I've stopped optimising for the ladder. I'm optimising for leverage.

A ladder assumes one company gets to define the climb. Leverage doesn’t.

The older I get, the less interested I am in climbing the career ladder, and the more interested I am in building career leverage.

I saw an argument recently that careers in technology narrow as you get older: fewer senior roles exist than junior ones, ageism is real, staying anywhere too long can count against you, and unless you become an executive, a founder, an investor or a recognised expert, your options start shrinking. Some of that rings true. But I think it names the wrong mechanism. The problem isn’t that experience becomes less valuable as you get older. It’s that companies aren’t always very good at recognising the full value of accumulated experience. Those are different problems, and they call for different fixes — one is about the labour market, the other is about how you present what you’ve accumulated.

Tenure and stagnation are not the same thing

I’ve been at Sage for a long time. If all I’d done in that period was the same content job every year, I’d be worried too — that version of tenure really does narrow your options, because it gives an employer or a future hiring manager nothing to distinguish year eight from year one.

That isn’t what happened. The work has moved through journalism, SEO, content strategy, customer research, thought leadership, AI, GEO, events, video, and increasingly the systems surrounding content rather than the content itself. Different problems, different tools, different parts of the business, most of it self-directed rather than assigned. Length of service was never the thing that would have put me at risk. A job description that hadn’t moved would have been.

So I’ve started treating tenure and stagnation as separate questions, because the ageism argument quietly collapses them. Long time in one place, with the work substantively the same throughout, is a real risk. Long time in one place, with the work continually redefined, is closer to the opposite — it’s evidence of exactly the range the “narrowing options” argument says gets harder to demonstrate.

The bigger risk is letting an employer define you

The risk I actually worry about isn’t tenure. It’s letting an employer completely define your professional identity.

If the only thing the outside world knows about me is “content writer at Sage” or “content marketing manager at Sage” — the two titles I’ve actually held there — that’s a fairly narrow description of what I’ve actually learned to do, narrower than either job itself, and much narrower than the range of problems I’ve worked on inside them. Nobody outside the building has a reason to know the difference unless there’s a record of it somewhere they can see.

That’s one reason I’ve been building Editorial Intelligence alongside my day job. It isn’t an attempt to start a consultancy. It’s becoming career infrastructure: a place to develop my thinking, a public record of how I work, a laboratory for experimenting with AI, a way to learn technical skills I wouldn’t naturally use in the day job, and potentially, one day, another source of income. None of those depend on Sage, and none of them disappear if my role there changes.

What AI actually changes

AI is clearly going to remove some of the production work that people like me have traditionally been paid to do. I don’t think the answer is to become an even faster writer — that’s optimising for a version of the job that’s shrinking. I’ve been using it to expand what I can do instead of doing the same thing quicker.

Concretely: I can build a website without being a developer, prototype tools, maintain a knowledge system, analyse research, experiment with different models, develop frameworks, and publish the thinking as I go. The Portable Intelligence framework is the more formal version of the same idea — the durable layer has to sit in something you own, not in a company system or a model’s conversation history, or none of it survives a change of employer or platform. What all of it adds up to is turning years of fairly messy professional experience into something that’s actually portable, which is the part the ladder never asked for and the labour market has started to reward.

A different model for later in a career

The traditional model looks something like experience leading to promotion, leading to management, leading to senior management. It’s a reasonable model when the rungs exist in enough supply, and for a long stretch of a career they do.

I’m increasingly more interested in a different sequence: experience, then judgement, then systems, then reputation, then optionality. Experience is the raw material. Judgement is what accumulated experience turns into if you keep applying it to new problems rather than repeating the same one. Systems are what let judgement outlive any single job — a framework, a body of writing, a way of working that’s documented well enough to be picked up by someone else, including a future version of you. Reputation is what forms once that system has been visible for long enough to be checked against reality. Optionality is what reputation buys: work you can choose rather than work you have to accept.

The honest objection

The strongest version of the counterargument is that this can be a story people tell themselves after the fact rather than a strategy chosen in advance — that “I’m optimising for leverage now” is sometimes just a more flattering way of describing not having been promoted, dressed up once it’s too late to change the outcome. I can’t fully rule that out from the inside; nobody assessing their own career is a neutral witness to it.

What I’d say in response is that the test isn’t the framing, it’s whether anything durable actually exists outside the job. A ladder you didn’t climb and a system you didn’t build look identical from the same distance. They stop looking identical the moment someone asks to see the work.

The other honest caveat is one I’ve made before and won’t rebuild here: this kind of position is easier to hold once you already have the standing to build from. Raising the floor is not building a ladder is the fuller version of why that isn’t transferable advice to someone earlier in a career, where the accumulated experience this whole argument depends on hasn’t happened yet.

There’s a more concrete version of the same caveat, and I’d rather name it than leave it implicit. For the last few years especially, a meaningful part of why I haven’t taken employment risk has had nothing to do with career strategy at all. My wife is in the UK on a marriage dependent visa, and the stability that comes with steady employment has mattered more during that process than any argument about leverage would have. Some of what reads in this piece as deliberate positioning was also just the sensible choice available to me at the time. Both things can be true — the strategic reading and the practical one — and I’d rather admit the second than let the piece imply the first was the whole story.

Not an exit plan

None of this means leaving employment. Sage can still be a very useful place to learn, experiment and do substantial work — most of what feeds the systems side of this still comes from problems I only get to see because of the day job. It just means I don’t want one company, one title or one career ladder to represent the entirety of my professional value.

Perhaps that’s one of the opportunities AI gives experienced people. Not just the ability to do their current job faster. The ability to build a career that extends beyond it.