A former colleague dropped me a line the other day. In our previous dealings he had been working as a sales executive. Now, having moved to a different company, he grabbed my attention with a small detail at the foot of his email. Somehow in the year or so since we last worked together he had risen, via his new employer, to the rank of director of advertising and sales.

Let me be clear, I wish nothing but career success to this former colleague. For all I know it may well be that in the past 12 months he has pulled off an unlikely but meteoric rise from sales floor to boardroom. But I suspect his new job title may owe more to a more artful trend.

Over the past few years, while many workers have found themselves gridlocked in jobs with frozen pay, others have apparently been seizing the opportunity to inflate their career profiles, if not the contents of their wallets.

According to a report by the Resolution Foundation, the phenomenon of job title inflation has been growing in recent years, which is to say there is an increasing proportion of people who have senior-sounding job titles but who still earn middle-ranking wages.

It would be a mistake to see job title inflation as being all about career opportunism; as much as anything the trend is about employers finding ways to flatter their middle-income workers without actually paying them any more money. The research found, for example, that the proportion of "managers" in the retail sector earning less than £400 a week increased from 37% to nearly 60% during the 2000s.

Another possible explanation is the idea that in recent years the UK labour market has split into high-wage "lovely" jobs and low-wage "lousy" jobs, while roles in the middle have disappeared.

The report does find that levels of both low- and high-paid work in the UK increased during the 2000s. But it also appears that while many mid-level, supposedly "routine" job titles, such as process operators in industrial plants, have indeed disappeared, the actual work does still exist – abeit with more fluffed-up titles.

Not that you need to be a member of the squeezed middle to trump up your job title. The late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was a master of job title blubber, having used around 1,200 of them ranging from Sun of Socialism and Guiding Star of the 21st Century to (my personal favourite) Dear Leader, who is a perfect incarnation of the appearance that a leader should have.

Now his son and successor Kim Jong-un seems to be carrying on the family tradition, most recently naming himself supreme commander of North Korea's army. (Interestingly, observers are interpreting this as a sign of vulnerability on Kim's part).

Tinker, tailor, metallurgical consultant, director of fabric fusion. What are the worst (or best) cases of job title inflation you've seen?