How to Become a C-Level Executive: The Complete Pathway

The honest answer to how to become a C-level executive is structural rather than personal. Most C-suite seats are filled from inside the company that already employs the person who takes them: 60% of the 168 new chief executives appointed across the S&P 1500 during 2025 were internal promotions, and 78% of them arrived from roles carrying operating accountability rather than from a functional staff position. Which seat you occupy, what you are accountable for, whether that seat exists where you work, and whether your employer promotes from within decide far more than any quality of character.

That is measurable, and it is measured every year. Spencer Stuart, Crist|Kolder, Heidrick & Struggles, Russell Reynolds and the Talent Strategy Group each publish an annual account of how people reach the top of large companies, with disclosed universes and disclosed dates. Almost none of it appears in the guidance written on this question, which tends to run on wage tables and on percentages with no study behind them.

This guide covers the four routes separately, because they behave differently: chief executive, chief financial officer, chief operating officer and chief human resources officer. It covers the profit-and-loss question and what the evidence for it actually is, what has changed in the past 18 months, how the US, European and South African markets differ, what the qualifications data shows, and what the sponsorship research really measured. Every figure carries its publisher, the population it describes and its date. Where the data does not exist, this guide says so rather than filling the space.

Last reviewed 7 August 2026.

What is a C-level executive?

A C-level executive holds a role reporting into the chief executive or the board with accountability for a whole function or a whole business, rather than for part of one. The term is loose at the edges, and it has been stretched by title inflation, but the seats with a consistent published evidence base are four: chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer and chief human resources officer, the last also titled chief people officer.

Those four are the subject of this guide, because they are the four the annual research tracks. The route to chief technology officer, chief marketing officer, chief legal officer or chief risk officer is worth writing about when comparable data exists for them. It largely does not, and inventing it would be worse than leaving it out.

How to become a C-level executive: the four numbers that decide it

These four figures carry most of the argument. Each is stated with the population it describes, because the most common error in this category is quoting a number about one group as though it described another.

• 60% internal. Of the 168 new chief executives appointed across the S&P 1500 during 2025, 60% were promoted from inside the company. Spencer Stuart, 2025 S&P 1500 CEO Transitions, published February 2026 on data as at 31 December 2025.
• 84% first-time. 84% of those 168 had never been a chief executive before. Same source, same population.
• 78% from operating roles. 48% arrived from a chief operating officer or president role and 30% from a divisional chief executive role, against 9% from the chief financial officer’s chair. Same source, same population.
• About 36% of large companies have a chief operating officer at all. Crist|Kolder Associates, Volatility Report Summer 2025, data to 31 July 2025 across 667 Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies, records 248 sitting chief operating officers, or 36.7% in 2025 against a decade average of 35.4%.

Read the first three together and the route looks clear. Read the fourth alongside them and it stops being clear, which is the point of the next section.

One distinction to hold throughout. Some figures describe people newly appointed in a given year, and others describe everyone currently sitting in the chair. They answer different questions and they should never be blended. Spencer Stuart’s 60% is an appointment rate for 2025. Crist|Kolder’s figures describe who holds the seat today. Heidrick & Struggles’ Route to the Top 2025, published April 2025 across 27 markets, reports that 63% of current chief executives were appointed internally. The three converge closely, which is why the internal-promotion finding is solid, but they are not the same measurement.

The stepping stone that may not exist where you work

The standard advice on reaching the chief executive’s chair is to aim for chief operating officer. It is advice to compete for a seat that roughly two companies in three have never created.

Crist|Kolder’s Summer 2025 report finds that around 35% of its 667 large US companies have used a chief operating officer position over the past decade, and 36.7% did so in 2025. Meanwhile 48% of 2025’s new S&P 1500 chief executives came from a chief operating officer or president role. Both are true at once, and together they describe a bottleneck: a high-yield seat that most employers do not have.

The larger and much less discussed door is the divisional one. 30% of 2025’s new S&P 1500 chief executives arrived from running a division or a subsidiary as its chief executive. Among sitting chief executives, Crist|Kolder records 12.9% promoted internally from a divisional president role and a further 4.6% hired externally from one. A division is a business with its own revenue, its own costs and its own customers, and running one is the closest thing to a rehearsal for the group seat that most companies actually offer.

The practical consequence is a question rather than an ambition. Does the seat you are aiming for exist in your organisation’s structure? If it does not, the aim is not a plan, and the divisional route is likely to be the one your employer can actually give you.

The four routes, taken separately

Treating the C-suite as one path is the mistake that makes most guidance on this question useless. The four seats have different internal promotion rates, different feeder roles, different tenures and different qualification profiles. One of them, the chief human resources officer, breaks nearly every rule the others follow.

The route to chief executive officer

Spencer Stuart’s account of 2025, across the S&P 1500 and published in February 2026:

• 168 new chief executives were named during the year, the most since 2010.
• 60% were internal promotions.
• 84% were first-time chief executives.
• Prior role: chief operating officer or president 48%, divisional chief executive 30%, chief financial officer 9%.
• Average age at appointment fell to 54.4, from 55.8 in 2024.
• Average tenure of departing chief executives fell from 9.2 years in 2024 to 8.5 years in 2025.
• 19 new chief executives were appointed directly from their own company’s board, the most since 2020.
• Two-thirds had no prior board experience.
• Healthcare is a stated exception: the majority of new chief executives in that sector arrived from outside the company.

Crist|Kolder, describing the 677 chief executives sitting at its 667 companies as at 31 July 2025, gives the same shape from the other direction. 42.4% were promoted internally from a chief operating officer or president role, 12.9% internally from a divisional president role and 6.9% internally from the chief financial officer’s chair. Externally, 8.0% were sitting chief executives elsewhere, 4.6% divisional presidents and 2.2% other. Average age at hire is 52.9, average current age 57.8, and average tenure 7.5 years, longest in technology at 10.0 years.

The finance route to the top exists, and it is small. 9% of 2025 appointments and 6.9% of sitting chief executives came directly from the chief financial officer’s chair. That is not nothing, and it is not the main road.

The route to chief financial officer

Crist|Kolder’s population of 663 sitting chief financial officers, as at 31 July 2025:

• Roughly 40%, or 262, spent time in public accounting.
• 15%, or 102, spent time in investment banking.
• Only 24% arrived directly from another chief financial officer’s chair: 23.2% externally and 1.1% internally.
• Average age at hire 51.9, average current age 52.6.
• Average tenure 4.7 years, shortest in industrials at 4.1 years.

On turnover, Crist|Kolder records 71.8% of 2025 chief financial officer turnovers filled internally, with external appointments at 28.2%, down sharply from 47.1% in 2024.

Two things follow that the category rarely says. The chair is reached from inside the finance function but seldom from another chief financial officer’s chair, so three-quarters of the people holding the job were doing something else immediately before it. And at 4.7 years, average chief financial officer tenure is a little over half the 7.5 years of the chief executives they report to. The finance seat is a shorter and more volatile posting than its status suggests, and anyone planning towards it should plan for what follows it.

The route to chief operating officer

This is the most internal of the four seats and the least likely to exist. Crist|Kolder records 85.3% of 2025 chief operating officer hires as internal appointments, against 248 sitting chief operating officers across 667 companies.

Put those two facts together and the position is stark. If your employer has a chief operating officer and you do not work there, your chances of being appointed to it are slim, because roughly six in seven such appointments go to someone already inside. And at two-thirds of large companies the question does not arise, because there is no such seat.

The chief operating officer role is best understood not as a rung but as a decision a particular board has made about how it wants the business run. You cannot apply your way into a seat that has not been created, and the honest planning question is whether your employer creates them at all.

The route to chief human resources officer

The people function inverts almost everything above, which is why it deserves its own treatment rather than a footnote.

The Talent Strategy Group’s CHRO Trends 2025 Report, published 6 August 2025 on 2024 data covering 193 of the Fortune 200:

• 53% of 2024 appointments were internal successions, down from 73% in 2023.
• 79% of externally appointed chief human resources and chief people officers had already held that title elsewhere.
• 93% of new appointees had prior experience in human resources.
• 47% had held roles outside the human resources function.
• 100% hold undergraduate degrees and 73% hold at least one advanced degree.
• 23% had global experience, down from 38% in 2023.
• Appointees from a human resources business partner background outnumbered those from a centre of excellence background two to one.

Russell Reynolds Associates’ Global CHRO Turnover Index, published 27 May 2026 across 12 major indices including the S&P 500, FTSE 100, DAX 40 and Nikkei 225, adds the global picture: 155 chief human resources officers were appointed at public companies during 2025, up from 124 in 2024; 60% were first-time appointees, down from 65%; and average tenure of outgoing chief human resources officers rose to 5.2 years.

Three features distinguish this route. Prior experience in the same function is close to mandatory at 93%. External hiring rewards having already held the title, at 79%, which is the opposite of the chief executive market’s 84% first-timers. And no profit-and-loss accountability is involved at any point.

The 20-point fall in internal succession between 2023 and 2024 is the sharpest single movement anywhere in this data. On the Talent Strategy Group’s own figures the function has moved, in one year, from a strongly internal market to an evenly split one. Russell Reynolds separately notes a growing preference for external hires. For anyone inside a people function, that is the most consequential number in this guide.

Does becoming a C-level executive require P&L experience?

Not as anything a study has measured, and not for every seat. For the chief executive’s chair the great majority of appointees arrive from roles that carry operating and profit accountability; for the chief human resources officer’s, none do. The evidence needs stating carefully, because this is where confident writing outruns what was actually measured.

What the evidence is. Of new S&P 1500 chief executives in 2025, 48% came from a chief operating officer or president role and 30% from a divisional chief executive role. That is 78% from roles that conventionally carry operating and profit accountability, against 9% from the chief financial officer’s chair. Among sitting chief executives, Crist|Kolder’s internal chief operating officer and president share of 42.4%, plus 12.9% internal and 4.6% external divisional presidents, gives roughly 60% from operating roles, against 6.9% from finance.

What the evidence is not. No source we located measures profit-and-loss ownership as a variable. Every figure above is a role title. Chief operating officer, president and divisional chief executive conventionally carry operating accountability, and the inference is a strong one, but it is an inference. So the defensible statement is that the overwhelming majority of new chief executives arrive from roles that carry operating and profit accountability. The statement that a study found profit-and-loss experience to be a prerequisite is not defensible, because no such study exists, and we are not going to make it in order to sound more certain.

The exception that makes it legible. 93% of newly appointed chief human resources officers came from human resources, a function that does not carry a profit and loss. The threshold is function-specific, not universal, which is more useful than the blanket instruction to go and get profit-and-loss experience.

A dissenting practitioner argument exists and is worth acknowledging: that a great chief executive does not need profit-and-loss experience, and that judgement, capital allocation and the ability to build a team matter more than having carried a number. That is opinion rather than evidence, and we treat it as such, but a reader planning a route should know that the position is held by serious people and that the data above describes what boards have done, not what they must do.

The practical reframing: the useful question is not whether you have owned a profit and loss. It is what you have been accountable for that a board can price, and whether anyone outside your function can see it.

What has changed, and it changed recently

Two years ago the standard position was that boards want a proven chief executive. In the most recent full year of data, they overwhelmingly did not.

• 84% of new S&P 1500 chief executives in 2025 had never held the job before (Spencer Stuart, February 2026).
• 86% of global public-company chief executive hires were first-timers, per Russell Reynolds Associates’ 2025 Global CEO Turnover Index, reported in February 2026.
• Average age at appointment fell to 54.4, from 55.8 the previous year (Spencer Stuart).
• Two-thirds of new chief executives had no board experience, and 19 were appointed straight from their own company’s board (Spencer Stuart).
• 446 chief executives left publicly traded US companies in 2025, the highest annual total on record, up from 373 in 2024, on tracking that runs back to 2002 (Challenger, Gray & Christmas, 2025 CEO Turnover Report, published 4 February 2026).

One reconciliation matters, because the headlines went both ways. Total US chief executive exits across all company types fell 9% in 2025, from 2,221 to 2,032. Public-company chief executive exits hit a record in the same year. Both are Challenger’s figures and both are true. The churn is concentrated where the seats are visible and the pressure is public.

At the largest end of the market, external hiring has risen. Heidrick & Struggles’ Route to the Top US 2026, published 12 May 2026 on a survey of 1,033 chief executives and board members globally, 253 of them in the US, reports that 27% of Fortune 500 chief executives appointed since 2024 were external hires, up from 18% before 2024. That is not in conflict with Spencer Stuart’s 60% internal rate: Fortune 500 is a different and larger universe than the S&P 1500, and “appointed since 2024” is a different window. Both describe a real thing.

What this adds up to for someone planning a route is the most encouraging finding in this guide, and it is recent enough to be worth acting on. Having never held the title is not the barrier it was assumed to be. The proposition that reaching the C-suite is a matter of time served does not survive an appointment market where 84% of the winners were doing it for the first time and the average age of appointment is falling.

Does the same career read the same way in every market?

No, and the difference between the two best-documented markets is large enough to change where a plan should point.

The United States

As above: a public-company market appointing first-timers at 84% to 86%, promoting internally at around 60%, with record public-company turnover and a falling average appointment age. It is, on the current evidence, the most open large market for a first C-level appointment.

Europe

Heidrick & Struggles’ Route to the Top Europe 2026, published 18 June 2026 on responses from 299 European chief executives and directors within the same 1,033-person survey, describes a market running the opposite experiment. Almost half of the chief executives at Europe’s largest listed companies have previously held the chief executive title elsewhere. Average European chief executive age is 57.5 in 2026, up from 56 in 2021.

One caveat travels with that figure, and it is Heidrick’s own construction rather than our reservation: “previously held the title elsewhere” is not the same as “externally appointed”, because someone promoted internally from a divisional or subsidiary chief executive role would also qualify. It should not be restated as an external-hire rate.

Two further findings from the same survey are worth a planner’s attention. 38% of respondents report a mismatch between what they believe will matter for company success over the next two to three years and their current chief executive’s greatest strengths. And only 10% say the quality of the internal chief executive candidate pool is a key performance indicator for the chief executive and the chief human resources officer, which is a striking thing to learn about a market that prefers experienced appointees.

For a reader considering a move between London and New York, the practical point is that the same career is read differently in the two places. The US market is currently more willing to appoint someone who has not done the job. Europe is more willing to appoint someone who has.

South Africa

Here the position is asymmetric and we would rather name the asymmetry than paper over it. South African executive pay data is current and well sourced. South African route data is not available to us.

Heidrick & Struggles’ Route to the Top 2026 interactive dashboard, published 22 April 2026, covers 1,664 chief executives at the largest companies across 28 markets as at 5 January 2026, and the market list includes South Africa and Kenya. It holds exactly what a South African reader would want: previous roles, share holding an MBA, appointment type, age and tenure. We were unable to extract the country-level figures from the dashboard’s interactive layer, and rather than generalising from US numbers to a market with a different ownership structure, a different governance code and a statutory equity regime, we have left the section out. It will be added when the figures can be quoted properly.

What can be said, from current primary sources:

• PwC South Africa’s 2025 Directors Remuneration and Trends Report, published 15 October 2025 on the JSE Top 200, records median chief executive total remuneration up 8% year on year and median chief financial officer total remuneration up 19%. Non-executive board member fees rose 12% on a median basis and board chair fees 6%. Remuneration policy resolutions drew 91.6% shareholder support and implementation reports 83.8%, with 5.4% of companies receiving under 50% approval on implementation reports against 2.6% the previous year.
• The Labour Research Service’s JSE Top 40 CEO Remuneration Report for financial year 2025, published May 2026 from 42 to 43 integrated annual report disclosures, records R6.7 billion paid in total to JSE Top 40 chief executives, a median total pay of R58 million and an average of R171 million, falling to R77 million once international outliers are excluded. The highest single figure is R1.7 billion, at AB InBev, followed by R1 billion at Naspers, both globally domiciled groups with a JSE listing. The highest-paid chief executive of a South African group is at Absa, on R148 million. Female chief executives averaged R44 million against a male average of R171 million.

Two structural features of the South African market bear directly on a route to the top, and both are covered in detail in the companion guides rather than repeated here. The Employment Equity Amendment Act 4 of 2022, which commenced on 1 January 2025 with regulations published on 15 April 2025, sets sectoral numerical targets that apply at Top Management and Senior Management levels, which means a South African executive appointment sits inside a live statutory measurement regime. And King V, effective for financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2026, changes how independence and prior executive service are assessed for anyone moving from an executive seat to a non-executive one. Both are set out in our guide to writing an executive CV.

Wider Africa, the Gulf and elsewhere

We found no route data. Searches returned agency listicles rather than research, and Heidrick’s dashboard covers Kenya but is subject to the same extraction problem described above. Conventions and appointment practices in those markets differ in ways that matter, and the right move is to ask a search consultant working the specific market rather than to assume that a US or European pattern travels.

What does a C-level executive earn?

This is the question most guidance on this subject answers first and specifies worst. Three figures are in circulation, they describe three different populations, and quoting one for another is how a number ends up wrong by two orders of magnitude.

The first describes a broad occupational category in one country. The second and third describe the chief executives of the largest listed companies in two different countries. A figure drawn from the first tells a reader planning a listed-company career almost nothing, and a figure drawn from the second or third tells a reader running a 40-person business something wildly misleading. Any pay claim on this subject that does not name its population should be discarded, however precise it looks.

Do you need an MBA to become a C-level executive?

No. A majority of the people holding the job do not have one.

Crist|Kolder, on its Summer 2025 populations: 43% of the 677 sitting chief executives hold an MBA, so 57% do not. Among the 663 sitting chief financial officers, 51.1% hold an MBA against 36.2% holding an accounting certification, with 12.7% holding both. Among chief human resources officers, the Talent Strategy Group records 100% holding undergraduate degrees and 73% holding at least one advanced degree, which is not the same as an MBA and should not be read as one.

Whether an MBA improves performance once you are there is contested in the academic literature, and the two best-known findings point in different directions.

• Against. Danny Miller of HEC Montréal and Xiaowei Xu of the University of Rhode Island, writing in Harvard Business Review in December 2016, studied 444 celebrated US chief executives who had appeared on the covers of Fortune, Forbes and BusinessWeek between 1970 and 2008. They found that chief executives with MBAs pursued costlier growth strategies and were less able to sustain superior performance than their counterparts without one. Note the sample period: it ends in 2008.
• Qualified in favour. Kallias and colleagues at the universities of Portsmouth, Cardiff and St Andrews, published in the Journal of Business Research and reported on 23 February 2023, studied US initial public offerings between 1998 and 2018. Firms led by chief executives with MBAs showed 11% higher three-year post-listing returns, and those led by PhDs 12% higher. The authors’ own qualification is the important part: “a stellar academic background is beneficial only to the extent that it can cater to specific organisational priorities”, and IPO investors “remain indifferent to CEO education if this is unrelated to the issuer’s main organisational and environmental challenges”. MBAs added value in larger and more complex organisations, PhDs in small, young or research-intensive ones.

The honest summary is that an MBA is neither necessary nor reliably advantageous. It is a minority credential at the top of large companies, it appears to matter more in large and complex organisations, and the literature on whether it improves performance disagrees with itself. Anyone telling you it is always advantageous is not describing the population that holds the job. What boards do recruit against, in the markets that publish it, is a written capability specification rather than a credential, which we set out in the executive skills boards are hiring for.

Sponsorship, and what the research on it actually measured

The distinction between a mentor and a sponsor is genuinely useful, and it comes from a single study whose evidence is considerably thinner than the confidence with which the distinction is usually repeated. Both halves of that sentence belong in print.

The useful part. Coqual, then the Center for Talent Innovation, set out the distinction in The Sponsor Dividend: leaders “who think they’re engaged in sponsorship fall short on the requirements of the role because they’re often actually playing an important but different one: mentor”. A mentor believes in your potential and advises you. A sponsor advocates for your promotion in rooms you are not in and provides what the report calls air cover. Those are different relationships, they call for different asks, and confusing them is the reason many senior people believe they have sponsorship when what they have is encouragement.

The part the category leaves out. The study was published in 2019 on fieldwork conducted in January 2018, among 3,213 US full-time white-collar professionals aged 21 to 65 holding bachelor’s degrees. It is one producer, one country, and the fieldwork is now eight years old. More importantly, what it measured was not advancement. It was satisfaction with rate of advancement: 34% of professionals of colour were satisfied without a sponsor against 56% with one; 45% of white employees without against 67% with; 57% of men without against 70% with; 57% of women without against 68% with. Among those acting as sponsors themselves, satisfaction with their own advancement rose from 51% to 61% for men and from 53% to 60% for women. The report states that it measures correlations rather than causal relationships, and it reports no pay figures at all.

The direction of causation is also unresolved, and it matters. High performers may attract sponsors rather than sponsors producing high performers. Nothing in the study separates the two.

So keep the distinction, which is a definition worth having, and hold the evidence loosely. The practical version: know whether the senior person invested in you is someone who advises you or someone who will spend their own credibility on you, because only one of those is useful when a succession decision is being taken and you are not in the room.

How senior appointments actually reach people

The advice to contact executive placement recruiters and wait is wrong twice over, and the second error is the more expensive one.

Retained executive search is approach-based rather than application-based. Consultants research a market, identify a slate and approach senior people who are not looking, and a CV enters the process after longlisting rather than before it. The AESC’s own account of the profession is quoted in full in our executive CV guide. Registering with a search firm and waiting is therefore not a strategy, because that is not the direction the process runs in. What determines whether a consultant researching a market finds you is whether your record is visible and legible, which is the subject of our guide to personal branding for executives. Which channel a given seat is actually filled through, and what each one will and will not do for you, is set out in our guide to the executive job search platforms and search firms.

The second error is the assumption that patience is a method. On the evidence in this guide, 60% of chief executive appointments and 85.3% of chief operating officer appointments go to someone already inside the company. Waiting to be found is a strategy aimed at the smaller share of the market, and it is passive about the larger one.

One boundary, stated plainly. Elite Executive Career Solutions does not place executives in roles and does not hold search mandates. Executive search and placement sit in a separate business within the same founder-led group, Elite Talent, which runs its own mandates and its own client relationships. This firm builds the case for a leader; it does not decide where that leader goes.

What actually decides the route

Five questions, in the order in which they bind. They replace the character list that this kind of guidance usually offers, because disposition is not what the data measures and not what boards appear to select on.

1. Does the seat exist where you work? Roughly one large company in three has a chief operating officer. If yours does not, the chief operating officer route is not available to you internally, and the divisional route is the one your employer can actually offer.
2. Does your employer fill that seat from inside? The published rates differ by function, though the figures come from different studies and different populations and are not directly comparable: about 60% for S&P 1500 chief executive appointments in 2025, 85.3% for chief operating officer hires and 71.8% for chief financial officer turnovers at Crist|Kolder’s 667 companies, and 53% for chief human resources officer appointments across 193 of the Fortune 200, that last having fallen 20 points in a single year. An internal route into a seat your employer fills externally is a plan built against the odds, and the reverse is equally true.
3. What are you accountable for that a board can price? Not what you manage. What moves, in whose numbers, when you decide something. For three of the four seats that means operating accountability; for the people function it means depth in the function itself, which 93% of appointees had.
4. Which market will read your career? The US public-company market appointed first-time chief executives at 84% to 86% in 2025. Around half of Europe’s large-cap chief executives have already held the title. The same record supports a different argument in each.
5. What is the succession horizon in front of you? Average chief executive tenure is 7.5 years and average chief financial officer tenure 4.7. A seat occupied for two years and a seat occupied for nine are different opportunities, and the second one is a reason to look sideways.

Notice what is absent. Nothing here turns on being hardworking, patient, well qualified or in good health. Those framings are common in this category, they are unsupported by anything in the annual research, and one of them sits next to a characteristic that UK employers are barred by law from asking about at all, which is set out with its source in our executive CV guide.

Common questions

How do most people become a C-level executive?

By internal promotion. 60% of the 168 new chief executives appointed across the S&P 1500 in 2025 were promoted from within, per Spencer Stuart’s February 2026 report on data as at 31 December 2025, and Heidrick & Struggles reports 63% of sitting chief executives across 27 markets as internal appointments. Internal rates differ by function, though the figures come from different studies and different populations and are not directly comparable: 85.3% of 2025 chief operating officer hires and 71.8% of 2025 chief financial officer turnovers at Crist|Kolder’s 667 companies, against 53% of 2024 chief human resources officer appointments across 193 of the Fortune 200.

What role do most CEOs come from?

An operating one. Of new S&P 1500 chief executives in 2025, 48% came from a chief operating officer or president role and 30% from a divisional chief executive role, against 9% from the chief financial officer’s chair. Note that only about 36% of large companies have a chief operating officer at all, per Crist|Kolder’s Summer 2025 report, which makes the divisional route the larger practical door.

Do most C-level executives have an MBA?

No. Crist|Kolder’s Summer 2025 data shows 43% of 677 sitting chief executives holding an MBA, so 57% do not. Among 663 sitting chief financial officers, 51.1% hold one. The academic evidence on whether an MBA improves performance is contested: a 2016 study of 444 US chief executives sampled from 1970 to 2008 found MBA holders less able to sustain superior performance, while a 2023 study of US IPOs from 1998 to 2018 found 11% higher three-year returns under MBA-led chief executives, but only where the education matched the organisation’s actual challenges.

How long does it take to become a C-level executive?

No source we located measures time from career start to a C-level appointment, so any specific number of years should be treated with suspicion. What is published is age at appointment. Spencer Stuart records the average age of new S&P 1500 chief executives falling to 54.4 in 2025 from 55.8 in 2024. Crist|Kolder records an average age at hire of 52.9 for chief executives and 51.9 for chief financial officers. Those are ages, not durations, and they are falling rather than rising.

Is it easier to become a first-time CEO in the US or in Europe?

On current evidence, the US. 84% of new S&P 1500 chief executives in 2025 were first-timers, and Russell Reynolds Associates reported 86% of global public-company chief executive hires as first-timers. Heidrick & Struggles’ Route to the Top Europe 2026, published 18 June 2026, finds that almost half of the chief executives at Europe’s largest listed companies have previously held the title elsewhere, and that average European chief executive age has risen to 57.5.

Are C-level roles filled from outside the company?

A significant minority are, and the share is rising at the largest end. Around 40% of 2025 S&P 1500 chief executive appointments went to external candidates, and Heidrick & Struggles reports that 27% of Fortune 500 chief executives appointed since 2024 were external hires, up from 18% before 2024. Those are different universes and different windows, so they should not be read as one trend line. External hiring is also strongly function-dependent: 79% of externally appointed chief human resources officers had already held the title elsewhere, while only 24% of sitting chief financial officers came directly from another chief financial officer’s chair.

Where this leaves you

The route to a C-level seat is a structural question with an evidence base, and almost none of that evidence appears in the advice usually written about it. Most appointments are internal. Most new chief executives come from operating roles. The seat most often named as the stepping stone does not exist at two-thirds of large employers. First-time appointments are at a record share, and the market for them is more open in the US than in Europe. A majority of the people in the chair do not hold an MBA.

What follows from that is not a checklist. It is an assessment of a specific person against a specific structure: which seats exist where you are, how they have been filled, what you are accountable for that a board can price, and which market is going to read the record.

Elite Executive Career Solutions has been doing this work for nine years, has positioned more than 10,000 professionals across 38 countries and five continents, and covers 1,154 distinct role titles across 26 primary profession families. Every executive engagement is human-written. Client identities are never disclosed, and no client document appears on this site.

Two engagements answer the questions in this guide. The Executive Role Suitability Report assesses a specific leader against a specific target role and says plainly where the case is strong and where it is not. The Executive Positioning Strategy builds the leadership proposition, the narrative and the differentiators that carry it. Where the destination is a board seat, the Board Pack and the Board & Leadership engagement are scoped by consultation, because a governance case is built against a specific matrix. All are delivered through the Executive Career Positioning Suite™.

Review the executive engagements and what each includes, or write to [email protected] to arrange a confidential consultation. If the immediate question is the document, start with the executive CV guide. If it is whether a search consultant researching your market can find and read your record, start with personal branding for executives.

About this guide

Published by the Executive Insights desk at Elite Executive Career Solutions, formerly Elite CV. The firm was established in December 2016 and has been trading since February 2017. Across nine years of practice it has positioned more than 10,000 professionals in 38 countries across five continents, covering 1,154 distinct role titles across 26 primary profession families. Every executive engagement is human-written and is delivered through the Executive Career Positioning Suite.

Client identities are never disclosed. Work is attributed by role, sector and country only, and no client document appears anywhere on this site. Companies named in this guide are named solely from published listed-company remuneration disclosures, and no individual is named. Every figure above carries its publisher, the population it describes and its date, and the full source list follows. Where a source is an interested party, dated, single or outside the market under discussion, the guide says so on the page rather than in a footnote.

Sources

Annual executive search and market research, methodology disclosed

• Spencer Stuart, 2025 S&P 1500 CEO Transitions: Behind the CEO Moment, published February 2026 on publicly available data as at 31 December 2025. Universe: S&P 500, MidCap 400 and SmallCap 600
• Crist|Kolder Associates, Volatility Report, Summer 2025, data through 31 July 2025. Universe: 667 companies drawn from the Fortune 500 and S&P 500, tracked since 1 January 1995
• Heidrick & Struggles, Route to the Top 2025: The Ascent Redefined, April 2025, 27 markets
• Heidrick & Struggles, Route to the Top US 2026, 12 May 2026. 1,033 chief executives and board members surveyed globally, 253 in the US
• Heidrick & Struggles, Route to the Top Europe 2026, 18 June 2026, 299 European respondents
• Russell Reynolds Associates, Global CHRO Turnover Index, 27 May 2026, 12 major indices
• The Talent Strategy Group, CHRO Trends 2025 Report, published 6 August 2025 on 2024 data, 193 of the Fortune 200
• Challenger, Gray & Christmas, 2025 CEO Turnover Report, 4 February 2026, tracking since 2002
• Russell Reynolds Associates, 2025 Global CEO Turnover Index, reported via HR Executive, 26 February 2026. Trade press used as a route to the underlying index

Government statistics

• US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, reference date May 2025, released 15 May 2026. SOC 11-1011, Chief Executives

Academic

• Danny Miller and Xiaowei Xu, via Harvard Business Review, December 2016. 444 celebrated US chief executives, sample period 1970 to 2008
• Kallias and colleagues, Journal of Business Research, reported 23 February 2023. US initial public offerings, 1998 to 2018

Research houses

• Coqual, formerly the Center for Talent Innovation, The Sponsor Dividend, published 2019 on fieldwork conducted January 2018. n=3,213, United States only, correlational, outcome variable is satisfaction with rate of advancement

South Africa

• PwC South Africa, 2025 Directors Remuneration and Trends Report, 15 October 2025, JSE Top 200
• Labour Research Service, JSE Top 40 CEO Remuneration Report, Financial Year 2025, May 2026
• Labour Research Service, Directors’ Fees Report 2025, on financial year 2024 data

Interested-party data, attributed as such in the body

• AFL-CIO, Executive Paywatch 2025, 2024 pay year, drawn from mandatory SEC pay-ratio disclosures

Carried by cross-reference from the companion guides

• AESC, Executive Search as a Profession, on retained search being approach-based. Quoted in full in the executive CV guide
• Acas, applying the Equality Act 2010, on UK employers being barred from asking a job applicant about health or disability at any stage of the application or interview process unless an exception applies. Quoted in full in the executive CV guide
• Employment Equity Amendment Act 4 of 2022 and the Employment Equity Regulations, South Africa. Set out in the executive CV guide
• King V, the Code on Corporate Governance for South Africa 2025, effective for financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2026. Independence and prior executive service are set out in the executive CV guide; the ethical leadership and declaration provisions are in the personal branding guide

Consulted and not used

• Heidrick & Struggles, Route to the Top 2026 interactive dashboard, 22 April 2026, 1,664 chief executives across 28 markets as at 5 January 2026 including South Africa and Kenya. Country-level figures sit inside an interactive layer we could not extract, so no South African route figures appear in this guide
• World Bank indicator CM.MKT.LDOM.NO, listed domestic companies. A figure of 571 listed companies across 73 countries could not be reproduced from it on four attempts
• A widely circulated set of percentages on executive career paths carried by the highest-word-count competing page. None is dated, most name no study, and the attributions that are given could not be located
• A practitioner argument that a great chief executive does not need profit-and-loss experience. Opinion, referenced in the body as a counter-position and not used as a source for any claim