You could be leaving 40% of your lifetime earnings on the table.
Before anyone considers promoting you to a new level or giving you a bigger job, you must operate and show you are at the higher level you want to reach. You have to consistently show you have outgrown your current job. Regardless of your 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 requiring a more complex skillset, where at least ~35% of the needed competencies are new. The more of those moves you accumulate, the more knowledge you have to accelerate your rise. You need new skills, experiences, and knowledge to be considered for those bolder moves. And you need more than one move to accelerate your upward trajectory.
Winners think of acquiring new skills and knowledge as an investment with a huge ROI that will yield benefits for the rest of their lives, not as a one-off expense. 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). The average person switches roles every 2-4 years. These moves allow them to accrue, enrich, and demonstrate their skills. It’s a “skills-knowledge acquisition-growth” flywheel.
Studies show that experience accounts for ~70% of lifetime earnings for workers with ascending mobility and about 40% for those without it. The difference is driven by how many experiences and skills they acquired. In other words, if you don’t get the competencies you need for faster growth, your earnings potential could be significantly less.