The Company You Keep: The Outsized Effect of Employer Practices on Pay, Promotion, and Retention

The industry a worker enters matters far less than the employer they work for. This report from the Burning Glass Institute and Tullman Family Office draws on the career histories of more than 700,000 Chicagoland workers across 500 companies and 20 industries to examine how firm-level decisions shape pay, promotion, and retention. The findings are striking: workers at top-quartile Chicago companies earn 89 percent more, are promoted twice as often, and stay a third longer than those at bottom-quartile firms. By measuring four pillars of employer practice (access, pay, promotion, and retention), the report identifies what separates mobility leaders from the rest, and what Chicago's employers can do to build workplaces where opportunity is real, measurable, and shared.