There's no more corporate ladder to climb

I never understood the corporate ladder. Not in a rebellious way but I find the idea that someone else would decide when I was ready for the "next step" crazy. Waiting years for permission to do more interesting work just seemed like an elaborate game with rules I didn't want to learn.

I'm an autodidact and taught myself most of what I know. When I wanted to understand something, I just learned it.

For years, I felt I wasn't built for traditional career structures. Now I realise I was early to something that's becoming everyone's reality: the ladder was never the only way up. It was just the most visible way. The way that institutions could measure and manage and control.

In a world where AI builds in minutes, this ladder evaporates. And the truth is hidden in plain sight, the ladder wasn't just a career structure but a social contract. You exchanged years of deferred gratification for eventual status and security. You accepted lower pay and tedious work early on because you believed the system would reward your patience later.

Except none of this is happening now.

Why would you start your career £50-150k in debt

A decade ago, I nearly contracted a substantial student loan to go to school learning the ropes for another 5 years. AGAIN, waiting for permission to do things, and contracting the kind of debt that would have shaped every decision of my next fifteen years. Lucky me, I was also reading Seth Godin's Stop Stealing Dreams, and something clicked.

Godin dismantles the assumptions baked into traditional education: that you're being prepared for a workplace that rewards doing nothing but praising your boss, and that the path runs from intern to junior to manager to director and so on, in a nutshell conformity lead to success. But this entire system was designed for a different economy, one where large organisations needed reliable, interchangeable workers who followed instructions well.

Inspired, I decided to chose a different path building my first company. At 19, I was entering the workforce debt-free. Looking back, that decision wasn't just financially sound, it was future-proof. The ladder I was about to borrow money to climb was already rotting. I just couldn't see it yet.

If there's a corporate ladder, you're in a company dying

If your company still has a visible ladder, precisely predictable promotions and layers of middle management gatekeeping your progress, ask yourself why. The ladder exists because someone needs to control the pace of growth. That control made sense when scaling required coordination. It doesn't anymore.

Driven by AI, three forces are dismantling the traditional career structure, and they're accelerating simultaneously.

• AI is compressing time itself. The tasks that defined professional competence for decades such as research, analysis, drafting, coding, design, are collapsing from hours to seconds. The specific skills that got you here may not be the skills that matter tomorrow.
• Organisations are flattening. The layers of middle management that created this artificial ladder are being stripped out (The 2025-2026 tech layoffs were disproportionately middle managers, not leadership positions or individual contributors) If you're an individual contributor planning to move into management, that path is narrower than it was. If you're a manager planning to move up, there are fewer positions above you.
• The meaning of "senior" is mutating. If AI handles more of the routine, mechanical work, what does seniority even mean? The senior software developer still has agency, but increasingly doesn't code much. Future roles will be much more about orchestrating, reviewing, and directing, far away from pure execution.

The new dividing line: high agency

The economy's critical dividing line is no longer skill or education, and the piece of paper you got when you were 23 is now worthless. What matters now is willpower. Precisely, it's agency.

Agency is your sense of what you can do and what you think you can do. It's your power to affect your future, to take your desires, make plans, and carry out the actions necessary to obtain them.

But true agency goes further. It's the willingness to act without explicit validation - you can just do things and something will pop out the other side. This has always mattered, but it mattered less when technical execution was a genuine barrier - that's why engineers in the 90s were real engineers and today's engineers don't have the usual degrees. Learning to code took years back in the days. Understanding financial modelling required formal training. Building design skills demanded countless hours of practice and sketchy software. Specialisation was a form of local monopoly, even the most driven generalist couldn't do everything.

AI has shattered that equilibrium. When execution is genuinely commoditised, other things become differentiators. And guess what... they are the high-agency people traits.

• Judgement and taste. I often say marketing is more about editing than executing - and that's a very personal take on what is marketing. You can bombard your audience with messages and hope for one to stick, or you can be very precise with your iteration. AI allow performance marketers to run endless campaigns and personalisations. Good for them... but knowing what's good - what's right for this context, this audience, this moment - requires discernment that compounds with experience and good taste.
• Architecture over implementation. It's less about knowing how to patch a system, more about knowing that it needs to be patched. Strategy is more important all of the sudden.
• Orchestration as competitive advantage. If you can't anymore build a moat with a good product, what is your IP? A mix of culture, accessible knowledge, interoperable data and so on. At the end of the day, if you remove your product (that everyone can replicate fast), your IP is how you resonate and come about to solve complex problems independently from others.
• Speed of adaptation. The half-life of any specific skill is shrinking, so if you're not constantly learning you are fucked. The ability to learn fast, unlearn faster, and reorient without existential crisis is now a core competency. I literally started my career making websites, had to relearn every time a new marketing channel took over - and platforms do go away.
• Bias toward action. This one is tricky because I also believe strategy matters, and you don't change a good strategy, you ship it with a bulldozers (which is why every organisation needs a mix of superstars and rocks, coined in Radical Candor). Having an edge in the market is no longer about knowing how to do something very specific very well but about being biased toward making things happen. The person who ships something imperfect today beats the person perfecting something for next quarter - look at how fast ChatGPT is getting challenged by Anthropic.

What's next?

I don't think everyone has to go all-in vibe coding, and humans being social animals we need leaders. But the capitalistic system we've built on continuous economic growth is for the first time getting a real identity crisis. We're watching unfold the unravelling of credentialism in real time.

The transition will take time and it will be far from painless. Institutions built around credentials won't go gently - the likes of Trump, Putin don't understand we're at war with this model. Lower down the power chain of command, useless middle managers will fight to keep headcount because it will take time to shift away from the idea that more people working on a problem signals a more important problem (we marketers have understood this years ago, you're just playing catch up!).

But the high-agency individuals are already here, competing with much larger companies and winning. They're carrying the work of several teams and proving that the limitations we accepted as natural (degrees, credentials, specialised skills, years of experience) were never the barriers we believed they were.

The ladder isn't disappearing. Everyone's just finally being forced to see what some of us already knew: it was never the only path. And now, it might not even be a path at all.

The hardest part is simply believing you're free to jump.