The best company in Australia for career progression is - ServiceNow! And second on the list is homegrown global software firm Atlassian.

Technology companies rank high on LinkedIn's 2025 list of Australia's best workplaces, with four out of the top five being global tech giants. Banking and financial services firms, in contrast, have slipped: Commonwealth Bank, number one in the ranking last year and in 2022, is now number three. NAB and ANZ Bank, previously within the top ten, are no longer on the list at all.

List of top 25 employers: LinkedIn

How are top companies identified?

As tempting as it seems to try one's luck at the top companies - especially with the AI boom suggestive of more growth and more opportunities in tech right now - it's worth taking a look behind the scenes at how LinkedIn came up with this list.

A company is considered 'top' if it provides potential career progression for its employees, and LinkedIn identified eight pillars that lead in this direction:

• Ability to advance: The rate of internal promotions and external upward mobility (whether they advance upward when they move to a new company), based on standardised job titles.
• Skills growth: The rate of gaining skills while employed at the company, using standardised LinkedIn skills.
• Company stability: Rate of attrition over the past year as well as percentage of employees that stay at the company at least three years.
• External opportunity: How often recruiters reach out to employees of the company.
• Company affinity: How connected employees of the company are to each other on their LinkedIn profiles, used as a measure for how supportive a company’s culture is.
• Gender diversity: Measures gender parity within a company and its subsidiaries.
• Educational background: The diversity of educational attainment among employees, which is meant to reflect that the company recruits a wide range of professionals.
• Employee presence in the country: Number of employees relative to other companies, which is meant to indicate whether the company provides a diverse work environment and whether there are opportunities for career advancement and networking.

Taken individually and together, these eight pillars are areas that forward-thinking companies should aim to attain in the first place. The majority of Australian workers place high importance on career progression, almost on par with flexible work practices - one survey by Hays puts the difference just a single percentage point apart at 72% for career progression and 73% for flexibility - and at a time when salary competition is getting tougher, the allure of career progression can be a tipping factor in getting someone to sign on.

At the same time, though, the fluidity of LinkedIn's list suggests that a company providing good potential for career progression in one year might not be so advancement-friendly the next. Layoffs, budget freezes, and shifting business direction can change a company's performance in many of these pillars. US companies in particular may also see upheaval around DEI initiatives. And of course, there is the question of whether a company's employees have been updating their LinkedIn profiles at all.

Still, LinkedIn's list is a good indicator as to how consistent a company is about providing career progression. Banks and financial services companies have been on the list with some regularity over the years, Commonwealth Bank in particular managing to stay within the top five since 2020; Alphabet has been consistently around #10-#12; Medtronic has appeared near the end of the list several times before emerging #13 this year; Oracle climbed the rankings from #25 in 2022, to #13, and now #5.