1 in 4 Midcareer White-Collar Workers See Stalled Professional Growth, Study Finds

Nearly a quarter of midcareer professionals have stalled out in terms of mobility and pay, and they lack a path forward to attaining both, a new study released on May 31 by The Burning Glass Institute shows.

The report, a collaborative effort with researchers from New York University School of Professional Studies, focuses on office-based roles across business and management, clerical and administrative services, IT and math, and sales and customer service.

The study examined the career arcs of more than 1.3 million employees and found that 24.2 percent of midcareer workers have not seen a meaningful promotion or raise in five or more years of employment.

Stalled career growth isn’t a statistic that’s tracked by independent organizations or federal agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but it’s a key measure of underutilized talent and lost wages for employees, researchers said. The financial impacts of stalled wage growth aren’t felt evenly across occupations, either.

“Stalled professionals experience a significant wage gap relative to their non-stalled peers,” the report stated.

“In fields like finance and software development, where experience compounds multiplicatively, the penalty grows over time as stalled workers miss the accelerating returns that momentum would have unlocked. In occupations with flatter reward curves, the penalty tends to be more static, and in some cases workers even recover a portion of the lost ground later in their careers.”

Mid-career job stall, measured at the 10-year mark of employment, often shows up through early markers. Professionals who are most at risk of stagnation averaged just 1.5 internal promotions and 30 percent wage growth in their first decade of employment, versus 1.9 promotions and 71 percent wage growth against their more upwardly mobile peers, the researchers wrote. These early-career disadvantages typically compound over time and ultimately lead to higher numbers of stalled careers.

Stalled career growth also has a direct correlation to an employee’s job duties and role within an organization. Stall rates were lowest in the field of information technology at 20.7 percent due to the many pathways to advancement available in the IT field. Conversely, they were highest in the field of public administration at 30.2 percent due to fewer opportunities for meaningful advancement, especially for workers in smaller and less-competitive labor markets.

Technical and support roles, such as customer service and network engineer technicians, had high stall rates (30.1 percent and 29.4 percent, respectively) because those fields typically consist of entry-level employees and top-tier managers, which limits upward mobility.

Geography matters as well. States with more robust economies—California, Washington, Texas, Utah, Massachusetts, and Georgia—reported lower job stall rates. States with constrained labor markets and economies that are less diverse—such as Mississippi, West Virginia, and Alabama—showed higher stall rates, researchers wrote.

Employees can counter job stall in multiple ways, researchers noted. Reskilling into higher-mobility roles can reduce risk of career stagnation by 86 percent as midcareer professionals pivot into roles where their expertise adds greater value. The top soft skills that differentiate upwardly mobile working professionals from their peers include strengths in public speaking, time management, leadership, research, and teamwork.

“The skills most common among non-stalled workers are not technical or specialized—they are foundational professional competencies,” study authors said.

“The capacity to communicate effectively, coordinate with others, and operate beyond one’s immediate task description distinguishes workers who sustain [job] momentum from those who stall.”