Are Lateral Career Moves Good for Your Career?
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Release Date: 06/09/2026
Long-Term Unemployment, Employment Gaps, and Today's Job Market
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
What happens when someone spends years looking for work, only to be judged by the gap on their resume? In this conversation, I sit down with HR professional Tank Rhodes to discuss long-term unemployment, hiring bias, employment gaps, and what today's job market looks like from both sides of the hiring process. Whether you're a job seeker trying to understand today's hiring market or a hiring manager making difficult hiring decisions, this conversation offers valuable perspective on how the labor market has changed and why employment gaps don't tell the whole story. In this episode, we discuss:...
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Career Change Without Starting Over
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Are you miserable in your career? If the answer is yes, a career change might be worth exploring. But if the answer is no, that does not automatically mean you should stay exactly where you are. One of the biggest mistakes professionals make is treating career change as something that only happens when a situation becomes unbearable. In reality, many career changes happen because someone wants to build new skills, create more flexibility, increase income, improve quality of life, or move toward work that fits who they are now. In this final episode of Season 13, Julia Toothacre talks about how...
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The 5 Types of Managers: How to Navigate Each Leadership Style
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Every manager has a different leadership style, and understanding how your manager leads can help you communicate more effectively, build trust, and continue growing your career. If you're planning to stay in your current role for a while, learning how to work with your manager may be one of the highest-impact things you can do. In this episode, I break down five common management styles, including the strengths and challenges of each, so you can better understand your current manager, evaluate future opportunities, and adjust how you work together. This framework comes from an earlier season...
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Staying Market Ready in an Uncertain Job Market
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Market conditions can change your career faster than you think. In this episode of Control Your Career, Career Coach and Strategic Career Consultant Julia Toothacre discusses how professionals can stay market-ready, build career leverage, and prepare for unexpected career changes without living in constant job search mode. Over the last two decades, professionals have experienced the 2008 recession, the rise of LinkedIn, remote work, return-to-office mandates, layoffs, and the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. These shifts have changed hiring trends, career opportunities, and the skills...
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Are Lateral Career Moves Good for Your Career?
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Career growth is not always vertical. For a long time, professionals were told to climb the corporate ladder, stay loyal, take the promotion, and keep moving up. But that advice does not always reflect how careers actually evolve today. In this episode of Control Your Career, Julia Toothacre explores the value and complexity of lateral career moves. She explains why some professionals resist them, why a move without a higher title can feel risky, and how lateral opportunities can quietly build long-term career leverage. A lateral move may not look impressive right away. It may not come with a...
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What Is Career Sponsorship? Why Advocacy, Not Just Hard Work, Gets You Promoted
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
A lot of professionals still believe career growth mostly comes from working hard, doing good work, and eventually being recognized for it. But inside organizations, opportunities often begin forming before jobs are officially posted. Conversations happen early. Leaders compare notes. Someone’s name comes up because trust already exists. That is where sponsorship starts to matter. In this episode of Control Your Career, Julia Toothacre breaks down the difference between mentorship and sponsorship and explains why sponsorship is one of the strongest forms of career leverage inside...
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The difference between authority and influence at work
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
If you’ve ever wondered why some people get pulled into decisions at work while others are told after the fact, this episode is for you. In this episode of Control Your Career, I break down how influence actually works at work and why it has very little to do with your title, even though that’s what most people focus on. You can be experienced, capable, and respected in your role and still find yourself left out of key conversations, and that gap usually has nothing to do with effort and everything to do with influence. We’ll talk through what it looks like to move from executing...
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The Truth About Workplace Reputation and Career Advancement
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Workplace reputation plays a direct role in career advancement, promotions, and the opportunities you’re considered for long before any formal conversation happens. In this episode, career coach and strategic career consultant Julia Toothacre breaks down how reputation at work actually forms and why it often matters more than your performance. If you’re doing strong work but not getting promoted or pulled into bigger opportunities, your reputation may not reflect the level you’re operating at. In this episode, you’ll learn: How workplace reputation is built through repeated behavior ...
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5 Skills That Build Trust With Leaders
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Building trust with leaders at work is what drives career growth, influence, and access to more responsibility. In this episode of Control Your Career, career strategist Julia Toothacre breaks down the five skills that build trust with leaders and shape how you’re perceived at work. You can be reliable, do good work, and still not be the person leaders turn to when it matters. That’s because trust isn’t built through execution alone, but through how you think, how you communicate, and how you make decisions. In this episode, you’ll learn: How judgment influences trust and...
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How to Manage Yourself During Organizational Change
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
If you are navigating a leadership change, reorganization, strategy shift, or internal restructure, you are probably wondering how to manage yourself during organizational change without damaging your reputation. This episode breaks down how to stand out at work during uncertainty, how to build influence inside your company, and how to grow your career without waiting for a promotion. Organizational change creates instability when your reporting lines shift, priorities change, and projects lose owners. In those moments, most professionals focus on frustration or job security. Fewer people...
info_outlineCareer growth is not always vertical.
For a long time, professionals were told to climb the corporate ladder, stay loyal, take the promotion, and keep moving up. But that advice does not always reflect how careers actually evolve today.
In this episode of Control Your Career, Julia Toothacre explores the value and complexity of lateral career moves. She explains why some professionals resist them, why a move without a higher title can feel risky, and how lateral opportunities can quietly build long-term career leverage.
A lateral move may not look impressive right away. It may not come with a promotion announcement or a bigger title. But it can expand your business understanding, strengthen your relationships, build transferable skills, and make you a more adaptable professional over time.
Julia also explains when lateral moves can create confusion, especially if your career story becomes hard to explain. Nonlinear career paths can create leverage, but only when you can connect the dots clearly.
This episode covers:
• Why professionals resist lateral moves
• How the corporate ladder mindset still shapes career decisions
• When a lateral move can strengthen your long-term positioning
• Why cross-functional exposure matters for leadership growth
• How transferable skills support career mobility
• When nonlinear moves create confusion
• How to evaluate a lateral opportunity strategically
• Why career decisions based on optics can limit future leverage
If you are considering a lateral move, a career change, or a role that does not look like an obvious step up, this episode will help you think about the bigger picture.
Sometimes the move that looks sideways now creates more options later.
Read The Blog: https://ridethetidecollective.com/2026/06/09/are-lateral-career-moves-good-for-your-career/
Explore all episodes: https://ridethetidecollective.com/podcast/
Connect with Julia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliakrussell/
Visit the website: https://ridethetidecollective.com
Get career resources: https://ridethetidecollective.com/free/
Remember, you control your career.