IJPs complimented with in-role promotions to address the “Growth Vs Opportunities” impasse for talent retention.

To address this impasse, we have to firstly carefully understand from an employee’s perspective how he/she defines growth versus opportunity. For someone who is looking at growth in his current area it could mean two things, more responsibility or a progression within what he/she does and for someone who is looking at opportunities might be keen to learn new things in a different area at an elevated level or the same.

Some organizations look at In-role promotions and IJPs in mutual exclusivity.

To understand this let’s looks at a purely IJP strategy oriented organization. This organization would look at IJPs to address both growth as well as opportunities concerns of employees. In its purest form the IJP method expose different opportunities in an organization at various levels to everyone who is a part of the organization. This however has a downside, often it becomes the case that the employee owing to certain external factors like peer pressure or career stagnation is forced to apply to IJPs which are not from his particular area of interest if he/she wants to seek a progression. If such a predicament exists two scenarios emerge:

1.     At times the employee is not able to make it to the interview stage as his/her skill set does not match to what is required in the IJP.

OR

2.     If the candidate makes it he/she has a steep learning curve ahead of him and at the same time is not able to leverage the skills that he might already have. At times this leads to employees getting burned out and leaving the organization.

In both the above scenarios it not only causes anxiety for the applicant and the hiring manager but also at times causes organizations to loose on talent.

If we dissect an IJPs it is always very specific and talk about the skills needed for the job. Seldom do we see a generalist one which most often is dismissed as being too generic or vague and is exemplified as a poorly written JD that doesn’t talk about specifics. This makes them very specific and most of the time land up being a custom fit to a person from the area where the IJP has been raised making it virtually impossible for a person from a different area to apply there by raising concerns about unconscious bias.

Now on the other hand let’s look at an organization which is purely in-role promotions centric. The workforce here often complains of lack of visibility to opportunities across organization and transparency in the appraisal process.

Conclusion

Any ideal organization would want to become future proof by transforming its workforce into a multi-functional one and to retain this potential talent to leverage on when the need arises. To enable this, organizations should have a conflated approach of IJPs and in-role growth opportunities to truly become employee centric which is capable of retaining talent they have invested in. With such an approach at play employees would be able to make much clearer and informed choices on the growth versus opportunity paths they would like to take within an organization. Once the choice is with the employees they can consciously decide to seek elevation in their existing roles where they have invested time and effort or moving to exciting new opportunities across the organization and explore new skills.

Time to think exponential…