‍What titles were always really measuring

Job titles were never designed to measure the quality of your work. They were designed to manage the complexity of organisations, to tell one department where another department ended, to signal to the outside world how seriously to take someone, to give people a reason to stay without giving them more money, and keep them devoid of real fulfilment under the garb of that 'title'.

They measured tenure. They measured political navigation. They measured the ability to make a manager feel comfortable enough to advocate for you in a room you were not invited into.

What they rarely measured was the thing that actually made you valuable: your thinking, your judgement, your ability to solve problems that nobody else could see clearly enough to even name.

The shift that is already underway

Something is changing, and it is being driven by forces that do not particularly care about org charts. AI is compressing the distance between junior and senior output. Skills-based hiring is replacing credential-based hiring at companies including Unilever, IBM, and a growing number of India's GCCs. The professionals who are thriving are not the ones with the most impressive titles. They are the ones with the clearest sense of what they can actually do — and what they want their work to mean.

This is not a generational rebellion. It is a recalibration. And it is happening across career stages, not just among GenZ professionals who never bought into the system in the first place. Mid-career professionals who have watched reorganisations flatten their titles without changing their responsibilities are asking the same question. Senior leaders who have everything the hierarchy promised and still feel the gap are asking it too.

What should matter instead

If the title is not the measure, what is?

A portfolio of skills that travels with you regardless of which organisation you are inside. The ability to point to problems you solved, people you grew, and decisions that held up over time. A working life that draws on what you are genuinely good at rather than what the next rung of the ladder requires you to perform.

And underneath all of that, something that career conversations treat as soft but is in fact the most precise indicator of sustainable performance: whether the work gives you energy or takes it. Whether it connects to something you find worth doing. Whether, at the end of a demanding week, you feel spent in the way that good work makes you feel spent, or hollowed out in the way that wrong work does.

Fulfilment is not a luxury metric. It is a performance metric. People who find genuine meaning in their work outperform those who do not — consistently, over time, across industries. The research on this is not ambiguous.

The harder question

The title told you where you stood in someone else's structure. It said very little about whether that structure was worth standing in, whether the work you were doing inside it was building the version of yourself you actually wanted to become, or whether the years you were spending were moving you toward something that would feel worth it when you looked back.

These are not soft questions. They are the questions that determine the quality of a working life.

The professionals WOCULT most admires are not the ones with the most impressive designations. They are the ones who figured out some early, some after years of chasing the wrong thing, that the title was never going to give them what they were actually looking for. And who had the clarity and the courage to start building around what would.

The title was never the point.

The work, the skills, the purpose, the people, and the life you build around all of it - that was always the point.

It still is.

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