When most people talk about career, they use the same metaphor: the ladder.
You start at the bottom. You climb. If you work hard, you reach the top. There's an order. There's a sequence. There's a right way and a wrong way to climb.
I've spent years working with early career professionals. I've seen hundreds of career paths. And I can tell you with complete confidence: almost none of them look like a ladder.
Why the Ladder Metaphor Doesn't Work
The ladder assumes a few things that aren't true:
That there's a top. For whom? In what field? At what point in time? The “top” keeps moving — and what counts as success shifts every few years as the economy, the job market, and your own priorities change.
That you always know which way is up. Sometimes the best career move is lateral. Sometimes it means taking a pay cut to build a skill that will pay off later. Sometimes “up” isn't even a direction you want to go.
That the path is the same for everyone. We measure early career success by someone else's milestones — first job, first promotion, first salary threshold. But people are starting from completely different places, with completely different resources, in completely different fields.
That if you fall, you failed. Ladders have one path. Fall off, you start over. Jungle gyms have a hundred paths, a hundred directions, a hundred ways to keep playing.
The Jungle Gym Metaphor
Here's a more honest way to think about it: career is more like a jungle gym than a ladder.
On a jungle gym, you can:
- Move sideways
- Go down and back up
- Find a path that no one else found
- Climb something entirely different than what you planned
- Get stuck and figure out a way to move forward anyway
- Help someone else find their path while you're still figuring out your own
You can also: fall, get bruised, try a path that doesn't work, and realize you're more capable than you thought because you had to figure it out without a clear route.
This is the career reality for most people I know — especially early career professionals navigating an economy that looks nothing like the one their parents entered.
What Career Development Research Actually Says
The jungle gym metaphor isn't just mine. It's backed by career development theory.
John Krumboltz's Planned Happenstance Theory argues that career success comes from capitalizing on unexpected events and opportunities — not from following a linear plan. The theory suggests that uncertainty is not a failure of planning; it's a feature of career development that you can actively leverage.
Mark Freo's research on career adaptability shows that the people who navigate career transitions most successfully are not those with the most linear paths — they're the ones with the most flexibility, curiosity, and willingness to experiment.
The SCCT model (Social Cognitive Career Theory) emphasizes self-efficacy — the belief that you can actually do what you set out to do — as a primary driver of career outcomes. Linear path-following doesn't build self-efficacy. Overcoming unexpected obstacles, navigating ambiguity, and figuring things out — those do.
The research is telling us: the ability to adapt is more important than the ability to plan.
What This Means for You
If you're early in your career, here's what this changes practically:
You don't need a five-year plan. You need to know what you value, what you're good at, and what kind of problems you want to solve. The specific path will emerge from those — not from a plan you made at 22.
Changing direction isn't failure. It's development. Most people change careers at least once in their lives. Many change more than that. That's not a glitch in the system. That's the system.
You're allowed to not know. You're allowed to be 25 and unsure. You're allowed to be 30 and realize you picked the wrong major. You're allowed to be 35 and start completely over. The jungle gym has room for all of that.
Your path will look different from everyone else's. Stop measuring yourself against someone else's jungle gym. Their structure, their climbs, their path — that's not yours. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday. That's the only competition that matters.
A Reflection Prompt
If you knew you couldn't fail — if the path was completely clear and there were no obstacles between you and the career you actually want — what would you do?
Write it down. Not the “practical” version. Not the “realistic” version. The real one.
Now, with that in front of you: what's one small step you could take toward that direction today? Not a leap. Not a pivot. Just one step.
Because here's the thing about jungle gyms: you don't have to see the whole structure to start climbing. You just have to find the next bar.