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Talented, ambitious workers (big fish) often join highly competitive organizations (big ponds), though they sometimes instead choose less competitive organizations (small ponds) offering brighter promotion prospects. Big fish exist in both types of organizations, though average worker ability is higher in big ponds. Top executives enjoy higher wages in big ponds. Choosing a big pond allows workers to signal high ability. Workers sometimes overestimate or underestimate their abilities, choosing the wrong pond. Big ponds tend to be larger in total employment. All of the preceding phenomena are shown to be consistent with equilibrium in a new theoretical model of careers. (JEL J24, M53)

In a multitask, market-based promotion tournament model, under different environments concerning employer learning about worker ability, it is shown that: (a) asymmetric learning in multitask jobs is a necessary condition for strategic shirking (i.e., underperforming on certain tasks to increase the promotion probability); (b) when learning becomes increasingly symmetric on one task, the effort allocated to that task could increase or decrease, but effort on the other task increases; (c) strategic shirking does not occur in equilibrium in single-task models; and (d) promotions signal worker ability even when there is symmetric learning on one task, if learning is asymmetric on another.