I collected stats on how long it takes for dancers to move between WSDC divisions in their primary role.
The shortest time between someone's first novice point and first all-star point is 8 months (Jesse Vos). The next fastest is 12 months (Melissa Rutz, Samir Zutshi, JT Anderson). (There's actually someone with 5 months, but it looks like a clerical error—before and after their supposed all-star points, they compete in several novice competitions.)
Below is a plot of the distribution of times between first novice point and first all-star point. The dashed line is the median time, and the dotted lines are the 5th, 25th, 75th, and 95th percentile times.
Below is a table of summary statistics for the plot, where "25%" means "25th percentile".
StatMeanStd. dev.1%5%10%25%50%75%90%95%99%Time (years)5.162.641.331.932.423.254.676.448.5010.2514.03
Though the median time between first novice point and first all-star point is 4.67 years, this does not mean that the typical person can expect to reach all-star 4.67 years after their first novice point:
* People who reach all-star are a self-selected group of people who probably devote a lot of energy into dance and who progressed through earlier ranks faster, e.g., their median time between first novice point and first intermediate point is 50% faster than among all people who have reached at least intermediate.
* Most people never reach all-star, which isn't captured in the above plot.
* People who will reach all-star in the future aren't captured in the plot, which skews the stats downwards (e.g., suppose person A and person B both received their first novice point in 2019 and person A got their first all-star point in 2023 whereas person B will get their first all-star point in 2030—then person A shows up in the above plot but person B does not).
* There have been and will continue to be WSDC rule changes (e.g., modifications of the qualifications for each division) and changes in the competition scene—historical d