Building Careers in Project-Based Organizations: Breadth, Fit, and the Path to Advancement

Project-based organizations allow employees in ostensibly similar roles to acquire very different experiences by working on different kinds of projects. We study how people build careers in these contexts, examining when employees choose to diversify their experience—both in terms of project content and collaborators—and how the resulting diversification affects their career advancement. Using longitudinal project data from a services organization, our results suggest that employees initially ex