You’ve taken on more responsibilities. You’re mentoring junior team members. You’re leading projects that were once reserved for your boss. But your title—and paycheck—haven’t changed.

Welcome to the world of quiet promotions—a growing trend where employees are informally “promoted” with higher workloads or leadership duties but without the official title, recognition, or salary bump to match.

It’s a phenomenon that’s quietly reshaping how advancement looks in the modern workplace. And it’s forcing professionals to ask an uncomfortable question: Am I leveling up, or being taken advantage of?

What Exactly Is a Quiet Promotion?

Unlike formal promotions that come with HR paperwork, raises, and announcements, quiet promotions are subtle. They often happen after a team reshuffle, a resignation, or a shift in priorities. You might hear phrases like:

• “You’ve really stepped up.”

• “Can you just take the lead on this?”

• “We see you as a future leader.”

And while those words sound encouraging, they rarely come with a formal update to your role or compensation.

According to a 2024 Gartner study, 1 in 3 employees said they’ve experienced a quiet promotion in the past 18 months, and most said they weren’t sure how to advocate for what they deserve in return.

Why It’s Happening More Now

There are a few key drivers behind the surge in quiet promotions:

1. Cost-conscious organizations – With tighter budgets, some employers are stretching team capacity without adding headcount or raising pay.

2. Workforce reshuffling – As older employees retire or shift careers, younger professionals are picking up the slack—without clear pathways or support.

3. Remote work blur – In hybrid or fully remote environments, leadership visibility is harder to measure, making role creep easier to justify.

4. Fear of job loss – Many employees hesitate to push back or ask for more compensation, worried it may jeopardize their standing.

While the intent isn’t always malicious, the outcome is often the same: doing more without getting more.

The Upside (If You Play It Smart)

Now, let’s be clear—not all quiet promotions are bad. In fact, for strategic professionals, they can be a golden opportunity to prove leadership ability, build influence, and position themselves for future growth.

Taking on higher-level tasks can help you:

• Test-drive leadership without the pressure of a formal role

• Build a portfolio of wins that support your promotion case

• Gain visibility across departments

• Strengthen your internal network

The key difference lies in how you leverage the moment—do you let it define your worth, or do you define your next move?

How to Handle a Quiet Promotion Strategically

If you’ve found yourself in this situation, here’s how to turn it into an advantage:

1. Document everything – Track projects, responsibilities, results, and any leadership contributions you’ve made outside your formal job scope.

2. Initiate a conversation – Schedule a meeting with your manager. Frame it as a career check-in. Lead with value: “Here’s what I’ve taken on, and here’s the impact.”

3. Make your ask – Whether it’s a title change, salary adjustment, or clear promotion timeline, don’t assume they’ll offer it on their own.

4. Know your market value – Use platforms like Glassdoor, Levels.fyi, or PayScale to benchmark what someone in your expanded role should earn.

5. Set a deadline – If you don’t receive a response or action within a reasonable time, it may be time to explore opportunities elsewhere.

The Employer’s Responsibility

Organizations must also reflect on how they’re using their talent. Quiet promotions can feel like short-term wins for management, but long-term, they erode trust and create high-performing teams that feel underappreciated.

If employers want to retain talent, especially younger workers who value transparency and growth, they need to:

• Clarify role expectations regularly

• Offer formal development plans

• Align responsibility with recognition

• Create a culture of earned advancement, not silent exploitation

What It Means for Workforce Development

The quiet promotion trend reflects something deeper: a mismatch between evolving job roles and outdated HR practices. In today’s fast-moving economy, career development must be proactive, transparent, and skill-based.

Workforce development is no longer just about learning programs—it’s about career pathways that feel fair, flexible, and intentional.

For employees, this means owning your story and building a brand around value, not just output. For companies, it means developing future leaders with your people, not through them.

A Final Shift in Perspective

So if you’re carrying more on your shoulders these days, take a breath and look at the bigger picture. Yes, it might be a quiet promotion—but your response doesn’t have to be quiet at all.

You have every right to name your growth, advocate for it, and shape what comes next.

Because in today’s workforce, silent leadership isn’t sustainable—and real career development starts with knowing your worth.

If you’ve been watching the headlines in 2025, you’ve probably noticed a familiar pattern: tech layoffs, shifts in hiring priorities, and a growing demand for roles that didn’t even exist five years ago. But here’s what’s not making as much noise—job seekers are changing, too.

Across industries, today’s professionals are becoming more agile, more proactive, and more intentional about the way they build their careers. And it’s starting to reshape how employers think about talent.

What’s Driving the Shift?

Several factors are accelerating this evolution:

• Shorter skill shelf lives. What was considered advanced two years ago might now be a baseline requirement.

• More career pivots. Professionals aren’t waiting for the “perfect time” to make a move—they’re seeking roles that better align with their values, skills, and life goals.

• Increased access to training. With micro-courses, certification bootcamps, and flexible degree options, upskilling is more accessible than ever.

What’s emerging is a new kind of workforce—one that is more self-directed, more skills-focused, and more resilient.

The Rise of Career Builders, Not Just Job Fillers

Gone are the days of staying in one lane. Workers are building layered skill sets across project management, communication, data tools, and AI—even if they’re not in a traditional tech role.

Employers are taking notice. In many industries, hiring managers are now valuing adaptability and willingness to learn over years of experience in a narrowly defined position.

Some are even rethinking degree requirements, placing more weight on portfolios, performance assessments, and practical knowledge.

What Companies Can Do Next

To keep up, organizations need to look beyond resumes and job titles. The most successful companies are:

• Partnering with community colleges and workforce programs to grow local pipelines

• Offering internal upskilling paths to prepare talent from within

• Reimagining job descriptions to focus on capabilities instead of credentials

• Creating more equitable access to training, especially for underrepresented groups

This isn’t just about filling roles—it’s about future-proofing teams.

Final Thought:
The job market may be shifting quickly, but professionals are keeping pace—and in many cases, setting the pace. As the line between training, hiring, and growth continues to blur, one thing is clear: the next era of work will belong to those who are ready to build as they go.

For more insights on emerging talent trends and workforce shifts, stay connected with WORxK Global News.

Is everyone in your organization aligned on who your customers are? Does your organization understand your customers? Since at least the turn of the millennium, businesses have turned to personas as a way to address questions like these. Personas are insights-based, easy-to-understand representations of a group of people, including their goals, needs, and behaviors. They likely exist in some form in your organization. But I’d hazard a guess that they aren’t living up to their full potential — i.e., eliciting empathy, helping teams prioritize, and driving human-centric decision-making.

The Challenges Of Creating Effective Personas

Why the disconnect? Most personas we see are based on outdated or ineffective practices, leading them to collect dust on a shelf. Companies succumb to pitfalls such as including identities that invite bias, overloading personas with irrelevant data, or using personas as the default audience framework when other tools (e.g., segmentations) would be a better fit. The good news is that these pitfalls are avoidable.

The Qualities Of An Effective Persona

Personas remain a powerful design tool in 2025 for brands that take an intentional approach to planning, building, and activating personas. This starts with knowing the qualities of an effective persona, which include being:

• Purpose-built. Personas should only exist when there is a clear “why” for creating them. Creating personas “because we need personas” is not a good reason. What will personas help your company achieve? Are you creating personas to improve experience design decisions? To align on priority customers across the company? Will your personas be used companywide to drive empathy and understanding or to inform very project-specific needs? The answers to these questions will guide who needs to be involved, what research you need to do, and what shape your persona artifacts will take.
• Insights-based. Personas are only as effective as the research that goes into them. While creating personas based on internal assumptions or the collective knowledge of the team creating them — referred to as hypothesis or proto personas — can be a useful exercise to identify research needs, you should never use these personas to inform decision-making. Instead, ensure that personas are based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data.
• Goals-oriented. Unlike segments, which are based on quantifiable data such as demographics or psychographics, a persona is based on patterns of the user’s, audience’s, or customer’s goals, motivations, and behaviors, ultimately helping to enable empathy. Make sure this data takes center stage in your personas.
• Inclusive. Personas have the potential to cause bias and exclusion, so take one of several approaches to ensure that your personas are inclusive. You might shift away from assigning identities to personas altogether, instead using an archetype approach to visualize customer goals, motivations, and behaviors. If moving away from identities isn’t practical — perhaps because your personas are already rolled out — then take the approach of including quotes from a range of customers, noting specific factors in terms of diversity next to each quote (e.g., age, gender, abilities). Other approaches include showing a collage of identities or reflecting diversity across the persona set. For example, include a persona with a disability as a way of nudging employees to keep accessibility top of mind.

Unlocking The Full Potential Of Personas

Whether you’re getting started on your persona journey, updating your personas, or striving to unlock more value from the personas you have, start with the foundation of these qualities of a modern persona. When created with these practices in mind, personas can be the powerful empathy-building tool they were always intended to be.

Conclusion

In conclusion, creating effective personas is crucial for businesses to understand their customers and drive human-centric decision-making. By avoiding common pitfalls and focusing on purpose-built, insights-based, goals-oriented, and inclusive personas, companies can unlock the full potential of personas and foster empathy. To learn more about how to create effective personas and drive customer experience, register to attend Forrester CX Summit North America in June and explore the full agenda for the event.

FAQs

• Q: What is a persona in the context of business and customer experience?
  A: A persona is an insights-based, easy-to-understand representation of a group of people, including their goals, needs, and behaviors.
• Q: What are the qualities of an effective persona?
  A: An effective persona is purpose-built, insights-based, goals-oriented, and inclusive.
• Q: How can personas help businesses drive human-centric decision-making?
  A: Personas can help businesses drive human-centric decision-making by providing a deep understanding of customer goals, motivations, and behaviors, and by fostering empathy across the organization.