“No promotion. No notable raises. Not yet 40. You aren't alone.
About a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers before their peak earning years, going at least five years without a real boost in pay or position.
That is the central finding of a new study tracking the careers of 1.3 million midcareer professionals across a range of industries since 2000. It suggests that even in an economy with high employment, many workers run into an invisible barrier to upward mobility just when their careers are supposed to gain momentum.
Midcareer stalls often start as early career slumps and can ripple across a lifetime of earnings, the analysis found. That makes those first working years after college especially critical for gaining the experience and skills that propel a career forward.
"When you're talking about a quarter of the workforce, you're not talking about a niche problem," said Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute think tank, which conducted the study with New York University's School of Professional Studies.
The research complicates the picture of today's job market. Even during the pandemic hiring spree, the midcareer stall persisted, researchers found. Now, hiring has slowed to a trickle, and companies from Amazon.com to Meta Platforms and United Parcel Service have laid off thousands of managers and other staff. The upshot is fewer opportunities to move up or jump to better-paying jobs.
"Everyone I know is holding on to whatever job they have," said Erika Oberhansley, an office manager in Garland, Texas, who has been in the same role for seven years. Though the 41-year-old got a raise a few years ago as inflation was surging, it wasn't enough to keep pace with rising costs.
She took a hard look at her career progression when her husband lost his job in virtual-reality game development last year. Oberhansley said the pool-maintenance company where she works can't afford to give her a raise, and her search for a better-paying office job has run into rejections or silence. "The landscape is awful," she said.
She has since enrolled in a bookkeeping certification program through Intuit to reflect her work managing finances. She hopes the credential will position her for a job as an accounting specialist or bookkeeper.
"Now more than ever, it's absolutely necessary," Oberhansley said.
The first decade often predicts whether someone will hit a wall in their careers later on. Those who ultimately fell into a midcareer slump averaged 30% wage growth in their first 10 years of work, compared with 71% for those who kept progressing, according to the study.
The good news is that obtaining a few strategic skills to shift into a more promising, adjacent field can significantly reduce the risk, the researchers found. Office managers who pivoted to business-operations roles, for instance, could redeploy most of their existing skills onto a track with more momentum. Likewise for a stalled computer programmer who becomes a data scientist.
The study also flagged capabilities that, when sharpened or highlighted in job searches, reduced the risk of a stall. They included common skills like public speaking and time management. Developing expertise in relationship-building -- say, event planning and community outreach -- also helped.
NYU's School of Professional Studies sees thousands of students who enroll into continuing-education programs for credentials, said Angie Kamath, the school's dean. These credentials can help workers make an "adjacent pivot" as their industries adapt to new technologies and organizational structures, she said.
Stall is "the new normal for many," Kamath said, and individuals should expect it and try to prevent it.
Erich Eilenberger, 43, had worked at a university in digital communications for four years without a meaningful raise or promotion when a more-senior job on his team opened up. He did the work of that position during the search, he said, but didn't get the offer.
The next year, in 2025, he applied for a role emphasizing fundraising skills at a different university. He highlighted that experience, talking about major donations he had worked on rather than strictly his communications skill set. He got the job.
"Rather than having one skill set, writing, and being able to generate something that is relatively replicable, can I expand what I do and maybe get ahead?" he said.
A variety of factors contribute to career stagnation, even among professionals who are gainfully employed or switch jobs. Some research suggests career mobility has worsened in recent decades. A Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis report in April found workers today are roughly half as likely to snag a better-paying job offer from an outside company than in the 1980s -- partly because of the concentration of fewer employers in many places.
Though workers in a swath of fields hit a midcareer stall, the study found those in public-administration jobs were most likely to do so. About 30% of people in that field stall out, possibly because there are fewer senior roles to advance into.
Sidi Traore, 28, works in legal compliance and research for a state agency. After an earlier layoff, he believes there isn't a path to build wealth in a 9-to-5 job.
Traore earned a real-estate license and hosts open houses on weekends alongside his public-administration job.
"Why not bet on yourself?" he said. "Job security, it's a fallacy. We could get a six-figure job, but if you're no longer an asset, they could fire you today or tomorrow."” [1]
1. More Professionals Hit Midcareer Ceiling. Ellis, Lindsay. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 02 June 2026: A1.
