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Why does burnout peak at social media manager level? Carolina Barbosa connects missing junior roles, unclear strategy and overloaded teams in our Career Ladder research.

Carolina Barbosa is a Senior Social Strategist & Brand Consultant, and she has been one of the most quoted contributors to this research so far, partly because she is unusually willing to talk about burnout in specific rather than general terms. What she gave us in this conversation is the clearest causal account anybody has offered of why the burnout in this profession happens where it happens.

Carolina's starting position on our framework is that the lowest rung is increasingly being skipped. The market, as she sees it, moves people almost straight into executive or coordinator roles, and companies routinely ask for experience that somebody straight out of university does not have and cannot have.

Her verdict is that stage one roles should exist, and that the fact they are being missed in the current market is a major flaw.

That matters because of what follows from it, which is the part of her argument I think is the most important thing in this interview.

Carolina identifies the social media manager and senior manager stage as where the most severe burnout occurs, and her explanation is structural rather than personal.

Because stage one has been skipped, the person at manager level is expected to handle execution, strategy and everything in between simultaneously.

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