For an all-round win-win that benefits your workforce and your organization in equal measures, consider creating a career pathing program. Here's why.
Savvy organizations know their success is directly tied to their employees - their skill set, their zeal to learn and grow, their passion to innovate.
But what many miss is that companies need to play a leading role in workforce development to encourage organizational development.
One effective solution to this end? Career pathing - or personalized plans for employees that set their career goals and give them a blueprint for growth in your organization.
Here’s more on what it is, why you need to be investing in, and what you could do starting today:
Career pathing is the process of creating a personalized career progress roadmap for employees.
It involves setting a clear and intentional direction for how an employee would grow in your company — laterally, vertically, and/or cross-functionally — based on their interests and your organization’s talent priorities.
From increasing work engagement to improving employee retention, career pathing is important for several reasons:
Personalized career pathways give employees a clear blueprint of their progress in your company. It gives them an itinerary of skills to develop that’ll help them go up the career ladder.
In turn, this improves employees’ motivation level — helping you retain talent down the line.
In fact, 8 in 10 employees say learning (to develop skills) adds a sense of purpose to their work. 7 in 10 also say learning improves their connection with their organization.
As you invest in your staff’s holistic career development, you also create a people-first-culture that lets you discover hidden and new talents.
Attracting top skills is one part of the puzzle. The other? Growing those skills.
Thankfully, with a career pathing program, you can help employees continually polish their skills and master new ones, which, ultimately, benefits your organization.
80% of organizations also agree that offering mentorship programs (as part of a robust career pathing strategy) helps them address internal talent shortages.
Again, this contributes to helping your organization achieve its ambitious growth goals by leveraging your workforce’s highly developed skill set.
With career pathing fueling internal upskilling and reskilling, organizations can also easily look internally for new positions they want to fill.
This way, in addition to helping organizations save by retaining employees better, career pathing lets you slash expenses that go into hiring and onboarding new talent.
Far from being just a "nice-to-have", career pathing can achieve some real strategic wins for your organization:
Effective career pathing aids succession planning (your strategy for replacing or filling up leadership roles). In turn, this saves organizations from the high costs and risks associated with the sudden departure of senior executives.
Put another way, career pathing ensures business profit and operations continuity by optimizing succession planning.
Organizational growth and innovation can very much depend on employee development — both in terms of the skills they are mastering and how they’re moving in their career paths.
The skill and professional development that career pathing facilitates, in turn, helps organizations innovate and meet current and future challenges.
From this perspective, career pathing also helps companies beat their competition and become an industry leader.
By working with your employees on a career map outlining how they can grow at your organization, you give people a strong reason to stay.
Learning and development alone are strong factors that not only encourage employees to join a company but stay with it. Now pair it with career pathing, and you not only motivate employees at their work but also increase their interest in their work.
All this compounds to contribute to improved talent retention.
The real benefit of career pathing is that it creates great outcomes for organizations and individuals.
In fact, an essential step to an effective career mapping strategy is telling employees how it can benefit them. This ensures they take their full interest in pursuing the personalized career pathways you create together.
So with that, here are a handful of goals career pathing helps individuals achieve:
By having a clear growth plan within your organization (alongside knowing the steps they can take to get there), career pathing gives employees job security.
Job security, in turn, makes sure all folks can easily focus on building and mastering specific skills to grow in your organization.
This also aids their overall professional and career development, improving productivity and engagement at work.
Career pathing is not just limited to outlining the skills that can lead employees to specific positions at your organization. Instead, it offers opportunities to proactively build and exercise new skills.
In doing so, a career pathing plan helps individuals stay relevant in their field — even grow laterally by using their skills to change departments/fields.
The clarity that career pathing offers individuals helps curb work anxiety that comes from job insecurity, lack of clarity, lack of growth and development, and similar.
With the increased peace of mind, folks can focus on other areas of their life too — creating an overall balanced life.
Career pathing can only drive home its best benefits when you:
Now to achieve these golden principles, you’ll want to follow these tips:
Put another way, proactively work with employees to learn their career goals, interests, and skills they want to build.
To do so, you’ll want to involve department heads or team leads. Ask them to schedule one-on-ones with folks under them to learn what their ideal career path looks like.
This will involve helping employees achieve clarity on their goals, assisting them in understanding what their strengths are and how they can capitalize on them.
The end goal is simple: work with employees to help them set clear career goals.
When done, work with managers to map out how these career goals can pan out within the organization while revisiting your organizational goals.
For instance, if your organization wants to start offering AI products in the future, you can forecast what positions will likely be open and what internal skills you’ll need for it.
By doing so, you can create personalized employee career paths.
That is: don’t pack employee schedules to the brim — this leaves them with no time to learn new skills. In fact, 20% of employees say they don’t have time to learn or participate in training sessions despite their interest in learning.
The solution? Take a mindful approach to scheduling, and factor in learning time for workshops as you plan workloads.
Get employees on projects that will help them develop their target skills. This would require resource managers working closely with department heads — allocating resources based on not only skills and availability but also the skills employees want to build.
People learn best when they learn in a format they love to consume. Some folks (like myself, for instance 👋) are readers, and don’t mind text-only guides. Others prefer video content, or audio that they can listen to on the go.
To find out what learning formats suit your staff, enlist managers’ help to identify popular formats. From there, provide learning material in all preferred formats while making sure it’s interactive to maintain learners’ focus.
Just as helping employees set career goals is the first part and facilitating learning is the vessel that supports the endeavor, regular check-ins are what take the strategy to its destination.
Here, make sure team leads check in with employees on their skill development at least once monthly. This makes sure employees are on track to grow as envisioned in the career plan.
Then, in their performance review, go into detailed reviews of what they’ve achieved, what needs to be achieved, and how the organization can support here.
There’s also a third factor here that contributes to the success of career pathing: strategic resource management.
Done thoughtfully, resource management ensures employees have ample learning time and work allocations that create opportunities for hands-on skill-building.
A powerful tactic to this end: keep and reference a running log of employee skills — what we call a skills inventory.
A skills inventory gives you an overview of each employee’s skills, interests, experience, and seniority level. Each time you plan projects and resources, reference it to not only find ideal-fit employees but also assign work that helps employees refine, grow, and master skills.
It’s really one of the best ways to offer employees one career advancement opportunity after another.
Unsure how to start off making this inventory? We’ve got just the guide for you. Plus, here are more related resources that’ll help with implementing career pathing in your organization:
