No Room At the Top?

During a meeting, someone raised a concern about how hard it is to get a promotion in the office. It was believed (by my co-worker) that until someone on a higher level is leaving the office, the lower level is never going to get promoted because there's no room at the top.

I was quite surprised when I heard this comment. (I'm always interested in listeing what people say so that I can understand if they see the glass as half-full or half-empty.)

First of all, let's think about it--when you are ready and become one of the best players in the field, you can always get a better pay and maybe even a promotion from another company. A competitor company always want to attract top talents from another company right? Based on my knowledge, there are at least 4 or 5 companies are doing what my company is doing and definitely there's a demand of talents.

Secondly, if you want to stay in the same company, there's always other locations which might have a position that you are looking for. I was looking at the company job openings page a few days ago, and there are tons of positions at different levels are opening for applications.

Thirdly, when the baby boomers start to retire, (there are about 77 million baby boomers in the US and this represents 37% of the workforce), the company needs to fill up the upper level positions by some younger people.

As the saying goes ,"there's always room at the top", it's really depends on how you see it.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good points Y, BUT:

1) Many people have ties to their community/family and don't desire to move, particularily to a different part of the country
2) At higher levels of actuarial practice, some people get to be pretty specialized (perhaps this is moreso with insurance work than consulting work) and so within their specialty there really aren't that many opportunities with other firms
3) I don't think the babyboomer statistics are completely relavant to the actuarial profession, which is reasonably young (look at how many more people have been taking exams in recent years).