There is a peculiar inertia in the way we talk about careers. Actually, scratch that, it is a confidence eroding myth—it is the 'pivot'. It occurs when someone changes roles, industries, or disciplines, and are told by some fatuous hiring manager that they are pivoting—as though careers were gymnastic floor routines and professionals must now stick the landing. It's a word soaked in ignorance and implied reinvention, a term that attempts to flatter with notions of agility while quietly erasing experience, devaluing self, and undermining confidence. And like many buzzwords with TED Talk charisma and shallow roots, the pivot metaphor has a dark underbelly: it suggests you're starting over and your life to date is valueless.
But what if we resisted that erasure? What if, instead of pivots, we spoke of 'stacking experience'—of accumulating skills, achievements, and wisdom in layers, building a platform from which to do higher-order work?
Career development, after all, is not a game of snakes and ladders where a wrong turn sends you back to start. Nor is it a series of clean slates, as if switching from marketing to product management renders your hard-won political acumen, stakeholder influence, and problem-solving instincts null and void. As Jack Mezirow (1923–2014) noted, adult learning is transformative because it integrates new knowledge into prior experience—it is not a replacement but a reformation.
The problem with the pivot metaphor is that it conceals the continuity of capability. Delve into any of the literature on careers, from HR Magazines to scholarly literature, and a similar landscape is presented. Though it dresses up the reality in wonderful sounding concepts like 'protean career', in which a person reorientates their career approach to one that is '(a) self-directed, and (b) driven internally by one's own values', and the soaring language of people shifting their focus from 'work self' to that of the 'whole self'', there remains a problem of detachment. Of being fluid to the point of dissolution. Thus, it is essential to draw a clear line between flexibility and amnesia.
The danger is not just linguistic, much less an academic quibble. It is profoundly material. Framing a move as a pivot gives others permission to devalue your past experience. Consider a senior manager in healthcare who transitions to a tech firm. Despite managing complex compliance regimes, stakeholder coalitions, and enterprise-wide transformations, she is now labelled a newcomer. Why? Because she hasn't worked in our kind of tech. The underlying assumption: context trumps capability.
And yet the evidence points the other way. Tacit knowledge, once developed, is remarkably portable. Complex problem-solving, a cognitive skill honed across roles, tends to improve with age and breadth, rather than decline. Even decision-making under pressure—a staple of executive function—is highly transferable, particularly when rooted in structured reflection. Another reason it is critical to spend less time in endless video calls and more time thinking about work.
In short, the pivot narrative is both empirically flimsy, psychologically corrosive, and emotionally destructive. It invites imposter syndrome where none is due. Worse, it gives gatekeepers—often actual imposters—an excuse to talk accomplished people down.
The Stack as Career Architecture
In computing, a 'stack' is a structured sequence: each function builds on the ones below. In games like Tetris, stacks are cumulative—they rise, they consolidate, they create room for manœuvre. As a metaphor it carries the notion of being a ballast for your career: a stack is not a reset; it's a record of appreciation for everything that has come before.
Transposed into the professional realm, the stack becomes a conceptual model for capability. Experiences in leadership, negotiation, analysis, stakeholder management, crisis response, or even failure, accrue in layers. Like sediment in rock formations or rings in a tree, they tell a story—and the deeper the strata, the more resilient the structure.
Psychological capital research supports this logic, identifying confidence (self-efficacy), optimism, hope, and resilience as key ingredients of sustainable performance—each of which strengthens with cumulative experience. Moreover, 'boundaryless' career models stress that career capital is accrued across roles and organisations, not merely within them.
Indeed, even the much-maligned generalist is experiencing something of a renaissance. In a world of hyper-specialisation, those who can integrate ideas across domains are increasingly valuable. Generalists don't pivot; they layer, building stacks robust enough to traverse sectors, challenges, and political climates.
Stacking means your prior leadership in a not-for-profit context informs your decision-making in a commercial one; it means that marketing experience enriches your approach to stakeholder communication in policy roles. It's the 'spiral curriculum' of Jerome Bruner (1915–2016) applied to careers—revisiting and reapplying core ideas at ever higher levels of complexity.
This stacking also aligns with research into expert performance which underscores the reality that deliberate practice shows that mastery depends less on innate ability and more on structured repetition across contexts. A seasoned professional who has led teams through ambiguity, built consensus across cultural lines, and made mistakes worth learning from, is not a beginner in a new domain. They are, in fact, experts in adapting expertise.
What stacking demands is narrative coherence. Something which is easier said than done because career transitions are socially negotiated through identity narratives. In other words, if we don't inform how people talk about us, we are servants to their whims and ignorance. Or, as Salman Rushdie put it:
Those who do not have power over the stories that dominate their lives, power to retell them, rethink them, deconstruct them, joke about them, and change them as times change, truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts.
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands
How you frame your experience—what you choose to foreground—shapes how others interpret your value. The story is the strategy. A stacked career, therefore, is not one that needs justification. It needs articulation.
Wonder, Worth, and the Will to Resist Shrinking
There is, of course, a more insidious reason why the pivot narrative persists. It serves existing power structures. If someone pivots into your industry, you are licensed to treat them as junior, to discount their past contributions, to assert your own superiority in domain-specific arcana. Pivoting becomes the pretext for status stripping, position demoting, and pay reducing.
It is especially toxic for women, migrants, older professionals, and those with nonlinear paths. These are the groups most often told they need to 'start at the bottom again'. One might forgive the ignorance—if it weren't so selective. Somehow, former consultants become CEOs without a hiccup, while experienced public servants moving into private sector roles are treated as bureaucratic detritus in need of retraining.
The antidote is wonder—specifically, inner wonder. Not the kind that marvels passively at stars, but the kind that fiercely guards against being made small. Aristotle (384–322 BC) opened his book Metaphysics with the words 'all men naturally desire knowledge', and that wonder is the beginning of philosophy. In the professional sense, wonder is the refusal to accept that your stack is meaningless. It is the belief that what you've built matters, even if others haven't learned how to read it.
This refusal has ethical weight. We must form conscience, not replace it. Conscience here includes your understanding of your own journey—the integrity of your capability narrative. Don't let someone else overwrite your career script because their schema lacks nuance.
Experience, particularly in leadership, is more than the sum of capabilities—it is discernment, moral clarity, and judgment forged in the heat of battle. Leadership literature increasingly recognises this, stressing the centrality of leader introspection and moral awareness as key elements in authentic leadership. These traits don't pivot. They compound.
There is a lot of joy to be found in this compounding. Every experience—each triumph and mishap—adds another layer to the stack. The job that bored you taught you how to endure. The project that failed taught you how to bounce back. The startup that pivoted (ironically) showed you the human costs of chasing novelty at the expense of purpose. Simply put: stack it all.
The true professionals I admire are not the ones who've stayed in one field. They're the ones who've earned their scars across many, and emerged not jaded, but crystalline—clarified. Their authority is not derivative of the job title they hold but the stack of trials they've transcended.
So, reject the pivot. Ditch the narrative that says each transition requires a sacrificial offering of prior worth. Instead, stack. Accumulate. Tell the story that binds your layers into something compelling, credible, and coherent.
And when someone suggests that perhaps you ought to "start from the bottom" in your new field, respond (firmly but cheerfully) that you've already done your time at the base of several pyramids. You're here to start from where you've earned.
You are not a beginner. You are a full-stack individual of wondrous experiences and amazing capabilities.
Good night, and good luck.
The Three Ages of Man by Titian (1490–1576) is licensed under Public Domain.
