You’re employed. Nobody’s laid you off. Your paycheck lands on time. Health insurance still works, and if anyone were to ask, you’d probably say your job is just fine. But in the middle of all that just fine, five years disappeared. No promotion. No real raise. The title on your LinkedIn has been the same since your kid was in elementary school. So, is your career stalled?
One in Four
You’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone in it. A new analysis, by the Burning Glass Institute and NYU’s School of Professional Studies, of 1.3 million career histories from found that roughly one in four midcareer professionals in the U.S. is stalled. Meaning steadily employed, but stuck in the same place for years. It doesn’t have a metric in the unemployment rate. It doesn’t show up in any jobs report. You can be doing everything “right” by every visible measure and still be quietly losing ground… and at Diversity Employment, we notice almost nobody is tracking it.
So, how do you tell if that’s you, and what does the data says is behind it? Because the answer is a lot less about your effort than you’ve probably been told.
Does It Apply to You? Here’s How to Check
Most people run a vague version of this test on themselves. Vague tests give vague answers though. Now researchers have built a specific test you can run against your own career in about five minutes.
Check 1: The Definition of “Stalled”
The report defines a career stall using two conditions happening at once, both have to be true.
- No promotion for five or more consecutive years
- Less than 5% real wage growth (adjusted for inflation) over that same five-year window. Not 5% last year. Cumulative, over five years, after inflation.
Run the math before you assume you know the answer. A lot of people who feel anxious about a slow stretch in their career turn out fine once the wage side is accounted for, because it’s still moving forward even if the title isn’t. And many people who feel okay because they got small annual bumps realize, once they add it up and subtract inflation, that they’ve actually gone nowhere in any real terms. The two-part test is made specifically to catch both of those false readings.
Check 2: The Early-Warning Numbers
If you’re under 15 years into your career, there’s an even earlier signal worth checking into. The researchers found that people who eventually stall are already distinguishable from their peers a full five years before a stall can be officially declared. At the ten-year mark, workers who will go on to stall have averaged 1.5 internal promotions and 30% wage growth since starting out. Workers who stay on track average 1.9 promotions and 71% wage growth over that same span. That’s the difference between a career that’s compounding and one that’s already flattening out. And it’s visible half a decade before anyone will call it a problem.
Check 3: Your Baseline
Here’s the part most self-assessments skip is the fact that the bar isn’t the same for everyone, and it shouldn’t be. Some jobs inherently come with a higher risk of stalling before anything about you, personally, even factors in. Jobs in IT Support and Sales as well as Customer Service have roughly 14% to 16% higher odds of stalling than average, no matter who’s actually doing the work. Business and Management positions have a 14.7% lower likelihood of stalling. Mainly because those jobs are created with more promotions and internal flexibility built into the job structure itself.
So, if you’re four years without a promotion in a support position, that’s a very different signal than four years without a promotion in a management-track position. Know your baseline before you judge your own numbers against a flat, one-size-fits-all bar.
Final Check: The Results and Where You Stand
Once you’ve run those three checks, you will know where you stand or where you’re heading.
From here on is about why that number is the way it is. The rest might actually change how you think about it.
The Position, Not the Person
The researchers set out to answer a specific question: “When a position has a high stall rate, is that because of the chair, or the person sitting in it?” In plain terms: are people stalling because the job itself is destined to stall? Or is it because of who tends to end up in that job?
A Structural Penalty & A Sorting Problem
The honest answer turned out to be both, but the structural piece is bigger than most career advice gives credit for. Even after accounting for who’s actually in a given position (their education, credentials, and early-career trajectory), people in IT Support and Sales still stall far more often. And it’s not just certain kinds of people ending up stalling there. The job architecture of things like less senior level positions, less internal flexibility, less cross-department training, all of it is keeping people stuck. Regardless of how good they are at their job.
Meanwhile, Business and Management positions are generally more protected for the opposite reason. There are more promotions, easier ways to shift into other parts of the business, more chances of being seen by someone with the authority to move you up. Two equally capable people, one in each track, are not playing the same career game.
Same Company, Wildly Different Reality
Since that’s true for certain occupations as a whole, a companion report from the same institute found it’s just as true within a single employer. Released weeks after the career stall study and based on the career histories of 12 million workers across 1,750 of the country’s largest employers, it found an average 81-percentile-point gap in outcomes between the best-performing and worst-performing positions inside the exact same company.
- At Cigna, actuaries sit at the 99th percentile for promotion and the 92nd for retention. Business intelligence analysts, just a few floors over, sit at 22nd.
- At Wells Fargo, accountants are promoted more often than 97% of accountants anywhere else in the dataset, while financial managers down the hall land in the 30th percentile.
- At Accenture, IT systems analysts hit the 98th percentile on promotions. Financial managers sit at the 29th, trailing seven in ten of their peers elsewhere.
Same building, same logo on the badge, completely different career tracks.
Core vs. Overhead
The pattern isn’t random either. Companies invest in the stuff they consider their “strategic core” and treat the rest as overhead. But the functions that count as “core” depend entirely on that specific company’s business, not on any general set of guidelines. Software engineering is the beating heart of a tech company, and a cost center at a bank. Credit and lending staff are the lifeblood of American Express (and are treated accordingly), while their software engineers trail the market. There’s no way to know this from a job posting or any “Best Places to Work” list. You genuinely can’t tell from the outside whether the offer in your hand leads you to a fast track, or a dead end. And neither can the recruiter selling the job to you.
That reframes the question people should actually be asking. Not “am I doing enough to get noticed,” but “is my specific function this employer’s strategic core, or its overhead,” because the data says that answer predicts more of your trajectory than your individual performance ever could.
A Detour Worth Taking
Before getting to what to actually do about any of this, one more finding from the stall research deserves a mention, because it’s genuinely surprising and it reinforces everything above without overcomplicating it.
The Numbers Don’t Follow the Story You’d Expect
If you assume career stall hits historically disadvantaged groups hardest and uniformly, the data actually doesn’t back that up. White professionals actually post the highest stall rates in several white-collar categories, reaching 32% for White men in IT Support and 30% in Sales and Customer Service. Asian professionals show the lowest rates in most categories, including Business and Management (16 to 17%) and IT and Math (17 to 20%). Black and Hispanic workers generally land somewhere in between.
Gender tells a similar story depending on the field. In Business and Management, men stall more than women, at 26.8% versus 24.0% respectively. However, in Clerical and Administrative Services, that stat flips. Women stall at 25.5% versus 21.9% for men. If stalling was a single, constant form of disadvantage, one group would stall more everywhere. Instead, any group can face real difficulty in one field, and a real advantage in another.
The Real Story is Sorting
The researchers’ own read is that this isn’t evidence of any uniform bias, it’s evidence of “occupational sorting.” Which groups end up concentrated in which positions, matters more than any flat demographic drawback. That sorting itself has an actual history behind it, shaped by which fields have historically directed which groups toward them; which jobs reward informal networks versus rigorous filtering; and which positions get labeled as “support” versus “leadership,” regardless of the day-to-day work involved.
Women who make it into management, for instance, have typically cleared a higher, more competitive bar to get there, producing a more rigorously filtered group with lower stall rates once they’re in. Men flow into those same positions more easily through informal networks, producing a wider spread of readiness and a higher eventual stall rate.
Bias Doesn’t Disappear
Not to say any of this erases the bias factor. It does relocate it. The disadvantage shows up less in “how you’re treated once you’re in the room” and more in “which room you end up in in the first place,” which is arguably the harder problem to see… and fix. But it’s the same underlying idea running through the whole thing: Structure, not individual effort, is doing more of the stall work than most people understand.
What Actually Moves the Needle
Knowing you’re stalled and knowing why doesn’t get you anywhere on its own. The research maps out real pathways forward, and they’re honestly more specific and more encouraging than “network harder” or “just wait it out.”
Three Ways People Actually Escape a Career Stall
The researchers found that most successful stall escapes follow one of three patterns, and luckily, none of them require starting over.
Deepening. Which means adding more advanced expertise within a closely related field. Computer programmers who advance into software development cut their stall risk by 44%. Programmers who move into data science, specifically, cut stall by 86%, which is the single largest reduction in the entire report. It’s because the skill overlap is already 86% and the target position’s growth ceiling is drastically higher.
Broadening. This means expanding into planning, analysis, or cross-functional work that leans on the same core skill set just from a wider angle. Cost estimators who move into project management or budget analyst positions cut their stall risk by 12 to 13%, and those who jump into market research analyst positions cut stall by nearly 21%.
Changing Domains. Means carrying your transferable skills into a totally different direction. Office managers who only stick to what they know (especially in executive assistant positions) barely move the needle. Office managers who pivot into business operations specialist or management analyst positions cut stall risk by 34% to 39%, because the real barrier was actually never the industry, it was staying on a track that never had a ceiling to break through.
The Skills That Actually Separate People Who Advance
When researchers compared otherwise-identical workers (same starting job, same education, same state) the skills that showed up more often on non-stalled profiles weren’t the technical ones you’d assume. Public speaking, leadership, and time management topped the list of most desired general skills. On the specialized side, social media, event planning, and community outreach surprisingly beat out data analysis and project management. What really connects them isn’t their technical depth, it’s their ability to work well with people and tie their work to something bigger than their work.
“Just Get a Certification” is Wrong as Universal Advice
Here’s a warning worth chewing on before you spend your money. Credentials help enormously in some fields; but actively backfire in others. A high-quality, market-aligned certification cuts stall risk by 52% on average. In fields like Education, Health, and Communication, credentials are one of the strongest protective moves available. But on the flip-side, in Public Administration, holding a non-degree credential is associated with a 79% increase in stall likelihood. In Engineering, it’s a 67% increase. In Business and Management, any credential raises stall risk by nearly 17%, and even a well-regarded one only partially offsets that.
The reason isn’t that credentials are bad. It’s that in fields where credentials are an ongoing sign of advancing expertise, they do signal you’re moving forward. In fields where a credential is really just a way in the door, holding onto one years into your career can make it look like you never made it past that skill. So, before you spend a weekend and a few hundred dollars on a certificate, check which kind of signal it will send in your specific field. It matters a lot more than the certificate itself.
Where This Leaves You
Put the whole picture together and the reframe is: The point of the self-check wasn’t to put you down, or tell you you should feel bad. It was to see whether the problem is a real one for you; and if it is, know the structural findings tell you it’s very likely not a character flaw, it’s your career track.
The sorting data adds one more layer. Even the structure itself isn’t applied evenly, so if you’ve silently felt like the rules were different for the person next to you, the data says you just might be right. It’s worth knowing why before you draw the wrong lesson from it.
None of it is a reason to simply sit tight and hope someone notices your work. It’s the opposite. You can find your real number against the five-year test. Figure out whether your specific function is part of your employer’s strategic core or its overhead. You know whether a lateral move into a similar position could cut your risk by double digits, and whether the certification you were about to invest in actually helps in your field, or silently works against you. Waiting for recognition was never one of the real paths forward available to you. These are.
