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  Forté Signals

  The Myth Of The Career Ladder

  A colleague of mine said something the other day that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. We were talking about career ladders, the metaphor, the model, the whole idea, and she paused and said: Why did we all assume the ladder went up? I mean, what are ladders for, other than to get […]

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  Articles

  The Virtual Career Fair That Felt Surprisingly Human

  Most people do not hear the words virtual career fair and think ‘warm’ or ‘personal’, or ‘human.’ They think awkward networking, a sea of resumes, carefully rehearsed elevator pitches, and recruiters bouncing between conversations while candidates try to stand out in tiny squares on a screen. And why not?  Career fairs often feel transactional even […]

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  Career Advancement

  “I was basically a chair”: 5 tips for telling your career story

  Yesterday, my daughter texted a picture from work. Two tiny preschoolers, both perched squarely in her lap, grinning at the camera. It was adorable. She’s spending her gap year at a preschool, before she starts graduate school in the fall. I’ve gotten a lot of texts like this.   But it was her caption that made […]

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  Articles

  Your First Promotion: What You Need to Know

  When people talk about women’s advancement, the conversation usually jumps straight to the C‑suite. But the real story starts much earlier, at the very first step up. For more than seven years, we’ve had a name for the place where women’s careers most often stall: the Broken Rung. First introduced by McKinsey andLeanIn.org in 2019, […]

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  Forté Signals

  The Graduation Speech I Wasn’t Asked to Give

  This is the time of year when people who are famous, accomplished, or both get invited to stand in front of a room full of graduating students and say something memorable. Graduation speeches are supposed to be inspirational. They are meant to give you good advice. And they are supposed to send you out the […]

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  Forté Signals

  Signs vs. Signals: The Two‑Letter Difference That Explains a Lot About Work

  For reasons that probably say something strange about me, I’ve been thinking about traffic signals a lot lately. Not because I’m secretly passionate about municipal infrastructure or have taken up a side hustle in urban planning. If anything, I’m the person who still gets irrationally annoyed when a left turn arrow takes too long. But […]

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