Political elites rarely advance by moving up a single, well defined ladder; instead they accumulate experience across a variety of posts, creating defacto career tracks. Yet we still know surprisingly little about how those tracks pay off and why. We offer a systematic assessment of career pathways in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1982 to 2012. We assemble an annual panel of every full and alternate Central-Committee member, we map unique jobs into a directed transition network, and apply a SpringRank algorithm to derive a continuous leadership–status scale that spans all bureaucratic domains. This study takes a novel perspective on the selection of leaders in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). We measure career tracks of full and alternate CCP Central Committee members investigate their role in political selection. We find that the career tracks corresponding to frequent rotations are associated with significantly higher probabilities of obtaining top leadership positions in the CCP despite the influence of patronage networks. By comparing the role of career tracks with that of personal connections, our findings speak to the research on institutional versus personalistic rules in non-democracies.