Forbes45%
Mid-Career Professionals Are Facing Job Stagnation. Here Are 4 Ways To Fix It 47%
By Liz Elting0%
7/22/2026, 12:45:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 9 faulty reasoning types, including Indoctrination, Optimism Bias, and Negativity Bias, with Anchoring Bias as the most egregious example at 29.1% saturation with 285 hits. Analysis detected 897 faulty-reasoning hits from 979 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 49.3% and a BS Rank of 47% (10,472 of 19,731 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 53.10% of the article peer group.
Mid-career professionals are finding themselves stuck in their jobs with little room for growth.
For many workers, what should be the prime years for advancement have instead become a frustrating period of stalled career momentum.
According to NYU School of Professional Studies and the Burning Glass Institute's recent report"Sidetracked: The Hidden Crisis in Mid-Career Mobility," around 24% of mid-career professionals—defined as those in the 10-to-15-year mark of their careers—are stalled, meaning they have gone five or more years without a promotion and experienced minimal wage growth.
Gallup's 2025 "The American Job Quality Study," a survey of 18,429 working Americans aged 18 to 75, also indicates that around 25% of those aged 25 to 54 feel their organization doesn’t provide them with opportunities for promotion or career advancement.
Limited upward mobility isn't just an employee problem.
It can become an expensive business problem with broader economic and societal costs.
The Work Institute's "2025 Retention Report," which examined 123,297 exit interviews from 175 companies across industries, found inadequate career advancement opportunities to be one of the top reasons employees quit.
The report also found that replacing an employee earning $50,000 annually could cost a company $16,500 or more in recruitment fees, knowledge gaps, and lost productivity.
Indeed, helping experienced employees continue to grow is not only just good for workers, but it can also reduce costly turnover and preserve institutional knowledge, culture and continuity.
Why Mid-Career Professionals Stall
In many cases, mid-career stalls aren't the result of poor employee effort.
In fact, according to the NYU and Burning Glass Institute report, which analyzed 1.3 million career histories, mid-career stagnation typically stems from slow early-career development.
The report found that an employee falling behind peers early in their career can lead to skill depreciation, causing workers to "drift from market demand,” which makes it more difficult for them to compete for senior roles.
On average, stalled mid-career professionals receive just 1.5 internal promotions and 30% wage growth in their first decade of employment, compared to 1.9 internal promotions and 71% growth among their peers who haven’t stagnated.
What's more, slowed career development was shown to be caused by structural factors workers can’t always mitigate, such as limited internal promotion pathways, transitions between jobs, and roles that outgrow their original scope.
Limited access to educational opportunities can also contribute to stagnation.
Though only if a degree or credential is relevant to the specific field an employee works in.
For instance, per the report, a terminal degree can offer some protection against mid-career stalls.
Those with a master’s degree have stalled at a rate of 20%, compared to 25.3% for those with only a bachelor's degree.
However, obtaining industry-relevant credentials, even if they’re a non-degree certification, makes upward mobility more likely.
4 Ways To Prevent Mid-Career Professionals from Stalling
Avoiding getting stuck in the mud mid-career and ensuring long-term career advancement requires action on multiple levels, from identifying roles at risk for stagnation to structuring and supporting positions in ways that prevent stalls from happening.
And with the right strategies in place, companies can preemptively manage mid-career plateaus before they take root.
* **Identify mid-career stall risk early: **According to the NYU and Burning Glass Institute report, warning signs of a career stall often show up years before it can be identified.
In many cases, a decline in promotions and wage growth is visible as soon as ten years into someone's career.
The report recommends that employers identify at-risk workers early and provide them with targeted career mobility opportunities before they stagnate.
* **Normalize mid-career transitions: **In a piece for Harvard Business Review, Lynda Gratton details research from her book The 100-Year Life, which examines how to live and work in an age of longevity.
Gratton writes that mid-career pivots are typically "reactive, triggered by dissatisfaction, burnout, or external opportunity," a pattern she considers unsustainable across a person’s career that has the potential to span 50 or 60 years.
To reverse course, Gratton suggests leaders champion lateral moves, promote skill pivots into adjacent areas, and accept that a person's sense of self and their skill set can change over the course of a career.
Rather than treating mid-career pivots as a disruption, she argues that organizations should anticipate these transitions and, in some cases, treat them as a necessary career step.
* **Prioritize career reflection and exploration: **Gratton also discovered that mid-career professionals often aren’t given time to reflect or explore their work, which she notes is “critical for sustaining a long career.”
She recommends that leaders manage this through “low-risk exploration” by offering small side projects, brief courses or trainings, or short assignments that enable the exploration of new skills.
* **Invest in industry-aligned credentials for employees: **Per the NYU and Burning Glass Institute report, non-degree credentials reduce stall risk by 29% on average, but this benefit is dependent on an employee’s specific industry and job function.
In areas like education, credentials are associated with a 46% reduction in stall risk, since credentialing in this sector is seen as an indicator of ongoing expertise.
Conversely, in fields like public administration, credentials are associated with a 79% increase in stall risk, often acting as a sign of entry-level expertise rather than advancement.
For employers, this means weighing whether requiring or encouraging credentials makes sense for a specific role, rather than defaulting to a one-size-fits-all approach.
Mid-career stagnation doesn't have to be an inevitable phase of professional life.
For both employers and employees, the earlier signs of slowing career momentum are recognized, the easier they are to address.
Whether through targeted reskilling, thoughtfully designed career pathways, or a broader embrace of lateral mobility, organizations that invest in experienced talent are likely to benefit from stronger retention, deeper institutional knowledge, enhanced esprit de corps, and a workforce that's better prepared for long-term success.
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