For once, marketers aren’t the problem.
A new study of more than 1.3 million career histories found that marketing specialists have one of the lowest rates of mid-career stagnation among white-collar professions. Just 12.2% experienced prolonged periods without meaningful promotions or wage growth, making marketing one of the rare professional tracks where upward mobility remains relatively intact.
That figure looks even better when compared with financial sales representatives, where 30.1% of workers have stalled, or network and systems engineers at 29.4%. Insurance workers, sales managers and a host of other supposedly prestigious corporate roles also post far higher rates of career stagnation.
For an industry that regularly subjects itself to debates about cookies, identity graphs, retail media networks and whether AI will replace everyone except the guy who owns the AI company, marketing appears surprisingly resilient.
The findings come from a report titled "Sidelined: The Hidden Crisis in Mid-Career Mobility" by NYU's School of Professional Studies and the Burning Glass Institute, which found that 24.2% of college-educated professionals have effectively hit a career plateau, defined as five years or more without a meaningful promotion and with little real wage growth.