Rather than the recommended setting of 19 (from 38 default) for speed I have it set for 24, which gives my sims time for their everyday activities without be too prolonged. In game their life spans are set near epic, about 400 days for young adult, 400 days for full adult, 300 days for elder.

Settings for decay and delta are based on what I've read ; energy decay has been problematic as it seems every world needs a different setting (0.9 in Sunlit Tides but 0.4 in Riverview). Other settings mostly left alone as I've little idea what they do, or in what ways.

My issue now is progression through career and LTW, both being too easily achieved. A new sim in Sunlit Tides started working in the Science Lab, soon received a job offer to transfer to the hospital as a resident (at three times the pay), she is now a neurosurgeon ...and not even 25% through young adult stage yet (not to mention having achieved her LTW of max skills in logic and athletics). Her partner, my main sim in this game, is an acclaimed author and artist (maxed skills in both fields) who recently brought a dozen paintings to city hall for over $200k; they enlarged and remodeled their house, bought a sport car, invested in most businesses in town ...and this sim is only halfway through young adult stage.

Does Relativity have settings that would slow progress through LTWs and careers? I would like both to be attained after young adult stage.

You can apply Skill Gain Factors to slow the rate of skill gain, which will in turn make it harder to make career progress and complete skill related LTW.

Other than that, other difficulty mods are generally needed to balance Epic lifespans.

• No Free Work Performance will make it impossible to be promoted without the required skill level, which works well in tandem with the above.
• StoryProgression can slow the speed of the career performance bar further with Options: Job Performance / Job Difficulty Scale
• MadamDoofle's Minimum Wage and other tuning mods that affect monetary gain / prices
• Buzzler's Mood Hotfix has three harder mood flavors

Those should cover the most broad parts of gameplay.
Technically, just about everything needs a bit of tuning to be balanced for longer lifespans - so it depends how thorough you want to be.

Thanks! I'll try tweaking SP and Relativity first, then maybe add a Minimum Wage mod.

I'm not too picky, just want a more linear progression through their lives. (I know in RL some folks are billionaires a couple of years out of college, but I daresay for most of us that isn't/wasn't the case. ...my first job after graduating was working an assembly line for $6/hr.) Of course I'll have to play a couple of new sims for at least a fourth of their lives to see if things are advancing as I wish, and no doubt tweak some more.