Driving Success with Enterprise-wide Career Pathing

Every year, McLean & Company conducts an HR Trends and Priorities Report and in 2013 discovered that while HR respondents and business respondents chose employee development as their third highest priority activity, a whopping 59% of respondents felt current employee development initiatives were ineffective.

To bring greater weight and clarity to that statistic, it’s helpful to consider what else prompts great workers to head for the hills. When viewing exit survey data, lack of clear career paths is one of the #1 causes of employee departure. What’s going on here?

Some employees leave because they can’t get where they want to be in an acceptable timeframe – it’s not just their perception, it’s the reality. However, the employees you want to concern yourself with are the ones who are leaving because they incorrectly believe there is limited or no potential. In these cases, there is a lack of information or misinformation about career path options and it is up to leaders to correct this.

Implementing an enterprise-wide career path framework gives employees and their managers a visual representation of all of the potential career paths available within the organization – vertical, lateral, and even downward.

This type of framework can be a crucial part of the rewards and recognition within your organization in 2014. Consider the positive impact that formal career development (or ‘paths’) can have on…

• Talent attraction - Candidates are attracted to organizations with strong employee value propositions, including growth opportunities, especially Gen Y.
• Employee engagement - Employees’ belief that they can advance their career is positively correlated with their engagement level.  Employees who strongly agree with the statement “I can advance my career at this organization” are almost 10 times more likely be highly engaged than their low-scoring counterparts.
• Decreasing turnover – More than half of departing employees report in exit surveys that a primary reason for leaving is limited “potential for my career.”

HR leaders should be prioritizing career development in 2014 and continue looking for ways to provide employees with a realistic picture of career path options beyond traditional vertical job ladders.

So, how do you go about establishing a career path framework for your entire organization? Level set first.

Traditionally, when people talked about career paths, they were referring to promotions – a reference to a “career ladder” or “corporate ladder.” In this outdated model, employees either moved up or they stopped moving.  In this day and age, organizations and leaders are better positioned to introduce “career lattices,” or non-promotion moves, into the career path model.

The career lattice framework can be used by managers and employees to plan for upward, lateral, and sometimes downward movement in order to help employees reach their long-term development goals. In addition to the effects on attraction, engagement, and retention, lateral moves give employees an opportunity to explore different parts of the business and, consequently, understand it more fully and increase their contribution.

When designing a career path framework, it’s important to identify:

• Generic competencies –core competencies that apply to every role in the organization and common competencies which apply broadly across the organization.  (You’ll need a competency framework before beginning this project).
• Consistent proficiency levels for each competency, by tier, in the framework.
• Job-family or department-specific competencies and proficiency levels by tier.

Creating a career path framework can be a hefty undertaking, but it is a much more manageable endeavor when it is broken down into steps. Follow a three step process: prepare for project launch, select and build out competencies, and create administration guidelines.

Most importantly, do not take on the task of a career path framework if you don’t have the culture to support people moving around and taking advantage of it: a lattice framework without encouraging movement will cause frustration and drive disengagement. But the picture of this initiative is also critical to consider. The benefits to recruitment, engagement, and retention result in measurable and meaningful ROI. Like most business initiatives, implementing an effective career path framework isn’t easy or quick, but the results it leads to make it a worthy investment.

McLean & Company is a research and advisory firm providing practical solutions to human resources challenges via executable research, tools and advice that have a clear and measurable impact on your business. The research teams uses a rigorous research process that is used to identify and hone best practices, create practical tools, templates and policies, and supply clients with the insight and guidance of internal subject matter experts. McLean & Company applies this proven research approach to both human resources and company management teams, creating complete solutions that supply the tools you need to get each project done right. This process is informed by the participation of a client base that includes over 30,000+ members and by an evolving client-driven research agenda.