The secret to career success may well be off to the side

Listen to this story. Sideways moves, to jobs that don’t involve a promotion or even necessarily a pay rise, can be a boon to employees and organisations alike. A study carried out by Donald Sull of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his co-authors in 2021 found that the availability of lateral career opportunities has a marked impact on employee retention. Another paper, by Xin Jin of the University of South Florida and Michael Waldman of Cornell University, concluded that lateral moves did not just benefit organisations: employees who experienced them were more likely to be promoted and to enjoy higher wage growth later in their careers than employees who did not. Messrs Jin and Waldman reason that the higher echelons of companies tend to be populated by people whose capabilities are broad, not deep; that may explain why lateral moves are good for promotion prospects.