Assessing Career Attainment via a Non-Wage Measure

This paper proposes a non-pecuniary measure of career achievement, seniority. Based on a database of over 150 million resumes, this metric exploits the variation in how long it takes workers to attain job titles. A person’s seniority is defined as the number of years it takes the median individual—within the same industry and firm size category—to achieve that person’s job title. Seniority aligns with standard markers of success—it is positively correlated with both wages and educational attainment. To demonstrate its value as a measure of career progression, we show that individuals with higher seniority levels in the public sector are more likely to transition to higher-paying positions in the private sector. When non-monetary factors influence career choice, evaluating labor market outcomes using non-wage measures, such as seniority, offers significant advantages.