You can describe the next role you want in a single line and still not know where your career is going. The direction comes from the work an organisation needs done, the evidence you can bring to it and the conditions under which the appointment can succeed.
Andy Demir | Qalbur Perspective | Executive Career | 12 minute read
Executive Summary
A senior career needs more than a target title. It needs a mandate worth accepting: a business problem you can own, the authority to solve it and evidence that your experience will travel. Drawing on the planning principles in Career Moves, this essay looks at how you read demand, make your experience legible outside your current employer, build relationships that carry evidence and investigate an appointment before you accept it. Current evidence on mobility and age is more mixed than the usual advice suggests. And the same questions apply when you sit on the other side of the table and decide who gets responsibility in your own organisation.
In This Article
- The next title is an incomplete destination
- What Career Moves still offers
- Read demand at the level of the business problem
- Make experience understandable outside its original setting
- Relationships need to carry evidence
- Investigate the mandate before accepting the title
- The case for staying, and the limits of choice
- Keep a career decision record
- What Senior Leaders Should Consider
- A direction that can survive revision
- Questions for the Boardroom
- References
The next title is an incomplete destination
You can describe the position you want next with great precision and still have no career strategy. Managing Director, Vice-President or Chief Growth Officer tells you where a role sits on the organisation chart. It tells you very little about the problem necessitating the appointment, the authority you would need to solve it, or why an employer should believe your experience is a fit.
This matters more once a career has breadth. International assignments, technical depth and commercial responsibility can add up to a strong history, but the employer still has to decide which part of that history matters for its future. A career strategy joins those two views. In this essay I mean something specific by it: a deliberate choice about where to apply your capabilities, what evidence to build and which conditions make the next commitment worth making.
There is a human side to this as well. A title easily becomes shorthand for who you are, so accepting a different one can feel like giving up years of work. A grander title can also hide a narrower job. Before you weigh any offer, write down the work beneath the title: the decisions you would make, the resources you would control,ol and the outcomes you would be accountable for.
What Career Moves still offers
Caitlin Williams and Annabelle Reitman, both career development specialists, wrote Career Moves: Be Strategic About Your Future, published by ASTD Press in September 2013 as a revised and enhanced third edition. The book was written for people in the training and development profession, and executives were never its main audience. What makes it useful here is its insistence that career development is continuing work, sustained by reflection, learning and a written plan. [1]
That written plan sits at the centre of the book. It connects the working life you want with your goals, your practical constraints and the actions you will take, and it treats movement across roles as development in its own right, so progress does not have to mean promotion. The idea travels well. You can broaden your responsibilities through a business-unit assignment, gain operational depth through a lateral move, or choose a smaller company where decisions and their consequences are closer together.
The parts tied to their time need more care. A 2013 competency model and an account of the American workplace are no map of today's executive market in Europe. Nor does personal responsibility explain every career outcome. Planning improves the choices within your reach; it cannot remove discrimination, create vacancies or make another organisation keep a promise. What the book leaves you with is disciplined agency, together with an honest account of where that agency ends.
Read demand at the level of the business problem
Start with what organisations need to get done. A growth appointment might mean entering a new market, rebuilding weak margins, or making revenue less dependent on a single large customer. Those are different jobs, even when the advertisements use the same words. If you can tell them apart, you can choose better opportunities and know which evidence to put forward.
European data give you good reason to distrust universal career advice. Spencer Stuart's annual analysis of 590 major European listed companies counted 61 CEO transitions in 2025, the fewest since 2017. France and Italy had the highest turnover at 15%, while Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK were at about 10%. Overall, 56% of incoming CEOs were external appointments, yet of the 15 companies worth more than US$20 billion that changed CEO, 10 promoted from within. These figures describe chief executives of large listed companies; they say nothing directly about openings for directors or heads of function. [2]
What they do show is that access depends as much on the organisation as on you. An internal succession route takes time, sponsorship and exposure to the right responsibilities. An external search needs evidence that still makes sense outside your current employer. Keeping both routes open is sensible, but each needs its own preparation, and repeating a general wish to lead will do neither job.
Keep sector demand apart from access to a particular role. An expanding industry can hire engineers by the hundred and leave its management structure untouched. A shrinking business may still need someone who can restructure its commercial operations. Before you invest in a qualification or a relocation, test the mandate you are aiming at against real vacancies and against conversations with people close to appointment decisions.
Make experience understandable outside its original setting
Experience has parts that employers easily lump together: knowledge of a sector, knowledge of one organisation, and judgement formed through hard decisions. Some of it travels. Some depends on relationships, systems or authority that disappear the day you leave. A credible candidate is honest about where that line runs and does not present every past achievement as if it could be repeated anywhere.
The strongest account makes your own contribution visible. A revenue result says more when you explain whether you changed pricing, developed distributors or sharpened account selection, and what your colleagues contributed. A transformation claim needs its starting conditions, the decisions you took and the evidence of what changed. Where confidentiality limits what you can say, you can still describe the method, constraints, and scope without publishing sensitive figures.
This discipline pays off long before any search begins. It shows which achievements are transferable evidence and which rely on your employer's name, because you can be widely respected within your company and still be hard for an outsider to assess. A record of decisions and outcomes kept while you are employed gives a future search far more substance than a career reconstructed under the pressure of a restructuring. If you run an organisation, the same test applies to the directors in your succession plan: could an outsider see what each of them actually decided?
Learning becomes useful when it is tied to this evidence. In the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, surveyed employers expected 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030, down from 44% in the 2023 edition. That is an employer expectation across all occupations, and it does not mean that 39% of your own competence will expire. It is still a reason to check, from time to time, which capabilities your target role now demands. [3]
For a commercial leader, learning to use artificial intelligence earns its place when it improves account research or the scrutiny of forecasts; a certificate alone leaves the employer to guess at the value. A language answers a different constraint: the ability to lead local teams without an intermediary. What comes first depends on what is actually blocking your access to the work you want.
Relationships need to carry evidence
Williams and Reitman put weight on coaching and mentoring, and that still holds, though at senior level it helps to separate the roles. A mentor may challenge the direction you are taking. A coach may help you test assumptions or communicate more clearly. A sponsor goes further and puts their own name behind you, opening access to responsibility or recommending you when an appointment is being discussed.
Sponsorship spends someone else's judgement and reputation. An introduction is far easier to ask for when the person making it can say what you do well and where that capability belongs. Relationships built through shared work, thoughtful exchange and useful contributions carry that knowledge, which no contact list, however large, can do on its own.
Public visibility helps by letting people see your judgement before a vacancy appears. An article or a professional discussion is worth something when it shows how you weigh evidence and consequences. Constant self-promotion may make your name familiar while leaving your case for an appointment unclear. The test is whether someone who knows your work could make a specific recommendation and defend it.
Posture matters too. The opportunity you spot from outside may be one the current leaders have already weighed, or cannot pursue under constraints you cannot see. Presenting that diagnosis with early certainty makes collaboration harder; explaining what the public evidence suggests and admitting what you do not know shows the judgement an organisation wants from someone joining it.
Investigate the mandate before accepting the title
Once an opportunity arises, you become both the evaluator and the candidate. The role commits your time, your reputation, and often your family's stability, and its value depends on the conditions you are given to deliver what is expected. A bigger title cannot compensate for long-term responsibility without effective authority.
Due diligence starts with the reason for the appointment. Is the company creating capacity, replacing someone who left, preparing succession or responding to a specific commercial problem? The answer tells you a good deal about the support and the timescale you can expect. Ask which decisions will be delegated to you, where approval will remain with others, and how disagreements will be settled, and ask before those questions come up under pressure.
Test the business assumptions the same way. A growth target may depend on delivery capacity, product investment, or customer access that you cannot control. Raising those dependencies is part of responsible preparation. If both sides agree on the starting conditions, both can later tell the difference between slow execution and a change in the assumptions the mandate rested on.
An international move raises practical questions you need to address locally. The same English title can carry different authority in a German subsidiary, a French group, a Polish operating business or a Gulf-based company. These are contexts to investigate on the ground, and cultural generalisations will not settle them. Reporting lines, language expectations, work authorisation and where decisions are really made matter more than how equivalent the titles look.
So a sideways move can be strategic and a promotion can be a poor choice. A smaller role may bring broader commercial responsibility and direct access to customers. It may also reduce your earnings or make the next step harder to explain. Either way, the decision needs a clear account of what you gain, what you give up, and how the new position serves the longer-term direction.
The case for staying, and the limits of choice
Career strategy goes wrong when movement is treated as proof of ambition. In many executive roles, knowledge and trust build slowly and results take years to show. Leaving before an investment or a reorganisation has matured can weaken both the business and your own evidence. Staying may well be the better choice while your responsibilities are growing and the work continues to develop your judgement.
The OECD's Employment Outlook 2025 offers a more nuanced reading of mobility. Using linked employer-employee data from 17 countries for 2000–2019, it separates direct moves from one job to another from moves into and out of employment. The direct moves did most of the work of shifting people towards higher-paying, more productive firms. This is historical, economy-wide evidence. It supports paying attention to the quality and circumstances of a move, and it cannot tell you whether changing employers will pay off for you. [4]
Age complicates the picture further. The OECD's 2024 report on longer working lives finds that career transitions tend to become harder at older ages, citing health issues, unfamiliarity with relevant technology, a lack of recent job-search experience, and discriminatory views of older workers. Yet in Spencer Stuart's European sample, the average incoming CEO in 2025 was about 55.7 years old. Both findings can hold at once: older professionals face real barriers, while some top appointments continue to favour long experience. Evidence from the top of listed companies cannot describe the market for every senior professional. [5] [2]
Money and caring responsibilities narrow the choice as well. If you are facing unemployment, it can be entirely reasonable to accept work that restores income before it advances your preferred direction. There is no need to dress that up as an ideal strategic move. Separating short-term stabilisation from longer-term positioning gives you a more honest plan and keeps a hard period from turning into a verdict on your ambition.
Keep a career decision record
The book's written plan can be adapted into what I would call a career decision record. It is a practical habit I am suggesting here, and nobody has tested it as a model. Its purpose is to tie the mandate you want to evidence, the constraints, and the actions, so that you judge each opportunity against something steadier than its immediate appeal.
The record starts with the work you want to take responsibility for and why that work matters commercially. It then lists the achievements that support your case and the remaining gaps. A director aiming at general management, for example, may need more exposure to cash, operating decisions or leading people beyond the home function. Another credential helps only if it closes one of those gaps.
The same record states your conditions. Location, travel, earnings, authority and family commitments all decide whether an opportunity can work. Writing them down does not remove compromise. It makes compromise visible, including the circumstances in which a temporary concession would be reasonable and the evidence you would want before a larger commitment.
A quarterly review turns the record into action without making career management a second job. Test one target mandate with well-informed contacts, look for an assignment that produces the evidence you are missing, then ask what you learnt and whether the direction still holds. A longer list of applications or courses is no sign of progress.
What Senior Leaders Should Consider
Everything above also describes the people below you. Your directors and heads of function are running the same calculation about their own careers, and the conditions they are calculating against are largely ones you set: which assignments exist, who gets them, how much authority comes with each role and what your succession process actually rewards. If the honest answer within your company is that the next step requires leaving, some of your best people will reach that conclusion before you notice.
Development conversations earn their time when they end in a decision about access: which responsibility a person will take on next, and by when. Exposure to investment decisions, cross-functional delivery or the economics of a business unit may build a stronger successor than another general leadership programme, and it lets the executive committee judge readiness by watching real work. Spencer Stuart found that the largest share of internally appointed European CEOs in 2025, 43%, came from divisional CEO roles, and it links large companies' preference for insiders to divisional structures that develop well-rounded P&L leaders. Those roles have to be designed, funded and filled years before anyone needs a successor. [2]
Then look at who receives stretch assignments and sponsorship, because opportunity decides what evidence people can build. Asking managers to own their careers while leaving access to development unexplained is a poor bargain for them and for the company. Make the routes visible, hold your executive team accountable for who travels them, and you protect both individual agency and the credibility of your succession.
A direction that can survive revision
The next title remains a fair ambition, and it becomes far more useful once it is attached to a considered direction. You need to understand the work you are seeking, the evidence behind that choice and the conditions you need to do it well. That understanding can guide a promotion, a lateral move or a decision to stay where real responsibility is still growing.
Your plan will need revising, because employers, circumstances and your own interests change. Its lasting value is the habit of examining those changes before you make the next commitment. Keep that habit, and your experience becomes something you carry forward with judgement, rather than a history you have to defend. And the next time you sit on an appointment panel, ask the candidates in front of you the questions you would want to answer about yourself.
Questions for the Boardroom
- Which responsibilities must our next generation of leaders acquire, and who currently has access to them?
- When we hire from outside, what evidence would show us that a candidate's results will transfer to our business?
- Does the authority we attach to each senior appointment match the outcomes we expect from it?
- Where could internal moves retain valuable experience within the company while providing the business with the capabilities it now needs?
- Are we judging succession readiness by what people have done in real roles, or by titles and credentials?
References
- Williams, C., and Reitman, A. (2013). Career Moves: Be Strategic About Your Future, revised and enhanced third edition. ASTD Press. ISBN 9781562868680. Publisher record.
- Spencer Stuart (February 2026). CEO Transitions in Europe 2025: Behind the CEO Moment. Report and methodology.
- World Economic Forum (January 2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025, Chapter 3: Skills outlook. Source.
- OECD (2025). OECD Employment Outlook 2025: Can We Get Through the Demographic Crunch?, Chapter 5: Reviving growth in a time of workforce ageing: The role of job mobility. OECD Publishing, Paris. Source.
- OECD (2024). Promoting Better Career Choices for Longer Working Lives: Stepping Up Not Stepping Out. OECD Publishing, Paris. Source.
About the Author
Andy Demir is an international commercial and business leader with more than two decades of experience across complex B2B and industrial markets. Andy writes about executive leadership, strategy, organisational transformation, commercial performance, international business and the changing world of work, combining research with lessons drawn from operating across industries, markets and cultures.
