Something wrong that I’ve done in my own career was to become the principal expert in company/industry specific technical details. My philosophy in education was always to steer to general engineering and business because of its wide applicability and my desire to understand the complete operation, and work at an executive level. Now I find myself with career ambitions that are seen as a negative at my current employer. They would find it difficult to replace my technical skills, so they prefer to keep me in my current role - where I’m most valuable. The thing that isn’t discussed in the article is that the most valuable employees are usually those making the technical contributions and housing the knowledge, which is why managers don’t want to move them. Unfortunately in business these employees are not compensated for their fair value or promoted because the management layers have their own incentives to find the best contributors possible at the lowest possible cost. In my case by doing the natural thing and learning all the details of my position and producing high quality work, I’ve made management hesitant to change my role.