For decades, the career ladder was the only respectable route forward. You climbed the ladder, ideally within one organisation, and any deviation required an apology. Lateral moves were red flags. Gaps were liabilities. A varied CV was evidence of indecision, not capability.
That consensus is collapsing, and the organisations still clinging to it are starting to lose people because of it.
The underlying shift is accelerating faster than most organisations realise. McKinsey’s most recent American Opportunity Survey found that over a third of employed workers have switched jobs since 2020, and nearly a fifth have changed occupations entirely. This is not restlessness. It is a workforce actively building breadth, and it is happening whether organisations design for it or not.
Professionals today move across sectors, disciplines and delivery environments in ways that were structurally unusual a generation ago. A project manager who has worked in construction, financial services and the public sector does not have an inconsistent CV. They have a genuinely versatile one, and smart organisations are beginning to recognise the difference.
The problem is that recognition has not translated into structure. Most organisations still build talent models around linear internal progression, which creates a specific and expensive inefficiency: skilled professionals sitting idle on the bench in one organisation while another down the road is desperately trying to access the same capability. The talent exists. The demand exists. The infrastructure connecting them does not.
This is most visible in project-driven sectors, consulting, and technology delivery, where workloads are uneven by nature. Organisations over-hire to maintain capacity, then carry cost during quiet periods. Or they under-hire, then scramble when demand arrives. Neither is a strategy. Both are symptoms of a talent model designed for a different era.
The response emerging is structured talent sharing: formal arrangements that allow professionals to work on short-term projects across different organisations while remaining employed. Not freelancing, not a gig economy rebranding exercise, actual employment with genuine variety built into it. The employee gets the breadth that makes a squiggly career genuinely developmental. The organisation gets access to trusted capability without permanent headcount decisions.
The squiggly career is not a consolation prize for people who could not climb the ladder. For a growing number of professionals, it is the point. The question organisations need to answer is whether their talent structures reflect that, or whether they are still quietly penalising the people most likely to build the adaptable, high-performing teams they say they want.
The organisations that adapt their talent structures to reflect this will retain the people who matter most. Those that don’t will keep losing them to ones that have.
