Source page: McKinsey & Company
Commentary
Moving on up
Economy | Human resources | Jobs
August 8, 2022 – Taking new roles at work usually means more responsibilities—and bigger rewards. Analyzing data on workers in four countries, the McKinsey Global Institute found that employees who made the most frequent and “bold” career moves were more likely to end up in higher earning quintiles. This was most pronounced among workers in Germany (32 percent) and the United Kingdom (34 percent) who were on track to move into higher earnings quintiles. Click through to the interactive below to see more results.
To read the report, see “Human capital at work: The value of experience,” June 2, 2022.
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Visual form
Slide-based alluvial flow chart showing movement between national earnings quintiles.
Layout / body structure
Each slide centers one country and uses the same left-to-right flow layout. Five earnings quintiles are stacked on the left under Where they started and repeated on the right under Where they end up, with curved colored bands running across the middle to show how people move between quintiles over a 30-year working life.
What is being compared
The chart compares upward mobility across four country views: United Kingdom, Germany, United States, and India. Within each country, it compares the starting earnings quintile distribution with the ending earnings quintile distribution and highlights the share of people on track to move into a higher national earnings quintile.
Measurement system
The key headline metric is a percent for each country, printed above the flows. The visual itself is categorical rather than axis-based: the quintiles are ordinal ranks from Bottom quintile to Top quintile, and the width of each flow band indicates how large each transition path is.
Visible structure inside the graphic
Each country panel repeats the same five-color quintile blocks and a bundle of crossing bands. Dark upper-quintile bands stay near the top, lighter lower-quintile bands rise upward in some paths and stay flat or move less in others, and the crossings in the center show that mobility comes from many smaller transitions rather than one single jump.
Main takeaway from the visual
The chart shows that experience and role changes can move a meaningful share of workers into higher earnings quintiles, but the effect differs by country. The United Kingdom and Germany show the strongest upward-mobility headline values, while India shows a much smaller share on track to move up.
Key standout values or extremes
The country headlines are 34 percent for the United Kingdom, 32 percent for Germany, 30 percent for the United States, and 23 percent for India. That makes the United Kingdom the highest visible mobility case in this sequence and India the lowest.
Controls / sequence, when applicable
This is a slide-based sequence. The reader moves country by country through the same quintile-flow template, rather than filtering a single chart in place.
Companion media, when applicable
There is no separate companion audio or video; the chart is the full visual on this page.