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Career Lab glossary

The Career Lab Glossary

The language of being stuck is vague. “I feel behind.” “Something is off.” “I should be further along by now.” Vague language keeps you guessing, and you cannot close a gap you have not named.

This page defines the terms Career Lab uses to measure a career. Every definition matches how the free assessments actually score it, so the words here and the numbers on your results mean the same thing.

Term 01

Career stall

A career stall is when a qualified professional stops advancing in title, pay, or scope while their responsibilities keep growing. It is rarely a performance problem. The work is still good. What stopped is the recognition of it, and the stall almost always traces to an unmeasured gap in one of three areas: career momentum, negotiation readiness, or resilience.

A stall has specific, recognizable signs:

  1. A promotion you were told was coming went to someone else.
  2. You are doing senior-level work under a mid-level title.
  3. Your salary has been flat for two or three years while your responsibilities grew.
  4. Performance reviews come and go without telling you anything you can act on.
  5. People you trained are moving up ahead of you.

The stall is common. In a 2025 Gallup survey of nearly 16,000 U.S. workers, one in four employees said they lack opportunities for career advancement.

The way out starts with measuring all three areas at once and closing the biggest gap first. That process has a name: a career audit.

Term 02

Career audit

A career audit is a structured self-assessment of where your career stands right now, across your momentum, your negotiation readiness, and your resilience. Unlike a performance review, you run it yourself, it covers your whole career arc instead of one role, and it ends with a ranked plan you control.

A complete career audit scores three dimensions:

  1. Career momentum. Whether your attitude, habits, and daily actions are building toward your next role or maintaining your current one. Scored by the AHA assessment.
  2. Negotiation readiness. How prepared you are for the conversations that set your pay and your title. Scored by the LATTE assessment.
  3. Resilience. Your capacity to take a professional hit and reset instead of stalling. Scored by the R4 assessment.

The full guide, including how to run a manual version yourself, is at What is a career audit? The scored version takes about five minutes per assessment and is free to take.

Term 03

Career momentum

Career momentum is the direction your daily habits are pointing: toward the role you want next, or toward the role you already have. A goal that keeps slipping is rarely a motivation problem. It is a habits-and-actions problem, and you can only fix what you can see.

Momentum is built from three inputs that compound over time:

  1. Attitude. The beliefs you carry into your work, and whether they are pointed at growth or at self-protection.
  2. Habits. The repeatable behaviors that either build toward your next role or quietly maintain the current one.
  3. Actions. The specific, visible moves you make: what you volunteer for, what you document, what you ask for.

Career Lab scores momentum with the AHA Framework in about five minutes.

Term 04

Negotiation readiness

Negotiation readiness is how prepared you are, before a high-stakes conversation starts, to state your number, anticipate the pushback, and hold your walk-away point. It is a measurable skill, not a personality trait, and it shapes your pay and your title as much as your performance does.

In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, only 28% of women and 32% of men said they asked for higher pay the last time they were hired. Among the workers who did ask, two-thirds came away with more money than the original offer.

Career Lab scores negotiation readiness from 0 to 100 and places the result in one of four tiers:

  1. Emerging (below 50). You are at the beginning of understanding your negotiation power.
  2. Developing (50 to 69). You know negotiation matters. You have not had a consistent system for it.
  3. Established (70 to 84). You are already negotiating. The gains now come from sharpening your approach.
  4. Advanced (85 and above). You negotiate well and the next edge is advanced positioning in the highest-stakes rooms.

Readiness is built with the L.A.T.T.E. Method, and the free LATTE assessment scores where you stand today.

Term 05

Leadership gap

A leadership gap is the distance between the leadership your next role demands and the leadership you consistently deliver today. It hides well. Strong results at your current level can mask it for years, and it usually surfaces at the worst possible moment: in a promotion conversation you did not know you were losing.

Career Lab measures the leadership gap across five scored areas:

  1. Communication. Whether senior leaders hear you and take you seriously, including in high-stakes and adversarial rooms.
  2. Decision-making. Whether you make decisive calls under pressure, with incomplete data, and own the outcomes.
  3. Team building. Whether you build teams that perform and stay, through clear roles, accountability, and safety.
  4. Strategic thinking. Whether you connect daily decisions to where the organization is going, and communicate up with that lens.
  5. Emotional intelligence. Whether you read what people need, not just what they say, and respond in ways that build trust.

The free Leadership Profile assessment scores all five and names your biggest gap.

Term 06

The L.A.T.T.E. Method

The L.A.T.T.E. Method is a five-step preparation system for high-stakes workplace conversations, created by Jacqueline V. Twillie in her book Don't Leave Money on the Table. Each letter is a step you complete before, during, or after the conversation:

  1. Look. Gather the facts: the situation, the data, the stakes, and who holds power in the room.
  2. Anticipate. Prepare for pushback: name the objections you expect and plan a response to each one.
  3. Think. Set your strategy: your target outcome, your acceptable outcome, and your walk-away point.
  4. Talk. Execute the conversation: how you open, how you make the ask, and how you hold your position.
  5. Evaluate. Reflect afterward: what worked, what did not, and what you will do differently next time.

The stakes of skipping preparation compound over a whole career. In Women Don't Ask, economist Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever estimate that by neglecting to negotiate the starting salary for her first job, a woman may sacrifice over half a million dollars in earnings by the end of her career.

The free LATTE assessment scores your readiness across these steps, and the full toolkit includes a LATTE planner that walks you through all five for a specific conversation.

Term 07

The AHA Framework

The AHA Framework is Jacqueline V. Twillie's self-audit for career momentum, drawn from her books Don't Leave Money on the Table and Dear Resilient Leader. It examines the three inputs that decide whether you are moving toward your next role or maintaining your current one:

  1. Attitude. The mindset and beliefs underneath your work.
  2. Habits. The behavior patterns you repeat, whether or not you chose them.
  3. Actions. The specific next moves you take, and whether they are visible to the people who decide your trajectory.

The free AHA assessment takes about five minutes and scores your momentum instantly.

Term 08

The R4 Framework

The R4 Framework is Jacqueline V. Twillie's process for working through a professional setback, from her book Dear Resilient Leader. A layoff, a reorg, a public failure, a bad manager: careers are long and setbacks are not optional. R4 turns recovery from a feeling into a sequence:

  1. Risk. Name what is being tested right now, at its full weight, without minimizing it.
  2. Resilience. Document the strength you already have. You have recovered before; this step makes that evidence deliberate.
  3. Reset. Release the pattern that kept you stuck and choose the one you are replacing it with.
  4. Reward. Name exactly what coming through this proves about you, in your own words.

The free R4 assessment scores your resilience and shows you which stage needs attention first.

Put numbers to the words.

Definitions tell you what a stall is. The audit tells you where yours is. Three free assessments, about five minutes each, instant scored results.

Start the free audit →