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Is the ‘Ambition Penalty’ Real?
Hi there,
I’m based in NYC and 28 years old. I’ve been working for six years.
I’m having trouble finding jobs with my level of experience. I’m a vice president at a P.R. agency — essentially, I’m a communications consultant with different clients — with a salary of $130,000.
My current title and salary level have made it hard to find a job moving in-house, working for just one company, which is what I want to do. I’m stuck in a limbo. I’m too expensive and experienced for jobs that call for similar years of experience, but I don’t have enough years of experience for more senior roles.
Is this an ambition penalty for moving up the ladder so quickly or the Covid salary curse, which used to feel more like a pandemic perk when companies were throwing money at you to stay?
I acknowledge I might have to pay my dues for a few more years to get the right title and find a more senior role, but the salary question still remains. Will I just still become too expensive for those roles when the time comes? And in the meantime, is there a way to stand out?
— Impatient at 28, NYC
One important thing to remember about advice is that it is always a reflection of the people giving it. It’s refracted through their personal experience — whether they think their path is the best one to follow, or whether they look back with deep regret, or some combination. Hopefully it also represents useful knowledge, empathy, and wisdom. But still. There’s no such thing as unfiltered advice.
This week, and for a few more, I am the person giving advice as the Work Friend. My qualifications, such as they are, are having edited this column when I ran the Sunday Business section a few years ago, and also having various jobs in the media industry for 20 years. I have managed teams; I have been managed. .
I recognize the impatience of being 28 and being a confident 28. Confident at work, anyway. (I was always most confident at the office, and while talking to other people’s moms — because we had the same taste in clothes and contemporary fiction. I’m not saying it’s the same for everyone.)
I remember manufacturing fights with my then-boss — who remains a good friend — because I thought that was part of the job. (We worked in opinion journalism, so it sort of was.) I was not as deferential as I perhaps should have been. And I took the fact that I had climbed one particular career ladder relatively quickly as evidence that I was right in most instances.
Your letter does not contain such impertinence.
But I did recognize the impatience. You have had early career success and are worried about a plateau. I am imagining you are asking because something feels lacking in your day-to-day, but maybe you are also asking because being 28 can mean you are deep in a season of comparing yourself to other people and the ladders they are on, personally and professionally. I can’t tell from your letter if you have recently had to participate in a particularly onerous bachelorette party weekend, and somewhere in between a passive aggressive Venmo request and a stalled train you thought: This is intolerable. And also, I want a new job.
It’s also not clear if you are actually chafing at the limitations of your current gig or are worried, looking ahead, that the pace of externally-validated growth — compensation increases, title changes — will slow down. And I imagine that what you have achieved in your six years in the work force may be central to your identity. The idea of it slowing down, even if you actually like what you are doing, is daunting.
But the key to figuring out your next move is to focus inward. Try spending one week — or even one day — breaking your work life into its component parts.
What moments of the day feel most energizing? When do you still feel nervous? Are there roles or tasks or areas of focus — or even ways of working — that seem most appealing? You don’t want to climb just any arbitrary ladder. You want to be ascending to a view you actually want to see. So now is a time to specialize a bit more. Do you like pitching clients? Public speaking? Do you like focusing on how new technology is changing your industry?
Can you, in other words, make use of this time when you feel “stuck in a limbo” to figure out what it is you want to specialize in beyond wanting to move in-house somewhere?
You did use two terms that I didn’t know about when I was 28: the “ambition penalty” and “the Covid salary curse.”
So I called J.T. O’Donnell, a career coach, to ask about those particular trends. The good news, sort of, is that she affirmed that what you are experiencing is real. People are “job hugging,” she said — not leaving secure gigs — so movement is difficult. This job market is very different from the one you entered and in the height of the Covid job market frenzy, companies were handing out titles and compensation on a much faster pace than they are today.
Her advice is also that now is a time to specialize. “Pick a lane. Talk to me about specific industries or skill sets or specific problems that you solve,” she advised. (Her guidance was to do this storytelling on LinkedIn, if that is your thing.) In particular, she pitched A.I. “Everyone is saying: I want to bring in the person who understands A.I.,” she said.
That may not be the right focus for you — but the point is to focus.
When Colleagues Think Too Small
I graduated from a midsize state school in 2024 and have been working at a small, private university since then. I work in the housing department, which is where I worked while I was an undergraduate.
I am trying as best I can to acclimatize to the culture and responsibilities in my current position. But there seems to be such a small scale in terms of ideas, perspective and goals. I’m not always getting rebuffed at work, but I often feel like there’s a lack of imagination and experience in my department to do things smarter instead of just “how our university does it.” I don’t want to seem like I’m forcing my opinions or thoughts on others, but I also want to see my department strive for more than just what we’ve done in the past. How can I navigate this?
— Class of ’24
In my first year in the working world after college, I excitedly volunteered for New Year’s Eve duty. I was just making my way past intern to being a temp editorial assistant at “All Things Considered” at NPR and I pitched so many stories about 2005. (It was about to be 2005.)
In my memory, I found someone to talk about the flavors of the coming year and I also booked a songwriter who had penned an ode to the province of Alberta, Canada, which was celebrating its centennial in 2005.
My colleagues gamely let me do this. They were happy even, if I recall, to let me take the lead on what I saw as “the New Year’s project!” and what someone else might have accurately called “filling 5 to 8 minutes of airtime on a holiday.”
Of course, looking back now, I realize every other person on the staff had already had the experience of noting the calendar year turn from one to the next while at work.
I tell this story not to recall the majesty of western Canada as captured in song — though Banff really is beautiful — but to remember that there is a distinct energy to getting to do something for the first time.
And what you seem to be experiencing is that your excitement at being new to the working world is perhaps out of sync with your colleagues’ attitudes. They have flipped a few calendar pages in their day already.
The worst outcome here would be for you to become disillusioned quickly, because you sound invigorated by your work.
I would suggest asking for a meeting with your manager, and leading with everything you know.
You know you are relatively new. You know it’s a very different institution from where you went to school. But you also know that you have relevant experience.
So, you wondered if you might share some specific successful strategies from your past position, in case they might be worth implementing. You know that there may be factors you don’t have visibility into. But now that you’ve seen how your current workplace functions, you do have some ideas.
You are not saying: Why don’t you do things the way my old boss did?
You are saying: I have this recent experience, it could be useful and I wanted to share.
Most workplaces benefit from the fresh perspective of their new hires. The key for you is to share your perspective in a self-aware way. To know what you don’t know, and to be confident in what you do.
And happy early New Year.
Rachel Dry, the current Work Friend columnist, is an editor with The Times Styles section.
The post Do You Want a New Job, or Just Some External Validation? appeared first on New York Times.
