If you’ve been an executive, don’t join a company as an “enlisted” man even if it looks good. You won’t be able to climb out of that hole in most cases, and even if it is possible at some times and places it will probably take years to get back to even close to where you were, and you’ll live in near poverty during that climb. Hold out for the executive job, work wherever you need to in the meantime but don’t expect any advancement if you start out low. That’s what dead-end job means, Dead End Ahead. I made a very big mistake joining a great company but at the lowest rung of the ladder, thinking that, because I had a strong track record of personal sucess followed by two decades of running teams of people in the same environment, I would be able to move up.
Uh-uh, doesn’t work like that. You start as a scrub and a scrub you will remain for a very long time. So, while that company’s pay checks clear and they don’t generally screw me over the way I’ve heard others do and the way others have, I’m going nowhere. I literally am not allowed to even apply for a management job where I am; although if I did not work here then I could. It’s an insane policy but, alas, a common one in the corporate world. That is all.
In about 1990 I was talking with the German Finance Director of a UK subsidiary of BMW. Mentioned in passing that my previous job had altered (secure but no possibility of promotion) when I became a union rep.. He couldn’t understand – no-one in BMW could become a manager unless they had at least two years under their belt as a union rep.. “How can you manage people if you don’t understand how they think”. The answer, of course, is to shout louder!
“…I literally am not allowed to even apply for a management job where I am; although if I did not work here then I could. It’s an insane policy but, alas, a common one in the corporate world.”
Most corporations work on the basic principle that “if you work for us already you’re obviously too stupid to be promoted”.