The nonprofit workforce is changing at every stage of the career journey. Younger professionals bring different expectations to work, experienced talent is harder to retain, and many organizations are approaching leadership transitions without a clear succession path. This three-part series explores these shifts and what they could mean for the people, organizations, and communities that depend on a strong nonprofit sector.

The Hollowing Middle:
Why Nonprofits Are Losing Their Core Talent

Nonprofits have spent years worrying about two ends of the workforce: how to attract younger people to mission-driven careers and how to prepare for the eventual departure of longtime executives. But a growing concern lies in between. Experienced professionals who have spent years developing the knowledge, relationships, and judgment their organizations depend on are reaching a point in their careers when staying may no longer offer enough room to grow.

These are often the people nonprofits can least afford to lose. They run programs, manage teams, raise money, oversee operations, maintain important community and funder relationships, and translate leadership priorities into everyday work. They may also become executive directors, CEOs, chief program officers, development leaders, and other senior executives. When they leave, nonprofits lose more than experience today. They may be losing part of their leadership pipeline for tomorrow.

In the first article in this series, From Calling to Career: Are Younger Generations Rewriting Nonprofit Work?, we examined how younger professionals are changing expectations around nonprofit employment. Purpose remains important, but so do compensation, flexibility, development, financial stability, and a life outside of work. The next question is what happens when those employees stay long enough to reach the middle of their careers.

For many, that is where the nonprofit career path begins to narrow.

The People Organizations Come to Depend On

Usually, someone in an organization knows why a program works the way it does, remembers what happened the last time a particular strategy was tried, and knows which community partner needs a phone call rather than another email. Another person may carry years of history with donors and funders. Someone else understands not only how an internal process works, but why it was created in the first place.

None of that institutional knowledge fits neatly into a job description. It accumulates over years, along with relationships, judgment, and an understanding of the organization that makes experienced employees especially valuable. Much of that value remains almost invisible until one of them leaves.

Then the organization feels it quickly. Responsibilities are redistributed. Senior leaders step in. Less experienced employees stretch to cover work they may not be ready to handle. Relationships have to be rebuilt, projects slow down, and remaining employees take on more.

The National Council of Nonprofits has documented this ripple effect in its workforce research. Persistent vacancies add responsibilities to remaining employees, increasing workloads and potentially contributing to further turnover.

This is what makes losing experienced middle-level talent different from simply filling another vacancy. These employees often provide the connective tissue between leadership and the organization’s day-to-day work.

The Warning Signs Are There

The reasons nonprofit employees consider leaving matter most in the middle of a career. Candid found that 67% of nonprofit employees surveyed in fall 2024 were either looking for another job or expected to be within a year. Reasons included too much work and too little support, limited opportunities for growth, unsupportive management, and inadequate pay and benefits.

The Career Blazers Nonprofit Search report, 2026 Nonprofit Compensation & Talent Strategies, adds another piece to the picture. Program management and development positions continued to experience the greatest attrition, while executive leaders tended to stay longer. The report specifically identified strengthening mid-level talent pipelines as an important priority for nonprofits.

That finding deserves attention. Program and development professionals are closely connected to two things nonprofits cannot function without: delivering the mission and generating the resources to support it.

Taken together, these findings expose a difficult tension. Nonprofits need experienced people, but experienced people have reached a point in their careers when they have more to weigh when deciding whether to stay.

What Does Growth Look Like When There Is No Next Job?

Nonprofits are often relatively flat organizations, particularly at the small and midsize level. That can give employees meaningful responsibility and early access to leadership. Several years later, however, the same structure can leave an experienced employee wondering where to go next. There may be a coordinator or associate, a manager or director, and then an executive leader who has no plans to leave. Creating another management layer to provide a promotion makes little organizational or financial sense.

But the absence of a promotion does not eliminate the need for growth. Career development can mean taking ownership of a major initiative, developing deeper expertise, expanding responsibility, participating in organizational strategy, representing the organization externally, mentoring others, or gaining the leadership experience that prepares someone for what comes next.

When those opportunities are missing, changing organizations can become the clearest way to keep a career moving forward. The issue may have little to do with commitment to the mission. An experienced employee may reach a point where staying feels too much like standing still.

Compensation Looks Different Ten Years Into a Career

The financial calculation also changes with time. Someone early in a career may accept lower compensation in exchange for experience, meaningful work, or an opportunity to enter a field they care about. Ten years later, that same person may be paying for childcare, buying a home, saving for retirement, supporting aging parents, paying down student loans, or simply trying to build greater financial security.

Purpose can still matter deeply, even as those realities become harder to ignore.

By mid-career, compensation is about more than whether someone can make the salary work today. Experienced employees also look at whether their earnings keep pace with their growing skills and responsibilities, and whether staying in the sector allows them to make financial progress over time. That makes compensation increasingly difficult to separate from career growth.

The challenge for nonprofits is that experience has real market value. As employees build expertise in managing people, budgets, programs, funder relationships, operations, and strategy, those skills become valuable well beyond their current organization. A salary that once felt reasonable can become harder to justify when responsibilities have expanded or when comparable opportunities offer greater compensation and advancement. The question for an experienced employee may gradually shift from Can I make this work? to Am I falling behind by staying?

Over the course of a career, even modest differences can matter. Compensation affects not only the paycheck someone receives today, but future raises, retirement contributions, savings, and the financial position from which the next career decision is made.

For nonprofits, this does not mean trying to outbid every other employer. It does mean recognizing that “they believe in our mission” cannot carry the full weight of a long-term compensation strategy.

When Being Good at Your Job Means Getting More Jobs

Another pressure can build almost unnoticed. Experienced employees become the people organizations trust when something needs to get done. A colleague leaves, so a dependable manager covers part of the position. A new initiative launches and the person with the strongest track record takes it on. A grant creates new reporting requirements, and the employee who understands the program best becomes responsible for those, too.

Each decision can make perfect sense on its own. Over several years, however, the job may grow substantially while the title, compensation, authority, and resources remain largely the same.

This is particularly challenging for managers. They are expected to deliver what senior leadership needs while supporting the employees who report to them. When staffing is tight, they frequently become the buffer between organizational expectations and the reality of what their teams can accomplish.

Over time, the organization can end up searching externally for precisely the combination of experience, judgment, and institutional knowledge it spent years developing internally.

Funding Instability Eventually Becomes Workforce Instability

Not every retention problem begins inside HR. Some start with the way nonprofit work is funded.

Restricted grants, delayed contracts, uncertain renewals, short funding cycles, and funding that does not cover the full cost of delivering programs affect much more than a budget. They influence whether an organization can hire, provide meaningful salary increases, invest in development, maintain manageable workloads, or give employees confidence that their positions will still exist next year.

Career Blazers’ 2026 research found that 40% of responding nonprofits reported staffing decreases tied to funding instability. For an organization, that may appear on a financial statement as a staffing adjustment. For employees, it can mean fewer colleagues doing the same amount of work, another year without a meaningful raise, or uncertainty about whether a program and the jobs attached to it will continue.

That uncertainty can carry more weight as employees move further into their careers. After a decade in the sector, they have built experience, relationships, and skills that give them more options, while their need for financial and professional stability may also have grown. Funding instability can therefore create a retention risk nonprofits may underestimate: the employees best equipped to help an organization navigate difficult periods may also be the ones most likely to leave.

What Can Your Own Departures Tell You?

Some experienced professionals move to larger nonprofits with more resources or clearer career paths. Others take their skills into foundations, higher education, healthcare, government, associations, consulting, or the private sector. But for an individual nonprofit, knowing where people across the sector are going may matter less than understanding where your experienced employees went, and why.

Look back three to five years. Which experienced employees left? How long had they been with the organization? Where did they go? What opportunity did the new position offer that the old one did not?

Exit interviews may provide part of the answer, but more useful conversation often happens before someone has accepted another job. Organizations routinely ask employees how things are going. They ask less often what those employees want the next few years of their careers to look like and whether they can see that future happening where they are now.

The Cost of Losing the Middle May Show Up Years Later

This is where a retention issue eventually becomes a leadership issue. Today’s program manager may be tomorrow’s chief program officer. A development director may eventually become a CEO. Experienced leaders in finance, HR, operations, communications, and other functions may become the people an organization relies on during its next executive transition, but only if they stay long enough to develop.

Future executives need opportunities to make increasingly complex decisions, manage people, work with boards and funders, participate in strategy, navigate conflict, and lead through uncertainty. Those capabilities develop over time, and much of that development happens in the middle of a career.

When organizations lose too many people during those years, the consequences may not become obvious until an executive position opens and the board discovers few internal candidates are ready to step forward. What appears to be a succession challenge in that moment may actually have begun years earlier, when talented managers stopped seeing enough opportunity to build their futures within the organization.

Creating a Reason to Stay

The answer is not simply better retention. Keeping someone in the same job longer is not necessarily success if that person is becoming increasingly frustrated, financially stretched, or professionally stagnant.

The goal is not to promise every talented employee a promotion. It is to make sure staying does not feel like standing still. That means paying attention to compensation and workload, as well as career conversations, professional development, flexibility, job design, and opportunities to lead. When responsibilities have grown substantially, has the position grown with them? Can an employee see how increased skill and contribution connect to compensation or greater responsibility? Is there a path for development even when no promotion is available?

Not every nonprofit can offer the highest salary or create another management layer. Sometimes an excellent employee leaves because another organization offers an opportunity that doesn’t exist where they are. But organizations can become much more intentional about the years between hiring someone promising and searching for their next senior leader.

For years, the nonprofit sector has focused on attracting new talent while also preparing for the eventual departure of longtime leaders. But workforce strength depends just as much on what happens in between. The experienced professionals managing programs, raising funds, leading teams, solving problems, and carrying years of institutional knowledge are not simply waiting to become tomorrow’s leaders. They are essential to the work nonprofits are doing today.

That makes the hollowing middle more than a retention concern. Every experienced professional who leaves takes knowledge, relationships, and leadership capacity that can take years to rebuild. And when enough of them leave, organizations do not simply have more positions to fill. They lose some of the people best equipped to steady the organization, develop those coming behind them, and help shape what comes next.

The question for nonprofits is not simply whether they can attract talented people or find their next generation of leaders. It is whether they can create enough opportunity, stability, and room to grow that their most experienced people still see a reason to stay.

Next in the series: The Leadership Cliff: Nonprofit Succession in an Era of Instability, examining what happens when executive transitions accelerate while the leadership pipeline beneath them is already under pressure.