The Career Ladder That No Longer Exists

What to do when the rungs disappear

There is a conversation that has been repeating itself, almost word for word, across immigrant communities in North America for decades. Someone arrives. Behind them: a degree, a profession, years of experience, a reputation in their field. Here: English classes, a credential assessment, and a job title they would not have mentioned to anyone in their previous life. They are told: be patient. In a couple of years you will be back at your level. Sometimes that is what happens. Often it is not.

Statistics Canada data published in 2026 shows that among workers aged 25 to 54 with post-secondary education, 30.3% of recent immigrants consider themselves overqualified for their jobs, against 20.2% among the native-born. According to 2021 census data, more than a quarter of immigrants holding foreign credentials were working in positions formally requiring no more than a high school diploma.

The number of immigrant physicians working outside their profession grew from 3,200 in 2000 to 57,500 in 2022. A seventeenfold increase in two decades.

All of this has long been described as the tragedy of a broken career. And that's fair - the licensing system across North America is fragmented across hundreds of regulatory bodies, and the losses here are real, both economic and human.

But there's a second, less obvious layer.

People who were forced to rebuild their careers from scratch - not by plan, but because the old plan stopped working - have, over the past thirty years, unintentionally developed a skill that is now rapidly becoming essential for everyone else.

Because the ladder is no longer breaking only under immigrants.

Where the Metaphor Came From

The idea of a career as a ladder feels as natural as gravity. In reality it's a fairly young construction, and it emerged from specific economic conditions.

Large mid-twentieth-century corporations needed predictability. A worker who stays thirty years costs less than continuously recruiting new ones. An internal hierarchy with clearly marked rungs is a cheap and effective retention tool: a person sees the next level and stays in order to reach it.

In exchange, the company promised stability and a pension.

It was a bargain, and it worked - roughly from the 1950s through the 1990s.

Everything we consider a "normal career" grew out of that bargain. Good grades in school. The right university. An internship. Junior, then mid-level, then senior. A raise. A promotion. A title on a business card.

William Deresiewicz, who taught English literature at Yale from 1998 to 2008, described the outcome of this system in a speech to West Point first-year cadets in 2009. He was talking about his Yale students: brilliant young people trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Set them any goal and they'll reach it. Give them any test and they'll ace it.

One of his students described herself and her classmates with a phrase that later became the title of his book: excellent sheep.

Deresiewicz wasn't talking about the lazy or the mediocre. He was talking about people of outstanding ability who had never had cause to ask themselves what they actually wanted. Each next hoop was obvious, so the question never arose.

The logic of the ladder relieves you of the need to choose. That's its greatest comfort - and its greatest cost.

What Actually Broke

Precision is required here, because there's a great deal of journalistic noise around this subject.

Let's start with what didn't happen.

The common claim that young people have stopped holding onto jobs falls apart under examination. The US National Institute on Retirement Security analyzed four decades of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Median tenure in a single job among workers aged 25-34: in 1983 (boomers at the time) - 3.0 years. In 2000 - 2.6 years. In 2024 (millennials and Gen Z) - 2.7 years.

The difference across forty years is a matter of months.

What's more: boomers changed jobs roughly thirteen times over their careers, but more than five of those changes happened between ages 18 and 24. Sixty-one percent of the jobs they started at that age ended in less than a year.

In other words, the generation now lecturing about loyalty changed jobs more frequently in youth than any generation on record.

Now, what genuinely broke.

It wasn't worker loyalty that broke. It was the bottom of the ladder.

A Randstad study based on an analysis of 126 million job postings worldwide found that the number of positions requiring zero to two years of experience has fallen by an average of 29 percentage points since January 2024. Junior roles in technology: down 35%. In logistics: down 25%. In finance: down 24%.

This is a fundamentally different problem from "young people don't want to work." The first rung of the ladder - the one people used to step onto after university and begin their climb from - is physically disappearing. Tasks that for twenty years served as a way to learn a profession on someone else's dime are now performed by software.

Average tenure for Gen Z in their first five career years is 1.1 years, against 1.8 for millennials and 2.8-2.9 for Gen X and boomers. But reading that figure as a sign of impatience means mistaking a symptom for a cause. When entry-level positions are scarce and unstable, short tenure isn't a choice - it's a description of the market.

Add the mass layoffs of 2022-2024, which definitively buried any notion of mutual loyalty, and the ladder metaphor stops describing reality.

Lily Pads Instead of Rungs

The alternative model forming in its place has no elegant name, but it does have a recognizable shape.

Instead of rungs, something more like lily pads on water. Each jump isn't necessarily upward. Sometimes sideways: into an adjacent industry, a different function, your own project. Sometimes backward in formal status, but forward in substance.

A career like this doesn't line up neatly on a résumé. It resists description by résumé altogether - because the résumé is constructed as a document proving sequential ascent.

The ability to reinvent your own professional identity would have read to a recruiter, even ten years ago, as a warning sign: this person can't settle, doesn't stay, spreads themselves thin.

Today it looks different. And here's where we return to where all of this began.

The Advantage Nobody Talks About

Someone who arrived in a foreign country at thirty-five and started their professional life from zero has already been through an experience the rest are only now facing.

They have already survived the erasure of their status - and discovered they didn't die from it.

They have already separated self-worth from job title - because for a while there was no job title at all.

They have already learned to translate their experience into a language they don't know - which is the literal description of what someone changing industries does.

They have already lived through the period when it's impossible to answer "what do you do" in one word, and learned to live with that discomfort.

This isn't romanticization. The experience was hard, often unjust, and no acquired skill compensates for the lost years of practice for a surgeon who spent eight years working outside their profession. Research documents serious psychological consequences of this kind of underemployment: isolation, distress, loss of professional identity.

But what was acquired is also real.

Tolerance for uncertainty isn't a personality trait but a trained capacity. It develops in exactly one way: through repeated encounters with the unknown that you survived. And the immigrant experience holds an unintended advantage here: this skill was acquired not at a personal-growth seminar but in conditions where there was nowhere to retreat.

People who have already reassembled themselves once know something the graduate accustomed to hoops doesn't: you can lose everything external and remain yourself.

In a decade when career trajectories are becoming unpredictable for everyone, that turns out to be not a biographical wound but a functioning competency.

How to Train It

Tolerance for uncertainty develops through specific practices, not through resolve. Here are five that hold up.

Find your anchors. Uncertainty is bearable to the extent that everything else is stable. Someone who knows firmly where they want to live, what they believe, and who is beside them can withstand far more ambiguity in the professional part of life. It's worth listing honestly: what in my life stays constant regardless of how things unfold? Those are your anchor points.

Shorten your planning horizon. Five-year plans, in an era when industries restructure in eighteen months, don't provide clarity but the illusion of control - and painful disillusionment on contact with reality. A six-month cycle works better: what do I need from the next six months? A career's future is more usefully treated as a hypothesis open to revision than a plan you can't deviate from.

Diversify your identity. An investor who puts everything into a single stock isn't called bold but reckless. The same is true of sources of meaning and self-respect. If your entire identity rests on a job title, being let go won't mean changing jobs but the disappearance of yourself. Parenthood, a craft, a community, a language, creative work, faith, friendship - every additional anchor reduces the amplitude.

Make small bets. Resilience to the unknown isn't built in theory. It accumulates in small doses: a new skill with no guarantee it'll be useful. A project outside your main job. A conversation with someone from an unfamiliar industry. Each of these actions is insignificant on its own; together they expand your tolerance for the unknown. As James Clear puts it, the highest form of preparation isn't a plan for a specific scenario but a way of thinking that handles uncertainty.

Choose curiosity over fear. The brain is evolutionarily inclined to treat the unknown as a threat - a sensible setting for an environment where the unknown most often meant a predator. In twenty-first-century professional life, that setting works against us. The practical technique is simple: on noticing anxiety, reformulate the same situation as a question. Not "what if it doesn't work out," but "what will I learn if I try." This isn't self-hypnosis but a change of frame, from which different things become visible.

The Cost, Which Should Be Named

It would be dishonest to end on an optimistic note without naming the costs.

A nonlinear career is harder to explain - to employers, to parents, to yourself at three in the morning. It converts poorly into a mortgage: banks like predictable income. It demands constant independent choice - and that's exhausting, and the ladder was precisely what relieved you of that burden.

And it isn't a choice for everyone. For a significant share of people - including those very same qualified immigrants - nonlinearity wasn't a decision but a consequence of circumstance. Calling something forced "freedom" would be mockery.

The honest formulation sounds different: the ladder is going away regardless of whether we like it. The question isn't whether to prefer it to lily pads. The question is what to do now.

What Remains

The main advantage of an unconventional path is that it forces you to answer the question the ladder relieved you of.

As long as there's a next rung, the question of what you actually want can go unasked - the answer fills itself in automatically. When the rungs are gone, you have to answer it yourself.

An employer no longer tells you what to value. You'll have to work that out on your own - and it's hard, uncomfortable work with no guaranteed result.

But the result, if you get it, belongs to you entirely.

People who came to North America with an adult profession behind them have already done this work - not by choice, and at considerable cost. The children they're raising now will enter a labour market with a third fewer entry-level positions and career trajectories nobody guarantees anymore.

And perhaps the most valuable thing the first generation can pass to the second isn't connections, or advice to choose a reliable profession.

It's knowledge earned through their own experience: a map can go out of date at any moment.

A compass cannot.