Selling more than anyone else on your team is a good way to be made sales manager, but in one large study it went with weaker managing, not stronger. In a 2019 study of company sales records, economists Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue found that firms tended to promote their top sellers, yet the higher a new manager’s past sales, the less the sales of the people they managed tended to improve.¹ The study covers one occupation, but the authors expect the same tension wherever the next job needs different skills: what gets you ahead in one job is not always what the next one needs.

Career growth, in decades of mostly correlational research, goes with a few things you can influence: skills and experience employers value and can see, people who back you, learning built into your daily work, and well-chosen moves between jobs. It also depends on deciding what “ahead” means to you, because pay, promotions and satisfaction are related but distinct outcomes.

What counts as career growth? Pay, promotions and satisfaction

Researchers measure career growth in at least three ways: pay, promotions and satisfaction with your career. A 2005 meta-analysis by Thomas Ng and colleagues at the University of Georgia found the three related but distinct, so doing well on one does not ensure doing well on the others. Pooling 140 articles, the team found that salary and career satisfaction, the most closely linked pair, shared less than a tenth of their variation.²

Why would they drift apart? The authors’ tentative explanation is that pay tracks what signals your worth to an employer, such as education and experience, while satisfaction tracks how supported you feel and your own temperament. Promotions, they suggested, also reflect the politics of who decides, such as network ties and visibility. Salary and promotions were even more loosely linked, which the authors flagged because researchers often treat the two as one measure: knowing someone’s pay tells you little about how often they have been promoted, and the reverse.²

1. Pay: linked more to what you bring, such as education, work experience and hours worked
2. Promotions: the weakest links of the three: most factors studied were only weakly related to it, if at all
3. Career satisfaction: linked more to support from sponsors and supervisors, and to personality

Picture two colleagues who joined a company in the same year. One has a bigger title and feels stretched thin; the other earns more in a role she has held for years and feels stuck. Each is ahead by one measure and behind by another, and neither is wrong to feel the way she does.

Initiative and skills that other people can see

A proactive personality is linked to getting ahead, and in a 2001 study that followed 180 full-time employees and their supervisors for two years, the authors’ model traced that link through what proactive people do. Scott Seibert and colleagues found that people with a proactive personality went on to innovate more, gain more political knowledge (which we take to mean, roughly, knowing how decisions get made and who has influence) and take more initiative over their careers. Those behaviors were in turn linked to faster salary growth, more promotions and higher career satisfaction.³

That chain is the useful part. A personality trait is fairly stable, but the behaviors in the middle of the chain are things anyone can try, although the study did not test what happens when people who are not naturally proactive adopt them. Some of them, such as taking initiative, can also make your work visible beyond your own desk, which matters because other people decide who gets promoted.

A 2022 meta-analytic study led by Zeyu Zhang, which combined correlations from earlier meta-analyses, likewise found proactive personality only weakly linked to salary and promotion but more strongly to how satisfied people felt with their careers; the authors note their data cannot establish cause.⁴ Ng’s meta-analysis adds a lead worth following: employees who reported more access to training and skill development had one of the most consistent sets of links across all three outcomes, salary, promotions and satisfaction.² The link is correlational, but training is also something you can simply ask for.

Effort is not the whole story. In the same meta-analysis, men, white employees, married people and older workers reported higher salaries on average. Across the years the studies covered, the link between gender and pay had weakened, but the authors found no clear sign that the link between gender and promotions had. Education also went with pay more strongly in samples with more women, which the authors took as a possible sign that women may have to do more than men to prove their credentials.² Advice that ignores these gaps can ask some people to work harder for the same result.

In a hypothetical case, an analyst notices that a monthly report takes two days to assemble by hand, builds a way to produce it in an hour, and in the process learns who reads it and what they decide with it. She has innovated, gained political knowledge and made her skills visible, all at once.

To put this to work, fix a problem your team keeps living with, in a way people beyond your team notice, and ask your manager which skills the next level needs and what training is on offer.

Mentors and sponsors go with satisfaction more than pay

Mentoring is linked to career benefits, though its links with pay are small. A 2004 meta-analysis led by Tammy Allen found the evidence generally supportive of mentoring’s benefits for the person mentored, but the effects on objective outcomes such as pay were small.⁵

Ng’s meta-analysis points the same way. Sponsorship from senior people and support from a supervisor were strongly linked with career satisfaction, but only weakly with salary, and weakly or not at all with promotions. The authors flagged one reason for caution: when the support and the satisfaction are both reported by the same person, links may look stronger than they really are.²

Ng and colleagues’ tentative explanation is that support from others bears more directly on how people feel about their careers than on what an employer pays them.² Picture a mentor who meets you once a month and helps you think through a difficult stakeholder: the work gets more manageable and you may learn a lot, help you would feel as satisfaction more than see in your pay. That is a different thing from someone arguing for your promotion in a meeting you are not in, and neither kind of help replaces the skills your employer pays for.

So value mentors for learning and perspective, and keep your expectations for pay realistic. Mentors and sponsors are also only one part of a network: the research on what loose contacts outside your usual circle add covers the rest.

Top performers get promoted, but the next job needs different skills

Being the best at your current job went with being promoted, but not with being good at the job above it, in a large 2019 study of sales workers. Benson, Li and Shue found that firms promoted top sellers ahead of colleagues with more managerial potential, which fits the Peter principle, named by Peter and Hull in 1969; the authors define it as firms putting current performance ahead of managerial promise when they promote.¹

The study

Moderate evidence

Who gets promoted in sales, and how they manage

Using records from sales-software client firms, the economists found that stronger past sales went with a higher chance of promotion, yet among those promoted, higher past sales went with less improvement in their team members’ sales. Workers who had shared sales with more colleagues tended to be better managers but were not consistently promoted. The authors estimated that a promotion policy aimed only at choosing the best managers would have made average manager quality about 30% higher.¹

The authors offer two readings: firms may be making mistakes, or they may be trading manager quality for motivation, because the promise of promotion rewards top sellers’ effort; some of their evidence fits the second. Sales is one occupation with an unusually clear performance measure, and a manager’s quality here means the sales of their team.

Why would the best seller make a weaker manager? The authors’ starting point is that management can need different skills from frontline work. Selling is judged by what you produce yourself; in the study, managing was judged by what other people produce. The same shift can happen far from sales: picture the strongest engineer who becomes team lead and spends the first year writing code at night, because unblocking five other people feels less like real work.

If you promote people, look past this quarter’s numbers. The study found that firms already did this more where managers ran larger teams, putting less weight on sales and more on collaboration.¹ For what managers actually do, see what effective leaders do differently.

Learning on the job: challenge paired with feedback

Harder assignments went with more growth in leadership skill in a 2009 study of 60 managers by Scott DeRue and Ned Wellman, but the gains tapered off at the highest levels of challenge unless feedback was available. Across 225 on-the-job experiences, access to feedback offset that tapering.⁶

Our own reading, which goes beyond what the study reports, is that very demanding work makes it hard to tell what is working, and feedback supplies the missing signal. A first project leading people from three teams can teach a great deal; the same project with nobody to ask how it is going can leave you busy and no wiser.

Myth

The 70-20-10 rule proves that 70 percent of workplace learning happens informally, on the job.

Fact

A 2018 review by Alan Clardy found the evidence behind that 70 percent figure weak and argued the rule should be set aside.

Clardy’s review examined five research traditions that seemed to agree on the figure and found the scholarship behind it sloppy and inconsistent.⁷ That does not make experience less valuable. It means the split between learning on the job and in courses is not settled, so neither deserves to be written off, and you can make formal learning stick with self-testing and spacing.

Early job moves: a search for a good fit

For young white men in the US from 1957 to 1972, changing employers was a large part of early pay growth. Following them through Social Security earnings records, Robert Topel and Michael Ward found in a 1992 study that pay rises at job changes made up at least a third of early-career wage growth.⁸

7jobs held in the first 10 years of work by a typical young white man, US Social Security records, 1957-72Source: Topel & Ward, 1992

Why would so much growth come from moving? The authors’ reading, set out most fully in their working paper, is that early careers are a search: young workers sample jobs, the good matches tend to last, and pay is a key factor in whether they move. The typical worker held seven jobs in his first decade, about two thirds of his career total, so most job changes came early.⁸

These are records of white men only, from decades ago, and this guide does not review newer data, so treat the pattern as a well-documented example rather than a rule for today. They describe averages, not what a move would do to any one person’s pay. Think of a graduate whose first two jobs are a poor fit; each move teaches her what work suits her, and the third job sticks.

The lesson is to treat early moves as part of finding a good fit, and to judge a move by what you will learn, how well the work suits you and what you would give up. If you decide to look, start with a step-by-step plan for a job search, and if the problem is the field itself, work through whether to change careers.

For outside help, the US Department of Labor sponsors CareerOneStop, a website for career exploration, training and jobs.⁹ In England, the government’s careers website offers information and digital tools.¹⁰ Elsewhere, look for a public careers service.

Putting the career growth research to work

The evidence in this guide points to habits, not a single trick, and none is certain to work for any one person: the studies describe averages, mostly from correlational data.

Ng and colleagues frame career success around two routes that can run side by side: contest mobility, in which you compete on skills and effort, and sponsored mobility, in which people with influence pick you out and help you along. The meta-analysis found preliminary support for both, with effects that were mostly small to moderate.² In practice that means building a record worth backing and making sure someone who decides knows about it; a strong record nobody sees, or a supporter with nothing to point to, leaves one route unused.

WiserHours

Career growth habits worth testing

• Choose the kind of growth I want most this year
• Fix one visible problem my team keeps living with
• Ask my manager which skills the next level needs
• Tell one person with influence what I want next
• Set two feedback check-ins for my next big assignment
• Judge any job move by what I would learn and how well it fits

Find this checklist online:
https://wiserhours.com/career-growth/career-growth-research/#checklist-career-growth-research-habits

The bottom line

Careers grow along more than one line, and the research treats pay, promotions and satisfaction as related but distinct outcomes with partly different predictors. Build skills that others can see, find people who will back you, pair hard assignments with feedback, and remember that being best at today’s job does not prove you are ready for the next one. Start by deciding which kind of growth you actually want.