This article first appeared in The Aligned Leader by Archbright. Subscribe to receive fresh leadership insights, HR strategies, and workplace trends every other week, before they're published on our blog. Follow the newsletter on LinkedIn →
Across industries, employers are talking about workplace readiness gaps. In this three-part series, I'm exploring what we’re seeing and what leaders can do to strengthen their talent pipelines, improve engagement, and develop future leaders who will shape the next chapter of their organizations.
For decades, career growth followed a relatively simple formula: perform well, gain experience, and earn a promotion. Today, that model is becoming harder to sustain. Employees are staying in the workforce longer, organizational structures are flatter, and many experienced professionals are finding themselves caught between early-career growth opportunities and senior leadership openings.
What do you do with an employee with 10-20 years of experience who has steadily progressed, but you have no room for growth? That’s the challenge facing most workplaces right now. As of late 2025, 20% of Americans aged 65 and older are still in the workforce (a percentage that has quadrupled since the 1980s), creating a bottleneck for Gen X and millennials in mid-career positions with no room to move up.
The challenge for employers isn't simply how to promote people. It's how to keep them engaged, growing, and preparing for future opportunities when advancement may be years away.
If there’s no room for promotion, what can an employer do to help prepare mid-career employees for their next steps? Here are three actionable steps employers can take to invest in their teams.
A 2026 Deloitte Survey of millennial employees shows the top skills employees are interested in developing are public speaking, leadership, AI fluency, communications skills, and creativity. Providing opportunities to develop these skills may lead to new opportunities within a different department or improve work in ways you previously hadn’t considered.
And you can get creative with this, and solicit ideas for a personalized approach. Options like providing a stipend for university courses, certificate programs, or professional skills courses are traditional. But you can expand and provide access to online training, development days, or even conferences to build skills and grow without traditional classroom education.
Wellbeing has never been more important at work. Burnout is a very real issue that impacts employees mentally, emotionally, and physically and mid-career professionals are at risk even as they seek promotional opportunities. It’s not a personal issue; it’s a systemic one. Organizations that foster burnout also experience lower engagement, high turnover rates, and lower team morale.
One SHRM survey found that 45% of burned-out employees were actively seeking another job. Studies show constant pressure to deliver, long hours, and an unstable economy weigh heavily, especially on mid-career employees, especially those in the middle of their careers who are balancing growing workplace responsibilities with demands outside of work. It’s a damaging problem, but there are solutions and ways to stop burnout before valuable employees disengage.
Look for signs like low energy, increased negativity, and declining performance as key indicators that something is wrong, especially in previously high-performing team members. If they come back from the weekend or vacation exhausted, have less enthusiasm for work, or report feeling overwhelmed by routine tasks: this is your sign to act.
Heavy workloads and unrealistic expectations are among the biggest contributors to burnout. Employers may need to adjust priorities, clarify roles and responsibilities, and create space for employees to focus on what matters most. Leaders should model healthy behaviors as well. If employees routinely see emails arriving at 10 p.m. or feel pressure to be available during personal time, the message is clear, regardless of what policies say.
Other ways to build a healthier workplace include providing role clarity for each team member, defining your priorities and listening to employee concerns about deadlines, and increasing recognition and appreciation of your team.
You might not see a clear path to promotion for every mid-career employee at this exact moment, but knowledge transfer is an excellent way to continue investing in your team and show them you do see a future when an opportunity arises.
Does your organization have a succession plan? If knowledge transfer only occurs when senior leaders decide to retire, you’re risking a rocky transition. By encouraging leaders to share their wealth of industry knowledge with their mid-career teammates you’re not forcing the older generation out to make room for another.
Knowledge transfer shouldn't be viewed as replacing experienced employees. Instead, it's a way to preserve institutional knowledge while preparing future leaders to succeed. It benefits both groups: senior employees have the opportunity to leave a legacy, while mid-career employees gain exposure, insight, and readiness for future leadership roles.
2024 to 2027 represents the peak retirement years for the Baby Boomer generation. By putting a plan into place that emphasizes mentorship, succession planning, and knowledge sharing, organizations can navigate leadership transitions more successfully while developing the next generation of leaders.
Another gap that occurs especially in the mid-career zone is a lack of performance management. Mid-career employees are experienced enough to require less oversight, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need regular check-ins, clarity on responsibilities, and coaching to progress to continue growing.
One mistake organizations often make is assuming that experienced employees need less leadership. While they may need less supervision, they still need feedback, development opportunities, and conversations about where they want their careers to go next.
Don’t ignore the needs of your mid-career employees simply because they’re self-sufficient. Setting regular check-in times, setting goals, and spending time together are all important parts of managing every member of your team. At Archbright, we use a quarterly review schedule that allows us to assess four quadrants of performance throughout the year, and we’ve included that same framework in our performance management tool, Align.
It is also a good practice to view the data organizationally. Collecting Quarterly Performance Insights (or QPIs) of how the company is performing can help you uncover trends before they’re obvious. Understanding where mid-career employees want to go with their careers can help you spot opportunities for expansion you may have otherwise missed.
I’ll leave you with a few questions about how your organization supports mid-level employees:
Thank you for subscribing to The Aligned Leader. My hope is that each issue offers practical insights you can apply with your team right away. Next edition, tune in for the third and final part of the Workplace Readiness Gap series.
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