Title Infalation hurts the individual and the industry

IT industry is hot in India (this is stale news! You don’t need me to say this). I do get to interact with many new recruits. They don’t just negotiate with the salary these days but also the title/designation. Folks want fancy and “heavy” titles. I always tell them finally what counts is what you deliver and not the title. Infact if you have a jazzy title and your work is below par it only hurts your image. Knowledge@Wharton has published a very relevant article about title inflation,

An overabundance of C-level job descriptions — like the increasing number of “A”s routinely passed out in classrooms — is cheapening the prestige and achievement that top titles and high grades once signaled. Yet chief you-name-it titles can also be a reflection of corporate restructuring, says Betsey Stevenson, professor of business and public policy at Wharton. Job title inflation, she suggests, “seems to go hand in hand with the flattening of the organization. People want to be distinguished in some way from everyone else, but in a flat organization there is less hierarchy and therefore less opportunity to be distinguished. One good thing about hierarchy is you can climb a corporate ladder. If there is no ladder, there is nothing to climb.”….more