A career ladder sets out the levels someone can move through in your organisation, and what they need to show to reach each one. A dual career ladder adds a second route: an expert track that lets your best specialists grow in pay, status and influence without having to become managers.
Most organisations still have one career ladder, and it leads to management. Your best salesperson, engineer or recruiter hits the top of their pay band, and the only way up is to take on a team. Some of them make great managers. Many don’t, and you lose a top performer and gain an unhappy, underprepared manager in the same move.
This guide shows you how to build a dual career path in six steps, with a sample two-track career ladder you can adapt.
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Why a single career ladder fails your best people
Management is a different job, not a promotion. It needs skills in coaching, difficult conversations and planning that have little to do with being brilliant at the work itself. When a single career ladder makes management the only way to earn more, you get three predictable problems: If someone does move into management, new manager training that starts before the promotion makes the switch far easier.
- Accidental managers. People take on teams for the money or the title, not because they want to lead, and their teams pay the price.
- Lost expertise. Your strongest specialist now spends half their week in meetings and one-to-ones instead of doing the work they’re best at.
- Quiet exits. Specialists who don’t want to manage see no future and leave for a company that will pay them for their expertise.
A dual career ladder fixes this by separating two questions that most organisations tie together: how valuable is this person, and do they want to lead people?
How to build a dual career ladder in six steps
1. Separate pay from management responsibility
Start with the principle. Pay should follow value and impact, not headcount. Write it down and get your leadership team to agree it, because every later step depends on it. If senior leaders still believe the person with the biggest team should earn the most, the expert track will exist only on paper.
2. Define the expert track levels
Set out three to five levels for the technical career path or specialist route, each with clear, observable criteria. Useful dimensions include:
- Skills and depth: what they can do that others can’t, and how complex the problems are.
- Mentoring: how they raise the standard of the people around them, without formal line management.
- Commercial impact: revenue, billings, margin or client retention they drive directly.
- Knowledge sharing: the methods, tools or training they create for the wider business.
Our guide to career development covers how to turn these into individual goals.
3. Define the management track with its own skills
The management side of the career ladder needs its own criteria, built around leading people rather than doing the work: coaching, hiring, giving feedback, developing others and hitting team goals. Make clear that these are learned skills. Our post on leadership and management development covers how to build them.
4. Allow progression beyond salary
Not every step up a career ladder has to be a pay rise. Bonuses, senior titles, mentoring responsibility, extra holiday, flexibility and choice of projects are all real progression. They also let you reward growth in years when the salary budget is tight.
5. Let managers switch back without stigma
Some of your current managers would be happier and more valuable as experts. Make it normal to move from the management track to the expert track at the same level, with no loss of pay or status. If the only way back looks like a demotion, nobody will take it.
6. Tackle the “nobody earns more than their boss” objection
This is the cultural barrier that sinks most dual career paths. A story often told in tech circles makes the point: an engineer at a large tech company earns many times more than their manager, because the code they write is worth far more than the team the manager runs. Nobody there thinks it’s strange. The engineer is paid for impact, and the manager is paid for leading.
Your numbers will be smaller, but the principle is the same. If your best individual contributor can never out-earn their manager, the ceiling on your expert track is set by your management structure, not by the value they create.
A sample dual career ladder
Here is a simple two-track career ladder to adapt. The levels sit side by side, so a Principal and a Head of Team are equal in status and pay range.
Get the dual career ladder template as a Google Sheet (with columns for your criteria and pay ranges). It opens a copy in your own Google Drive.
| Level | Expert track | Management track | What changes at this level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Associate | – | Learning the role with close support |
| 2 | Specialist | – | Delivers independently and meets targets |
| 3 | Senior Specialist | Team Lead | Expert: mentors others and owns complex work. Manager: leads a small team |
| 4 | Principal | Manager | Expert: sets standards across the function. Manager: hires, develops and leads several people |
| 5 | Distinguished Expert | Head of Function | Expert: shapes strategy through expertise. Manager: leads managers and owns function results |
Keep the criteria for each level short and observable, and publish the career ladder so everyone can see it. A ladder people can’t see doesn’t change behaviour.
How to roll it out
Introduce the dual career ladder through conversations, not just a policy document. Ask each person which track appeals to them and why, and map them to their current level. Then use the ladder in every development conversation, linking it to their employee growth plan.
Check that it’s working. Ask your people, anonymously and regularly, whether they can see a future for themselves in the business. A short pulse question such as “I can see how I could progress here” will tell you quickly whether the new career ladder feels real or is just a chart on the intranet. Wotter is one example of a tool that does this.
For more ways to keep your best specialists, read our post on ways to retain top employees.
Frequently asked questions
What is a career ladder?
A career ladder is a set of levels within a job family, with clear criteria for moving from one level to the next. It shows people how they can progress and what they need to do to get there.
What is a dual career path?
A dual career path offers two routes to seniority: a management track for people who want to lead teams, and an expert or technical track for people who want to grow as specialists. Both tracks have equal status at each level.
What is an individual contributor?
An individual contributor is someone who delivers work themselves rather than managing a team. On a dual career ladder, senior individual contributors can reach the same level and pay as senior managers.
Can an expert earn more than their manager?
Yes. On a well-designed dual career ladder, pay follows value. A highly skilled specialist can earn more than the person who manages them, and in many tech companies this is normal.
How many levels should a career ladder have?
Most organisations use four to six levels. Fewer levels make it hard to show progress; too many make the differences between levels vague.
Give your best people a way up that suits them
A dual career ladder stops you forcing great specialists into management and losing them either way. Separate pay from headcount, define both tracks clearly, make switching easy and tackle the “nobody earns more than their boss” belief head on.
For more on progression and accidental managers, listen to Episodes 16 and 25 of Strategic HR Weekly.
