Most Careers Stall at Mid-Level, No Matter How Long People Work

Many managers dream of reaching the C-suite, but most people’s careers plateau at mid-level regardless of how long they work or how much they earn.

This uncomfortable reality is among the findings of an analysis of 150 million resumes by Harvard Business School Professor Paul Gompers that shows the limits of using wages and titles to gauge career attainment. Ultimately, he offers a complementary measure: the time it takes to reach a particular title after college graduation.

Gompers and fellow researchers mined resumes and wage data to calculate the median time to reach a given title in an industry—steps they call “seniority levels.” At a time when people pivot multiple times in their careers, they say this approach can effectively compare the “speed of a person’s career progression” across companies and sectors.

“Exceptional workers will advance faster and achieve higher seniority earlier in their careers,” Gompers writes in the working paper “Assessing Career Attainment via a Non-Wage Measure,” released by the National Bureau of Economic Research in September 2025.

Gompers, the Eugene Holman Professor of Business Administration, coauthored the research with Natee Amornsiripanitch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Duke University’s Will Levinson, Georgetown University’s Vladimir Mukharlyamov, Sachin Srivastava of the University of Pennsylvania, and George Hu, a Harvard University doctoral student.

The team says that using seniority levels can be especially useful for assessing transitions across government, nonprofit, and private sector jobs with different pay structures. Seniority levels also predicted higher wages when people switch to new jobs.

They cited Jerome Powell as an example. Before joining the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Powell had reached the senior ranks of private equity and then spent a few years as a think tank scholar, accepting a salary of $1. While wages alone would imply that Powell was demoted, the seniority measure fully reflects his exceptional career.

Unlike Powell, most people top out much lower in the corporate pyramid, usually within 15-20 years into their careers. In fact, more than half of people with 10 years of work data had a seniority level of 10 or higher, but only 19% of those with 20 years of experience in the sample had achieved a seniority level of 20.

“The seniority measure avoids the problem of fake promotions or title inflation where the change in job title carries little economic value,” the authors write.