Prof. Peter Cappelli Looks for New Paths to the Top in the Transformed Workplace

There's little doubt that the traditional employment system of secure, lifetime jobs with predictable advancement and stable pay is, by most accounts, dead. How, then, do aspiring business leaders scratch their way up the corporate climbing wall? Peter Cappelli, George W. Taylor Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Human Resources, hopes his latest project, a book called The Path to the Top, will offer some answers to Wharton students and alumni, as well as the larger business community.

Prof. Peter Capelli, who has won teaching awards for both the MBA and MBA Program for Executives, was inspired to write his latest book, The Path to the Top, after his students described disruptions in their own employment experiences.

After the success of Cappelli’s influential 1999 book The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market Driven Workforce, he realized that his research had raised new questions that he wanted to answer. "It seemed to me that there is a story about how careers are evolving and that it makes sense to look at how we got here,” he says. “The ultimate goal of the book, of course, is to come up with a new model — to show what careers are looking like now."

Spotting the Next Wave
In recent years, when Cappelli has asked his MBA classes to write about their last jobs, he found that more students have reported that their jobs literally ended. “In consulting and even some corporations, after three years or so, they are told to leave,” he says. “Some people in partnerships were told that no one is eligible for partner promotion. In flat organizations, they are saying that beyond five years, they cannot see the next job up the hierarchy that could be open for them."

Cappelli was interested to see that this change in advancement patterns had affected the best and the brightest — achievers who were willing to grow their skills and reinvent themselves — and not just displaced workers from fields that had stagnated. Inspired in part by his classroom experience, Cappelli is looking for ways that aspiring leaders can navigate the new patterns — insight that will find its way back into the Wharton curriculum. Says Cappelli, “The idea is to understand what factors determine who gets to the top of modern companies and why. The processes appear to be quite different, especially the apparent necessity to move across companies in order to get ahead. But whether there is a simple description for how all that happens is not yet clear.”

For background about early history of executive careers in the U. S., read part one of Wharton Alumni Magazine’s two-part interview with Cappelli.