High school and college graduates are not the only ones fretting about their futures. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers before their peak earning years, going at least five years without a real boost in pay or position.”
Those findings come from a new report, Sidetracked, by Charles Koch Foundation partner The Burning Glass Institute and New York University’s School of Professional Studies.
Fortunately, this problem is solvable. “Mid-career stall is a structural problem, not an individual failure,” the organizations conclude. “Detected early and addressed with targeted intervention by employers, educators, and policymakers, career momentum can be rebuilt.”
What is mid-career stall and who is susceptible?
The study examined the careers of 1.3 million midcareer professionals across a range of industries. “It suggests that even in an economy with high employment, many workers run into an invisible barrier to upward mobility just when their careers are supposed to gain momentum,” The Journal explains.
Employees in some industries are more susceptible to mid-career stall. Public administration professionals have a stall rate of 30.1 percent while for individuals in the information sector, the rate is just 20.7 percent. Importantly, the report notes that “sectors long associated with stable, white-collar careers now exhibit the highest stall shares.”
The report offers advice for early career professionals who want to avoid a mid-career lag.
“Our analysis shows that workers who acquire high-quality credentials or differentiated skills earlier in their plateau materially reduce stall risk,” the report advises. “This finding underscores a core principle: stall is detectable through early wage trends, promotion timing, and skill portfolio narrowing, and it is far more responsive to timely intervention than delayed correction. Waiting too long transforms a temporary dip into a deeply embedded constraint.”
How employers and employees can work together to prevent mid-career stall
Sidetracked offers recovery pathways, pointing out that strategic reskilling into adjacent, higher-mobility roles can reduce stall risk by up to 86 percent. “The gains come not from starting over, but from pivoting into positions where existing expertise unlocks a steeper trajectory,” The Burning Glass Institute says. The report finds successful employee transitions follow one of three distinct patterns:
- Deepening technical expertise within a related field;
- Broadening into cross-functional planning and analysis roles; or
- Carrying transferable competencies into an entirely new domain.
The benefits of preventing stall are obvious for individuals: continued upward mobility and career fulfillment. Preventing stall benefits employers, too, by improving employee retention, for example. The report argues, “By identifying workers on a stall trajectory early and combining targeted learning with intentional talent mobility, workers and employers can redirect momentum before entrenchment.”
In addition to its support for The Burning Glass Institute, the Charles Koch Foundation works with partners like the SkillUp Coalition, Per Scholas, and Unmudl to facilitate access to the skills development programs Americans need to continue to advance and find fulfillment in their careers. Learn more about our work.