Moving On
Working out whether a new role is actually a step up
Offers are usually compared on pay and title because those are the two numbers available, and neither predicts much about what the next two years will be like.
By Zubin Mistry4 min read
The comparison people default to
Faced with a decision between staying and moving, most people compare the salary and the title, because those are the only two attributes that arrive in a comparable form. Everything else about a job is qualitative, and qualitative things lose to numbers in a spreadsheet even when they matter more. The result is a decision optimised on the two variables that are easiest to observe rather than the ones that determine the outcome.
A useful corrective is to notice which of your previous roles you learned most in and what they had in common. It is rarely the pay. Usually it is some combination of what the work demanded, who was around to learn from, and whether the organisation was growing into something or maintaining something. Those factors don’t appear in an offer letter and they are the ones you should be interrogating.
Scope is the variable that compounds
The most useful question about a new role is what you would own that you don’t own now. Owning something means being the person who decides, not the person who does the work and takes the decision elsewhere for approval. A role with a better title and identical decision rights is a lateral move dressed up, and it is a very common shape of offer.
Scope compounds because it determines what you can credibly claim next. Two years spent owning a small thing end to end usually produces a stronger position than two years contributing to a large thing, even where the large thing is more impressive to name. Interviewers ask what you decided and what happened as a result, and there’s no good answer to that from a role where you decided nothing.
Be alert to the version of scope that’s really exposure without authority: responsibility for an outcome, no control over the resources, and a reporting line that makes escalation awkward. It is common in roles created quickly, and the tell is that nobody can answer clearly what you would be able to decide on your own.
The manager is a larger factor than the company
Your day-to-day experience is determined far more by the person you report to than by the organisation’s reputation. A well-regarded employer with a poor manager produces a worse two years than an unremarkable employer with a good one, and the second combination also produces more learning. This is unfashionable advice because employer brand is visible and managers are not, but almost everyone who has worked for a decade will recognise it.
Which means the interview with your prospective manager is the most important part of the process, and it deserves preparation. How do they describe the people who work for them. Do they take responsibility for something that went wrong, unprompted. What do they think their team is bad at. Whether they can answer that last one at all is informative, and how they answer it is the closest thing to a preview you will get.
The things that are hard to reverse
Some elements of a move are easy to adjust later and some are not. Pay can be corrected over time, though more slowly than people hope. Location, sector and specialisation are stickier: a move into a narrow niche is much easier than a move out of one, and a shift into an industry can quietly become the industry you are from. Reputation in a professional community takes years to build and does not always travel across a boundary.
This does not mean avoiding such moves. It means weighing them differently from the reversible ones, and asking what your position would look like in three years if the role does not work out. A job that fails but leaves you with transferable scope is a very different outcome from one that fails and leaves you specialised in something the market has stopped wanting.
Deciding when the information runs out
You will not resolve this cleanly, and it is worth accepting that. You are comparing a known situation, whose faults you can list in detail, with an unknown one whose faults are still hidden — an asymmetry that systematically flatters the offer. Everything you dislike about your current job is concrete; everything you dislike about the new one has not happened yet.
Two habits help. Write down, before deciding, the two or three specific things that would have to be true for the move to be worth it, and check them at six months, because you will otherwise rewrite the reasons to match whatever happened. And be honest about whether you are moving towards something or away from something. Both are legitimate, and they call for different levels of scrutiny: a move away tolerates a worse destination than it should, which is how people leave one badly run place for another.
Common questions
Is a lateral move ever worth taking?
Frequently, if it buys scope, a better manager, or entry into a field you want to be in. The cases to be sceptical about are lateral moves taken purely to escape, since the thing you are escaping is sometimes portable, and lateral moves with a pay rise but no change in what you decide.
How much should pay weigh in the decision?
Enough to take seriously and not enough to decide it on its own, particularly early on when the difference two years of learning makes is larger than most pay gaps. The exception is when you are underpaid to a degree that will follow you, since future offers are often anchored on your current salary.
What if I cannot tell whether the new manager is any good?
Ask for a second conversation, and ask specifically about how they handle disagreement and mistakes. If that is refused or evaded, treat it as a partial answer. You can also try to find someone who has worked for them, which is often easier than expected within a professional network.
Editor, After the First Job
Zubin covers first months, managing up, money at work and the questions readers actually send in and is happiest when a piece answers the question completely.
