The entire labor market works in pyramids that rank all sectors and enterprises in the economy, all the professions, and the sub-specialties in each profession. Recognizing the relevant pyramid is critical, because it determines a person's value in the labor market, their promotion potential, their salary, and their employment horizon. Most people, including senior managers, make irreversible career decisions unaware of this. Why irreversible? Because you can only go down the pyramid, never up.
What are these pyramids? The first, which is relevant to every employee, is the sector pyramid, at the bottom of which is the public sector and "the third sector" (NGOs), while at the top is high-tech, with traditional, non-technological industries in the middle. The position of the sectors on the pyramid is a function of their image, the way they are perceived for professionalism, efficiency, complexity, innovation, and so on. This image reflects directly on those who work in these sectors determines their value in the labor market, for better or worse. This is the reason that even the best people in the public and third sectors find it very hard to climb up to the private sector, while the descent from the high-tech sector to an equivalent role in traditional industry is natural and easy.
Ability isn't mobility
Within each sector, enterprises and organizations are ranked according to their market position. In Israel's public sector, for example, the Mossad is ranked high, whereas the National Insurance Institute is ranked low. Every organization's position on the pyramid determines the brand value of its employees, and drastically affects their mobility from one organization to another, regardless of their actual abilities. To take another Israeli example, a manager in a kibbutz-based concern will find it very hard to find an equivalent job in a good company outside of the kibbutz sector, and their candidacy will almost certainly be rejected out of hand simply because they work in a low-ranked sub-sector. Is there any correlation between position on the pyramid and actual quality? In most cases, the answer is yes, since image and perceptions do not come from nowhere. They are based on some sort of reality, but even if the reality sometimes changes, the image remains, such as in the case of the kibbutzim, which in recent years have become far more professional but still suffer from an inferior image.
Who's at the top in marcom?
Within any industry too, there is a pyramid that positions its workers and determines their market value. Take marketing communications, for example. At the apex are the classic advertising agencies, below them are the digital agencies, then sales promotion firms, public relations firms, and advertising agencies specializing in particular sections of the population. The pyramid means that an account manager from a public relations firm will have great difficulty in finding work at a classic or digital advertising agency, not to mention their zero chances of being taken on as a brand manager, a move that is completely natural for an account manager in a classic advertising agency.
The next pyramids are those that determine the rankings within professions. In law, for example, commercial lawyers and those specializing in intellectual property are positioned higher on the pyramid than litigators or labor law specialists, who in turn rank higher than specialists in family law or traffic law. Therefore, even a brilliant litigator will find it hard to become a commercial lawyer, and will probably become stuck in litigation. Similarly, in human resources, the chances of a welfare, training, or compensation and benefits manager becoming a VP human resources are far lower than those of the recruitment manager, who is positioned much higher on the human resources pyramid, above even the enterprise development manager.
From HR to CEO? Forget it
On the other hand, should this VP human resources fancy the CEO job, he or she will discover that his or her chances are the lowest of all the senior managers in the enterprise, because the VP human resources is ranked at the bottom of the VP pyramid, while the VP sales is at the top, with the best chances of capturing the CEO chair. The positioning of other VPs is a little more fluid: for example, the VP operations in an industrial company ranks higher than his or her counterpart in a services company, but the VP development will almost always be in a higher position than the VP marketing.
Does understanding the pyramid tell us that human resources management is a bad career choice; that all engineers should learn computer engineering or electrical and electronic engineering, and not mechanical engineering or industrial management; that work in the public sector is a career blunder of the first order; and that the most highly recommended career path is sales management in high-tech? Of course not.
So what to choose?
No sector, industry, or profession is preferable to any other. The only aim is to exploit one's professional, managerial and economic potential, each on his or her own track, while minimizing strategic career errors. But countless highly talented people have become stuck in a blind alley and paid a high price only because they were ignorant of the structure of the labor market pyramid, and failed to realize that climbing up the pyramid is almost impossible. Good luck.
The writer is a career management consultant.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on June 25, 2018
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