Do you like riddles? What’s something that was never really true, but mostly seemed true, and which has become locked in our common conversation as having definitely been true? (Hint: As this is a careers column, the topic involves work.)

Give up? I could be cheeky and say that the above definition covers about half of the career “truisms” we regularly hear. But the chestnut I’m thinking about today is the one that says: “It used to be that you started in a job after school (high school or college) and stayed there, moving up regularly until you retired from there.”

Depending on the reader’s point of view, this conversation is either about how much better things used to be for workers, or how much better things are now. Seeing as the phenomenon of a lifetime, progressive employment with one company was not largely shared by huge swaths of the population (think: men, women, immigrants, trades workers, laborers, and on and on), I swing my vote too, “Things are much better now.”

For one thing, under the old model, even those workers who were benefiting from the system often stayed a lifetime in their jobs for unfortunate reasons. The mythology was so powerful that it created negative impacts on career decisions for everyone.

For example, workers hesitated to leave jobs for fear the next employer would interpret their departure as a lack of loyalty. Workers who weren’t being promoted stayed in the same role for decades under the assumption they would be treated fairly in the end. And heaven helps those who dreamed of changing careers. Just imagining the conversation about why one was applying for an entry-level position at age 40 was enough to stop folks from dreaming altogether.

The shift away from a rigid career ideology comes from too many influences — cultural, political, economic — to enumerate in a single column. But I believe strongly that the result is good. We are in a better place now than perhaps ever before in our country’s history when it comes to workers’ control over their career choices, and the careers themselves.

That’s not to say that we’ve gotten to where we should be. Again, there are too many things wrong with our current employment structure to even imagine listing them in a column. Until all workers have some reasonable level of access to career mobility, we won’t have met our basic obligation as a nation.

That said, the current trajectory is positive. The walls have been coming down to the point that the availability and acceptance of everything from multiple career changes to serial entrepreneurship to global, remote work opportunities is nothing short of revolutionary. When paired with trends (albeit imperfectly realized) toward diverse workplaces, multi-generational hiring, broader accommodations for disabilities and greater availability of flexible or part-time schedules, the resulting possibilities for customizing one’s own career path take my breath away.

Probably the most important and fundamental shift underlying the new reality is the move away from employer-control to worker-control of the career path. On the negative side, this feels a bit like the move from pension plans to largely employee-funded 401(k)s, or from comprehensive workplace health care plans to the patchwork insurance coverages most people currently juggle. When the responsibility for such issues shifts to the worker, that person is burdened with becoming an “expert” in finance or health insurance but without the necessary training or leverage to make the best choices.