Want to learn how to run a company? Sitting a few feet from the person who already does it may be one of the most valuable career moves available.
Chief of staff roles are booming across corporate America, offering ambitious workers a rare combination of executive access, six-figure compensation and a potential springboard into senior leadership. Job postings for corporate chiefs of staff more than doubled year over year, according to Revelio Labs data reported by Bloomberg, while the number of people holding the title in North America has more than tripled since 2021, according to Live Data Technologies.
The compensation can match the access. Senior chiefs of staff can reportedly command salaries above $200,000, while some positions in technology and finance can reach $400,000 or more, plus equity.
But the biggest perk may be what happens inside the job.
A chief of staff can spend every day alongside a CEO or another senior executive, helping decide which problems deserve attention, translating strategy into action and coordinating projects across departments. They may help prepare board materials, sit in on critical meetings, track company priorities, troubleshoot stalled initiatives, and act as a sounding board for the executive they support.
That proximity provides something difficult to replicate through a traditional corporate career path: a panoramic view of how a company operates.
Companies increasingly value that versatility as executives contend with AI adoption, geopolitical uncertainty and the challenge of managing increasingly complex global businesses. Chiefs of staff help executives manage competing priorities and make sure their decisions translate into action across the company.
The role can also accelerate the career of the person doing it.
McKinsey analyzed publicly available data on roughly 250 chiefs of staff and found that the median tenure in the role was just 2.3 years. Two-thirds were promoted afterward, moving up by more than one organizational level on average. Just 10% went directly into another chief-of-staff role. About 75% of the chiefs of staff McKinsey studied worked for CEOs, while the rest supported other C-suite executives, regional leaders, or board chairs.
That makes the job something of an apprenticeship in executive leadership. For workers eyeing an eventual VP, COO, chief strategy officer, or CEO title, a few years spent next to the person at the top can offer an unusually close look at what it takes to get there.
Ruth Umoh
ruth.umoh@fortune.com
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