You could be leaving significant lifetime earnings on the table.
Before anyone considers promoting you or giving you a bigger job, you have to consistently show you have outgrown your current level and operate at the higher one you want to reach. Regardless of whatever you currently do. Like Gandhi said, “you must be the change you want to see.”
Over a whole career, people with higher upward mobility make more frequent, bolder moves to new roles with broader responsibilities that require a more complex skillset, where at least ~35% of the needed competencies are new.
The more of these moves you accumulate, the more knowledge you have to continue accelerating your rise. To be eligible for those bolder moves, you will need new skills, experiences, and knowledge. And you need more than one move to accelerate your upward trajectory.
Acquiring new skills and knowledge is not a one-off expense but an investment with a huge ROI that will yield benefits for the rest of your life.
Consider this: in the U.S., people who progress to higher-earning jobs move 4.6 times on average (vs. 3.7 for the rest). Faster-growing individuals switch roles every 1-3 years, vs. every 2-4 years for the average person.
These more frequent moves allow them to accrue, enrich, and demonstrate their skills. It’s a “skills-knowledge acquisition-growth” flywheel.
Studies show that this broader experience accounts for ~70% of lifetime earnings for workers with ascending mobility and about 40% for those without it. The number of experiences and additional skills they acquire drives the difference.
In other words, if you don’t get the competencies you need for faster growth, your earning potential could be much smaller.