John Ternus, who takes over as CEO of Apple this week, joined Apple in 2001, just four years after he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Satya Nadella entered Microsoft in 1992, only two years after completing his master’s degree. Andy Jassy joined Amazon in 1997, 24 years before he took the top job. Three of the world’s most powerful technology companies are now led by executives who built their careers largely from within.
Their careers counter one of the most persistent pieces of modern career advice: that getting ahead means moving around. For much of the last thirty years, we’ve been told that long-term employment was dead. As large employers moved from employment guarantees to frequent downsizing during the 1980s and 1990s, ideas of loyalty became passé. Career advice has frequently revolved around embracing free agency, taking charge of our own careers through regular mobility across employers. Career success is supposed to come from proactively moving to wherever your services would be most valuable. No sector has epitomized the image of easy come, easy go employment quite like tech. Yet our biggest tech companies are now being led by organization men, executives whose career paths look like they’ve come straight out of the 1950s.
I’ve been studying employment for over two decades now, and I’ve started to suspect that the way that we talk about modern careers may be all wrong. Yes, loyalty is dead and employment is now something of a marriage of convenience. But we haven’t moved to a world of hyper-mobility. People aren’t quitting their jobs any more than they were twenty-five years ago; layoff rates have actually come down; and we haven’t seen the surge in freelance work that we expected. There’s also growing evidence that building a career inside a firm continues to be a more reliable route to success than trying to plot a path across companies. The insider tech CEOs aren’t outliers. They’re a sign that we need to reconsider how people get ahead.
Consider, for example, an analysis of the careers of the top 10 executives in each Fortune 100 firm that my colleague Peter Cappelli published with his coauthors back in 2024. Although the average executive had moved around a little more than John Ternus, their stickability is nonetheless striking: the average executive worked at only three employers during the 28 years that it took them to reach the top. They had also been with their current employer for 13 years before accessing the executive suite. Those executives may be more mobile than they were back in 1980, but there remain, it seems, remarkably few job-hoppers in the top-ranks of corporate America.
When we have studied careers below the executive suite, we have found that upward mobility—moving into more senior jobs with more responsibility—is overwhelmingly more likely to happen through internal moves within the same company, rather than by moving to a different firm. Another study of Finns found that moving up into a more senior job was almost six times as likely to occur through an internal move compared to a move across firms. The reasons are not hard to understand: moving somebody up in their career, letting them take on a job that is bigger and more responsible than any they have held before, is always a risk for an employer. Employers are much more willing to take that risk on somebody they know well—an inside candidate—than an outside hire that they know little about. There is also ample evidence that those internal candidates tend to do better once they get the job, as new hires initially struggle to navigate an unfamiliar organization.
There are, of course, a lot of reasons why moving employers can benefit people in their careers. Many people are in jobs they don’t like; they should be looking for something better. It also makes sense to move around to learn about yourself and the kinds of work that you enjoy. And recruiters can be reluctant to hire people who have spent much more than a decade at the same firm, because of worries that those long-timers will struggle to adapt to a new employer. Even the rhetoric around free agency, which emphasizes the need to take charge of your own career, navigating across employers in search of the best opportunities, serves a useful purpose by reminding us that our employers rarely have our long-term interests at heart.
But we also need to rebalance our understanding of how modern careers really work. It turns out that the things that allow us to be successful in our careers – doing good work and getting access to new opportunities – still depend on the kind of familiarity and trusting relationships that are built through longevity within organizations. The advice that you have to “move out to move up” has it exactly backwards. Those who are hoping to become the next John Ternus, rising to lead a trillion dollar corporation, should understand that they can move out, or they can move up, but it is hard to do both at the same time.
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