Mass Career Customization
Aligning the Workplace with the Nontraditional Workforce
by Cathy Benko & Anne Weisberg


The corporate ladder has been the enduring gold standard for personal success since organizational hierarchy was invented. But the ladder model of career progression is fitting fewer and fewer. Women’s career paths, in particular, often look less like a straight climb up and more like an undulating journey filled with ascents, lateral moves and planned descents.

The workforce has changed, while the workplace has not – until now.

While women have for a decade or more been the ‘canaries in the corporate coal mines,’ the workplace norms of how careers are built are no longer fitting the needs of today’s workforce across both gender and generational lines. We see evidence that, in fact, the ladder model is already evolving toward a more adaptive model we term the Corporate Lattice™. In mathematics, a lattice allows one to move in many directions, is not limited to upward or downward progress, and can be repeated infinitely at any scale. In the real world, lattices are living platforms for growth, with upward momentum visible along many paths. The lattice model of career progression allows for multiple paths upward taking into account the changing needs of both the individual and the organization across various intervals of time.

The Corporate Lattice is the central idea behind Mass Career Customization™ (MCC). MCC, as an enabler of a thriving corporate-lattice culture, offers a customized model for building careers and developing talent. The MCC framework articulates a definite, not infinite, set of options along four inter-related career dimensions – Pace, Workload, Location/Schedule, and Role – and provides a structure to articulate and manage these options as commonplace events rather than as one-off accommodations.  Similar to the way you would move the sliders up and down on a stereo equalizer to adjust the sound, MCC allows employees to dial up and down along the four career dimensions to optimize their career paths at varying life stages.

Visit PBWC Connections magazine again soon to learn more about mass career customization – the enabling framework for how careers are built in increasingly lattice organizations.

Read part II of this series in the new article:

Building the Corporate Lattice Organization
Deloitte's Cathy Benko and Anne Weisberg explain why your career may be less of a straight climb and more like a journey of ascents, lateral moves and planned descents. This great article reveals tips & trends from their new webinar.