Painting A New Career Ladder

Traditional career pathing cannot keep pace with change, and only 32% of employees can picture themselves in a future role at their current organization. Now is the time for talent management leaders to make career pathing more adaptive to changing employee preferences and organizational needs.

THE NEED TO BECOME MORE AGILE

Organizations often recruit employees by promising career growth and development, but many employees feel they are not getting what they need. According to Gartner's research, just 21% of employees believe their employer provides helpful resources for navigating their careers, and less than a third say they can picture themselves in a future role at the organization.

Talent management leaders typically identify three reasons why they struggle with career pathing:

• Roles constantly evolve. Roles change or disappear, making it hard for employees to target a specific one. In Gartner's research, 83% of organizations say they have eliminated roles in the last three years.
• Organizational structures often change. Sixty-eight percent of learning leaders say the complexity of their organization has increased in the last three years. Only 27% say their organization is effective at identifying the internal moves employees need to make to grow their career at the organization.
• Skills emerge and become outdated quickly. Only 39% of employees believe the organization is effective at predicting the skills they will need in the next three years.

A NEW APPROACH

In the last 10 years, organizations have increasingly addressed career development by creating new career pathing frameworks. One popular solution has been to change from a ladder-based framework, focused on vertical career progression, to a lattice-based one, in which growth happens horizontally, vertically, and even diagonally.

You will lose top talent if they feel like they aren’t able to flourish

But mapping to a fixed destination does not work as well in organizations where change is constantly accelerating. Because roles, structures, and skills needs are always changing, the destination can also change. So, while lattices work for organizations with stable role definitions and structures, they require constant updating in more dynamic organizations.

To accommodate constant change, dynamic organizations need to approach career pathing in an agile way. “Agile” means dividing work into short cycles with frequent iterations and adaptations, focusing on the end-user and enabling collaboration. Agile career pathing means:

• Regularly reassessing and adapting career plans to changes.
• Focusing on the employee as the end-user.
• Enabling collaboration and information sharing between business units, managers, employees, and the People Team (HR).

Three shifts will be required to achieve an agile career pathing approach.

DESIGN FOR ITERATION

First, dynamic organizations should shift from designing for longevity to designing for iteration. Currently, HR designs career paths to map out careers years into the future. Instead, it should move toward designing career support that accommodates changes in employee preferences and organizational needs.

As they move, employees grow in the context of changing skills needs, organizational structures, and role responsibilities. The logic the employees choose is based on their interests, talents, performance, and potential. Crucially, the process is iterative. Employees and managers reassess, and if necessary, adjust their career directions through regular career conversations and performance check-ins.

For any organization seeking to adopt this approach, its guiding principle should be to make it easy to reassess and adjust career directions. To get started, People Team (HR) leaders, should:

• Identify the most common career pathways in their organization.
• Define potential triggers, for the organization and individual employees, that could result in career moves that do not follow a prescribed path.
• Make an action plan to remove barriers to conventional and unconventional career moves.

DEFINE BASED ON EMPLOYEES

Second, career pathing support should not be based on job descriptions but on changes in employee interests and preferences. Traditionally, we start with the job description of a critical role and work backward to show how the employee should accumulate the necessary skills and experience for that role.

However, just as roles, structures, and skills change, employees’ preferences and interests also evolve. Organizations should start with the employees themselves, understand the direction they wish to take in their careers, and work forward to find the right roles for them. Successful organizations do this with employee portfolios that enable employees to customize and personalize their own career paths as they progress.

Employers should use an employee portfolio filled with inputs to create a holistic picture of the employee. This portfolio starts at the very beginning of an employee’s career, during onboarding, and continues throughout his or her career. Career portfolios are embedded directly within talent management processes.

Here are some tips for organizations seeking to introduce employee portfolios:

• Have employees fill out basic portfolios during onboarding and as part of the performance review process. The portfolios can be as simple as a résumé or CV with the experiences the employees gained in the roles they had with previous employers. Once the portfolios are created, managers can ensure that employees update them regularly in advance of career conversations and performance check-ins.
• Save managers’ and employees’ comments and updates from performance check-ins and quarterly career conversations in the portfolio.
• Enable talent management, recruiters, People Partners, and hiring managers to search employee portfolios when seeking to fill vacancies.

The portfolio thereby becomes a passport that enables employees to move from position to position within the organization.

BUILD ON EXPERIENCES

Finally, instead of relying on existing structures and hierarchies, which are constantly changing, organizations should base career paths on in-role experiences. This means matching and moving employees to new roles based on the experiences needed for and gained in those roles. This enables more cross-functional, lateral, and diagonal movement because employees are no longer restricted to one silo or function.

To build careers on the basis of experiences, leading People Teams (HR) start by breaking down roles into key experiences. Cross-functional teams develop role profiles based on the experiences desired for the role and the experiences gained in the role. Employees can then compare profiles across functions, find connections, and identify possible moves where they may not have initially thought to look.

Organizational connections are essential to agility. Employees can’t make informed decisions about their careers if they don’t know what the organization has to offer.

Further, the People Team (HR) can translate this approach into a visual, dynamic map on a career portal or People platform to show employees possible career paths throughout the organization based on the experiences they have and would like to gain. A dynamic tool enables employees and managers to explore conventional and unconventional moves during career conversations.

To create experience-based career support, People Team (HR) leaders should:

? Create basic role profiles that include the experiences most needed for each role and the experiences that employees gain in those roles.

? Frame career goals as developmental experiences the employee can acquire in the future.

? Encourage employees to visualize potential moves to new roles based on the experiences they want to gain. This is critical to helping them picture their future development at your organization.

MOVING FORWARD

As People Team (HR) leaders make career pathing more adaptive, they should keep in mind the principles of iteration, end-user focus, and collaboration. Agile career pathing offers a new approach to improving employee retention while making more effective use of organizations’ internal labor markets to fill skills gaps.

For employees, here are messages that can be effective in managing the change and setting the correct tone:

• Reimagine development in ways that allow for day-to-day growth right where you are, as opposed to waiting for a new role.
• Move from what you want to “be” to what you want to “do” so you can find meaningful ways to develop, regardless of access to particular jobs.
• Drive your own development, taking the lead, and setting the pace.
• Leverage work, projects, and developmental experiences to access learning on your own terms.
• Keep your options open by working flexibly between and among multiple possible end goals.
• Allow your career planning focus to remain fluid and make adjustments frequently to align with changing interests, needs, and opportunities.
• Acknowledge the dynamic nature of the workplace and become comfortable with less clarity about the specifics of the future.
• Find ways to develop next-level skills in the work you’re currently doing.

Adapted from Gartner's "Agile Career Pathing for Dynamic Organizations" article by Jane Alancheril and Benjamin Loring; and from Womon On Business's "4 Reasons Career Agility is a Must and How to Get There" by Anita Bowness