I'm in my 30s which means I've been working for well over half my life at this point. I have a college degree and haven't been unemployed in nearly a decade. I've been in my current industry for 8+ years now and on average I stay at jobs for around 2.5 years before moving onto something else with better pay. I've never once worked for a company that had promotions on the table in any meaningful sense, and most haven't even offered raises.
I like my current job/career path just fine, but it feels like I've been at the bottom of the totem pole since I started working, period. And it's not because I'm bad at my job or anything like that, seeing as I got a stellar performance review recently. It's just weird to hear my friends from college talk about how they're senior consultants at their firm now and I'm just stuck here at age 33, still being an assistant at a big corporation.
But it's like, if I have to leave a job after 2.5 years because there are no raises or paths to promotion, am I just stuck at the bottom until I retire? Does anyone else feel this way?