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Cliff Maxwell

Cliff Maxwell

Co-founder and CEO of Vocation, an AI-powered career coaching platform built on Harvard Business School research.

Jun 24, 2026

6:17
So can you enlighten us about the difference between the two and why we should care?
6:24
Yeah, certainly.
6:24
I think progression ultimately is-- It's a function of two things.
6:28
When we say career progression, we often think of the career ladder, the idea that I need to continually be moving up and doing something that impresses my friends or my family or pays me additional dollars every time I move forward, and we get the sense that if we're not moving up or progressing in that way, then, then we're going backwards or we're not making the, the strides that we need to.
6:51
And certainly for someone like myself, who's been a fairly ambitious person, right, and wanted to do big and important things, it comes with a, a large set of expectations around what I should be doing or with this degree that I have, what types of roles I should be considering, because you start to feel like if I'm not progressing along the ways that I've prepared for or invested time and energy in against, then something must be wrong.
7:16
And I felt that pressure a lot earlier in my career, feeling like I had to do the thing that was expected or that was consistent with what a ambitious person should be doing and at a pay rate they should be getting paid.
7:27
But the difference between that-- Uh, oh, sorry, the second, the second element of, of progression is often what a company wants.
12:03
... how you constructed this.

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