This video is an excerpt from a live training webinar hosted by Chrissy Scivicque, Career Coach & Corporate Trainer. The full video and worksheet are available in the Career Success Library.

The topic of this webinar was, “Career Advancement for Administrative Professionals.” In this excerpt, Chrissy explains the difference between two important terms: Career Advancement and Career Progression.

Watch the video to hear Chrissy’s thoughts or skip to the transcript below the video. 

Let’s talk a little bit about terminology. If you’ve attended any of my training sessions in the past, you know that I consider it very important that we’re all on the same page and we’re talking about the same things. So I want to be very clear about a few terms.

There’s two different terms that tend to be used interchangeably. Those are career advancement and career progression. We tend to use these terms interchangeably, but they do mean different things. So let’s talk about what each of them means.

On your worksheet, you’ll see under understanding terminology, you have a first bullet point, and it says advancement. Advancement traditionally involves a formal job or title change, and often includes an increase in pay. So you have two fill ins here under this bullet point, the first fill in is formal and the second fill in is pay.

So for example, if you are an administrative assistant and you receive a promotion to become an executive assistant, that is a formal title change, and typically it’s going to come with a pay increase. So that’s advancement. Advancement is typically where we put all of our attention, and it’s not the only way that we can grow our career. The good thing about advancement, though, is that it’s very obvious. On a resume, you can clearly see when someone has advanced in their career because their title changes. You can see the evolution of the title and that tells you very clearly that someone has advanced in their career. So that’s the good thing about advancement.

Now, just beneath that, you see a second bullet point, and it’s talking about progression. So progression is a little bit different. Progression usually involves a change in responsibilities. So you’re filling the blank there is responsibilities. The thing is that it can be formal or informal, and it can come with a pay raise or maybe not. You know, progression can happen if you’re in the same role and you have the same title, but you get a great opportunity to work on a new type of project that really stretches your skills. Maybe you don’t get any different pay for working on that project. Maybe your title is still the same as it was before, but you’re still progressing in your career because you’re learning something new and you’re being challenged in a different way.

Progression is very important, but it’s harder to see on a resume. If your title hasn’t changed. The only way you can show that progression is through your accomplishments and really explaining how your duties and responsibilities have evolved. So it’s a little bit more difficult to show, but it’s still valuable. Nonetheless, both progression and advancement are important. And in fact, progression often leads to advancement. So sometimes we have to take on those new responsibilities without the pay and without the title so that we can progress. And when we’ve done that enough, then we get the formal advancement, then we get the nice title change and the pay raise.