Should job titles still guide early talent career advice?

Why the label on a role is becoming less relevant within the future of careers.

Photo by Mahdis Mousavi on Unsplash

Ask a careers adviser what they tell a nervous eighteen year old and you'll hear a familiar refrain; work out what job title you want, then work backwards. Pick the destination, plan the ladder, then climb.

It's simple advice based on how careers worked for many years. It's also increasingly disconnected from how work actually gets structured, resourced for, and delivered.

A title was never the job

A job title has always been a summary, not a specification. It was a linear way of compartmentalising work, not a meaningful description of what a person actually does day to day. Two Marketing Managers at two different companies can have very little in common. Different levels of responsibility, autonomy and expertise depending on how the role has been packaged up.

Early talent are often told to chase the title anyway, based on their degree subject. Find the job title that matches your ambition, get the qualifications that unlock it, and apply. The problem is that the title was never a reliable proxy for the work, the skills required, or whether someone would actually enjoy doing it. It was just the most visible thing to anchor advice to.

And visibility is not the same as alignment.

Fixating on titles reduces options, not ambiguity

The tighter someone holds onto a target job title, the smaller their world of opportunity becomes. This isn't just a hunch, it shows up in the data on both sides of the hiring relationship.

Robert Walters found a 46% rise in the number of UK and Ireland job adverts carrying ‘lead’ or ‘manager’ in the title throughout 2023, despite requiring no more than two years' experience. The same research found that 40% of hiring managers had struggled to find suitable candidates specifically because job titles were confusing or overstated. Inflating or narrowing a title to make a role sound more attractive doesn't improve the quality of applicants, it muddies who applies and who's actually right for the role.

For early talent, someone who only searches for roles carrying a specific title filters out adjacent jobs that could suit them just as well, sometimes better, simply because the label doesn't match the one in their head. A role titled ‘Insight Analyst’ might involve more strategic, client-facing work than one titled ‘Consultant’ at a different firm. If you're only searching for the word you were told to chase, you'll never see the role that you may be more aligned to.

Sticking to job titles as a career goal also sets rigid expectations of the career itself. It implies a fixed sequence, this title, then that one, then the next, when in reality most career paths move sideways as often as they move up. Advice built around a title assumes a straight line exists to walk. It rarely does.

The trap starts earlier than the job search. Most ‘what can I do with my degree’ tools are still built to put degree subject in, list of job titles out, and increasingly they sit next to a disclaimer telling students their degree doesn't actually limit them. Students notice the gap between the two. Ask around and you'll hear the same thing from graduate after graduate; the messaging says skills, but the tools and advice say titles. A history graduate isn't just qualified as an Archivist or Teacher, they've built skills that map to dozens of titles nobody thinks to mention. Career advice that leads with a subject-to-title lookup, however it's caveated, skips the harder, more useful step which is helping the graduate to articulate their transferable skills, what motivates them and their aspirational archetypes.

Titles carry more than ambiguity, they carry prestige. ‘Lead’ or ‘Consultant’ can signal status in a way that shapes who feels able to apply. Graduates from less privileged backgrounds are less likely to have had the coaching, internships or family precedent that teaches someone to read past a grand-sounding title, or to apply for a modestly titled role that's actually a strong opportunity. Reducing how much weight a title carries in career advice doesn't just widen the pool of roles someone considers, it removes one more filter that quietly favours those who already know how the game is played.

Job design is adapting in real time, but titles are not

Job design is moving fast, reshaped constantly by new tools, new priorities, and work that didn't even exist two years ago. Employers fold emerging skills into existing roles, split old responsibilities apart, and bolt AI-adjacent tasks onto positions that were never built to hold them.

What rarely gets updated at the same pace is the job title. UK graduates are already applying into a market where the label on a vacancy tells them less than it used to. The Institute of Student Employers found the average UK graduate role now attracts around 140 applications, while separate analysis has found graduate-level postings falling year on year even as demand for the underlying skills holds up. The work has moved on. The title hasn't caught up, and candidates end up applying, or not applying, based on a signal that no longer means what it says.

When the currency itself is being devalued, building career advice on top of it stops making sense.

What should anchor the advice instead

If not the title, then what? The more useful unit isn't the role name, it's the underlying combination of skills, capabilities and behaviours that make someone effective across a range of roles that might carry very different names.

According to a 2025 CIPD report, 83% of UK employers are now prioritising skills-based hiring over traditional qualifications. That's not a niche shift, it's becoming the default filter employers use to evaluate people, which means it should be the default filter early talent use to evaluate opportunities too.

Thinking in skills and behaviours rather than titles does something else useful; it opens up the myriad of roles a person might genuinely enjoy, rather than narrowing them to the one they’ve settled on without any experience to know how aligned it may be. Someone who is naturally curious, comfortable with ambiguity, and good at synthesising information might thrive as a research analyst, a strategy consultant, a product manager or a journalist. Four different titles, one overlapping skillset. Advice anchored to a single title would only ever have shown them one of those four doors.

This is not an argument for ignoring titles altogether, they still matter for pay bands, for CVs, for the search filters recruiters use. It's an argument for putting them in their proper place; a label applied after the fact, not the compass used to navigate before it.

Semantic data models are already providing better clarity

If this all sounds abstract, it's worth pointing out that the infrastructure to talk about careers in terms of skills rather than titles already publicly exists in the UK, in various forms. One of the challenges of HRIS systems such as Workday or SuccessFactors, or even LinkedIn, is that they all have taxonomies and/or ontologies that analyse all the data its users provide but without much transparency on how they’re structured.

Nesta's UK Skills Taxonomy was built by analysing 41 million UK job adverts and clustering the skills mentioned within them, rather than the titles attached to them. The result is a hierarchy of roughly 10,500 distinct skills organised into 143 specific clusters, 35 broader groups, and 6 top-level categories, alongside a set of 66 identified transferable skills that sit outside any single job family, things like teamwork, budgeting, and problem-solving, that show up across wildly different roles.

Search the taxonomy by job title and it shows you the skills underneath. Search by skill and it shows you every title those skills feed into. The interconnected data points are what help early talent to understand how skills map to work and visa versa, providing much richer knowledge about what job market opportunities might align to their strengths.

The Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) does something similar for technology and digital roles specifically. Rather than defining jobs by title, the SFIA framework defines seven levels of responsibility and a set of professional skills and generic behavioural attributes that can each be held at one or more of those levels. A person's SFIA profile, their level of accountability plus their specific skills and behaviours, can describe a role far more precisely than a static job title ever could, and it can travel between employers who may use completely different titles for equivalent work.

Both tools point at the same underlying shift; as skills taxonomies and ontologies mature, career advice has a structured, evidence-based alternative to the ‘pick a title’ approach. A young person can look up the skills behind a role they're curious about, and just as usefully, look up which other roles share those same skills. That is a fundamentally more open way to explore a career rather than starting with a job title and hoping the rest follows.

As tools like these become more embedded in careers platforms, job boards and internal HR systems, the practical effect is that skills and behaviours become searchable, comparable and portable in a way titles never were. That's the direction career advice is moving but how accessible is it currently for early talent to be thinking differently?

Redesigning the advice, not just the language

Careers advice that leads with ‘what title do you want’ is asking early talent to answer a question the labour market itself can no longer answer consistently. It sets them up to filter out roles they'd love and filter in roles that don't match the promise or expectation.

The better starting questions should be open questions that help individuals discover the attributes of a job, work environment and company that will help them learn and grow the most. Titles will keep shifting, inflating, and meaning different things at different companies. Contextualising data such as skills, capabilities and behaviours, helps early talent to follow the job market in real time to make more informed choices.