thrive in highly social, politically complex environments. Others perform best in analytical or technical domains where deep expertise is valued more than organizational influence. Similarly, some individuals possess strong natural orientation toward leadership - comfort with authority, high tolerance for ambiguity, and the ability to mobilize others around difficult goals. Others may prefer work that allows them to focus on expertise rather than managing people.

These differences are not deficiencies. They simply reflect variation in how individuals contribute most effectively. Yet career frameworks often implicitly assume that everyone should aspire to the same advancement trajectory.

The Pay Incentive Problem

Compensation structures introduce another distortion into career advancement. In many organizations, the primary route to higher income is through promotion into management or leadership roles. As a result, individuals who are highly capable specialists may feel pressure to pursue leadership positions even when those roles do not align with their capabilities or interests. This dynamic creates two common problems.

First, talented specialists may be removed from roles where they create the greatest value.

Second, organizations may elevate individuals into leadership positions for which they are poorly suited.

The phenomenon is closely related to what Laurence J. Peter famously described as the Peter Principle - the tendency for individuals to be promoted until they reach a level of incompetence. While the concept is often treated humorously, it reflects a genuine organizational problem: advancement systems frequently reward past performance in one role rather than suitability for the next.

The Neglected Value of Expert Individual Contributors

If organizations were truly serious about career planning, one would expect equal attention to the development of technically sophisticated individual contributors. Yet in practice, most career frameworks overwhelmingly emphasize progression into management and leadership roles.

The implicit assumption is that the natural trajectory of successful professionals is to move from specialist roles into positions where they supervise others. Career ladders often culminate in management positions, and compensation systems frequently reinforce this progression by tying higher pay primarily to supervisory responsibility.

This orientation reflects a long-standing bias within organizational design. Research on internal labor markets has shown that promotion systems historically function as mechanisms for filling supervisory roles rather than for deepening expertise (Doeringer & Piore, 1971). As a result, advancement often becomes synonymous with management, regardless of whether individuals possess the capabilities required for leadership.

Yet this model sits uneasily with what we know about expertise and high performance. Research on expert performance demonstrates that mastery in complex domains requires sustained practice and deep specialization over long periods of time (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993). Removing individuals from technical domains once they become proficient can therefore undermine the very expertise organizations depend on.

Many industries depend heavily on highly capable individual contributors - engineers, scientists, physicians, architects, analysts, designers, and other specialists whose value lies in the depth of their expertise rather than their ability to manage people. Some organizations have attempted to address this imbalance by creating “dual career ladders” that allow technical experts to advance without entering management. However, research suggests that such systems remain relatively rare and often lack the status or rewards associated with leadership positions (Allen & Katz, 1986).

The result is a structural paradox. Organizations claim to value expertise and innovation, yet their advancement systems frequently encourage the most capable specialists to abandon the very domains where their expertise creates the most value.

If career development were genuinely focused on capability rather than hierarchy, far greater attention would be devoted to strengthening and rewarding expert individual contributors rather than channeling talent toward management roles by default.

Why These Constraints Matter

Acknowledging career constraints does not diminish ambition. It simply introduces realism into how careers are understood.

Careers do not unfold in an unconstrained environment where individuals can simply design their futures through careful planning. They develop within boundaries created by education, expertise, geography, personality, and organizational incentives.

Understanding these constraints reinforces the argument that career tracking systems are overly simplistic.

Rather than assuming everyone can move along a predefined career ladder, a more effective approach is to focus on developing capabilities within the domains where individuals can create the greatest value.

In other words, careers become most effective when individuals build on the capabilities that fit both their opportunities and their constraints.

Another damaging consequence of elevating “career tracking” as the central model of professional success is that it implicitly devalues the work people already do. When success is defined primarily as moving upward - to the next role, the next level, the next rung of the ladder - the current job becomes framed as merely transitional. This framing quietly diminishes the contribution of those who either cannot, or do not wish to, advance beyond their current role. Many employees reach positions that match their capabilities, interests, or life circumstances and perform them with deep competence and commitment. Yet career-tracking cultures often treat such stability as stagnation – if ou don’t keep advancing, you can’t be that valuable to the company. The result is an organizational narrative in which mastery of a role is undervalued relative to progression beyond it. Ironically, this undermines the very performance organizations depend on: the consistent, expert execution of essential roles by people who are well suited to them.

The Organizational Cost of Career Tracking

Beyond the conceptual weaknesses of career tracking lies a more practical concern: the organizational costs it creates. When advancement systems emphasize predefined career paths and upward movement into management roles, organizations often distort how talent is developed and deployed. Three consequences are particularly common.

Misallocated Talent

One of the most immediate costs of career tracking is the misallocation of talent. When advancement is defined primarily as upward movement into management, individuals who are highly capable in technical or specialist roles often feel pressure to pursue supervisory positions in order to progress professionally or financially.

This dynamic can remove individuals from the domains where they create the greatest value. Highly capable engineers, scientists, analysts, and other specialists may be promoted into managerial roles for which they are less suited, while the technical expertise that made them valuable in the first place is no longer fully utilized.

The result is a double loss: organizations weaken their technical capability while simultaneously placing individuals into roles that do not fully leverage their strengths. The phenomenon reflects the dynamic described by the Peter Principle, where individuals are promoted based on past performance rather than suitability for the next role (Peter & Hull, 1969).

Weak Leadership Pipelines

Ironically, systems designed to produce future leaders may also weaken leadership pipelines. Career frameworks often assume that progression through predefined roles naturally prepares individuals for leadership responsibilities.

Yet leadership capability is not simply the product of accumulating positions or experiences. Research consistently shows that leadership effectiveness is strongly influenced by underlying individual differences, including personality traits, cognitive ability, and interpersonal capabilities (Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt, 2002).

When organizations rely heavily on career pathways and key experiences to identify future leaders, they risk overlooking the more fundamental question of whether individuals possess the underlying capabilities required for leadership. As a result, leadership pipelines may become populated by individuals who have followed the correct sequence of roles but who lack the attributes necessary to lead effectively.

Underdeveloped Expertise

A third consequence is the underdevelopment of deep expertise.

Many industries rely heavily on highly capable individual contributors whose value derives from specialized knowledge and technical mastery. Yet advancement systems that emphasize managerial progression can discourage the sustained development of technical expertise.

Research on expert performance shows that mastery in complex domains requires many years of deliberate practice and sustained focus within a domain (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993). When advancement structures encourage individuals to leave technical domains prematurely in pursuit of managerial roles, organizations may inadvertently undermine the development of the very expertise they depend on for innovation and operational excellence.

Over time, this dynamic can weaken an organization’s core capabilities by reducing the depth of expertise within critical domains.

The Strategic Consequence

Taken together, these dynamics reveal a broader strategic problem. Career tracking systems often prioritize organizational order and administrative clarity over the optimal development and deployment of human capability.

Rather than strengthening organizational performance, such systems can inadvertently create talent mismatches, dilute leadership effectiveness, and weaken the depth of expertise on which many organizations rely.

A more effective approach would begin not with career pathways but with a far simpler question: where can each individual create the greatest value, and how can their capabilities be developed to expand that value over time?

 

From Career Tracking to Capability Strategy

This suggests a fundamentally different philosophy of career development. Career planning asks:

• What job should I pursue next?

• What role will I hold in ten years?

• What sequence of positions will get me there?

Capability strategy asks:

• What capabilities produce my strongest performance?

• Which capabilities create the most value in my environment?

• Where can I deepen those capabilities through challenging work?

• What experiences will accelerate mastery?

The first approach assumes predictability. The second assumes uncertainty. In volatile labor markets, the second approach is far more realistic.

Figure 2: Two competing models of career development. Traditional career tracking assumes predictable progression through predefined roles. Capability development assumes opportunities emerge as individuals build increasingly valuable capabilities.

To the extent that organizations seriously engage with the hard(er) work of individual capability development, then talk of career tracking/planning/pathways, is an irrelevant distraction, devoid of any real purpose or value. We should stop this nonsense.

Careers Are Navigated, Not Tracked

Career tracking systems persist because they offer a comforting narrative. They suggest careers can be engineered through structured development plans. Career tracking is like catnip for HR professionals who see it as of uniform value.

But the evidence tells a different story. Careers evolve through learning, opportunity, and circumstance. They are shaped by unexpected events, evolving interests, technological change, and new relationships. Most professionals could not have accurately predicted their current roles ten years earlier. That is not a failure of planning. It is simply how careers actually work.

The most reliable strategy - for individuals and organizations alike - is not to track careers but to build individual capabilities strong enough to shape whatever opportunities emerge. Because in the end, careers do not follow tracks.

They follow capability.

Careers cannot be engineered through planning frameworks. They emerge from capability meeting opportunity over time. Organizations that want stronger leaders and deeper expertise should stop tracking careers and start building capability.

 

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