Growing, developing, and promoting employees is the cornerstone of any great people strategy. But, despite data showing that teams led by internally promoted managers are 15% more productive, businesses still fail to create legitimate routes for employee progression.
If this happens in your business, we’re confident we know the answer – career pathing. In this article, we’ll explore what career pathing is, the benefits it can bring to you and your employees, and how you can implement it using Grow.
Let’s get started!
Quick Links
- What is Career Pathing?
- The Benefits of Career Pathing
- How To Get Started with Career Pathing
- Grow – The Ultimate Career Pathing Tool
What is Career Pathing?
A career path is a sequence of roles an employee progresses through as their career grows within an organization. Career paths traditionally run vertically from entry-level to executive positions. However, this isn’t always the case. Further developing particular skills, knowledge, and experiences can ensure people impact individual contributor roles.
As an employer, it’s best practice to actively create and manage career paths within your business. Managing this shows employees the typical approach you expect them to take, demonstrating where progression opportunities exist and the required steps.
Successful career pathing, therefore, requires excellent employee development. Each step along the path is designed to nurture the development of new skills, knowledge, and experience, ultimately preparing the employee for promotion.
The Benefits of Career Pathing
When designed and implemented correctly, career pathing benefits employers and employees alike. Here are three key benefits for each party:
For The Employer
1 – Improved Employee Retention
In a world where employees believe they can only get ahead by changing organizations, career pathing offers an effective alternative. A clear and attainable career path gives employees the confidence they can grow, and confidence improves employee retention.
But why is that important? Here are the benefits you’ll receive when boosting your employee retention:
- Savings on new employee hiring costs
- Knowledge, skills, and experience retention
- Consistent service and stronger relationships with customers/clients
- Enriched company culture
Consistency, longevity, and long-term relationships are crucial to building a solid workforce and career pathing to help deliver stronger employee retention.
The Data: 94% of surveyed employees said they would stay at a company longer if the company demonstrated a commitment to helping them learn and grow.
2 – It Enables Succession Planning
Companies continuously strive to optimize performance by getting their best people in the most critical positions. So for career pathing to be effective, it needs to be underpinned by skills development.
Career pathing helps organizations identify the best performers and maps out the required training and experience. A crucial point to consider is that employees may not reach the top through vertical promotion only. Coaching and mentoring should be in place to support diagonal and horizontal moves.
Effective succession planning is even more important for senior positions. Senior leaders are expensive to replace, but their roles are also critical for business stability and direction. Career pathing helps ensure succession planning is top-of-mind at every level.
The Data: 86% of leaders believe succession planning is of utmost importance, but only 14% think their organization does it well – career pathing can help!
3 – Enhanced Productivity Through Engagement
The positive effect of improved employee engagement? Improved productivity!
Engaged employees experience less stress, work better in a team, and get more work done in less time. That means lower costs and more output for your organization – the golden formula for greater profitability.
The Data: Engaged employees outperform their non-engaged peers helping their organization become 21% more profitable.
For The Employee
1 – Greater Visibility of Progression
As an employee, there’s nothing better than seeing a clear route to a senior position within your organization. While career pathing doesn’t necessarily create new roles, it does help them become more visible and accessible.
This enables employees to make an informed plan about their careers and helps set realistic goals for future roles. In addition, it means you don’t need to hunt for a new job, which can be extremely stressful.
The Data: Nearly two-thirds of employees believe promoting within beats hiring externally, with 70% of promoted employees staying with a company for an additional five years.
2 – A Pathway to Learn & Grow
As discussed, career pathing helps organizations identify the underpinning skills employees will need to grow. By focusing on their development, you give employees confidence that they will continue to grow professionally within an organization.
As long as HR policy remains competitive in other areas, such as working arrangements and salary, a focus on development is a huge incentive for employees to stick around. Learning new skills is rewarding, and career pathing places an exciting concentration on growth.
The Data: Surprisingly, lack of growth and development opportunities is the number one reason (at 22%) workers leave their roles. Leaving roles has been up by 170% in the last decade.
3 – Better Company Engagement
Engagement helps employees feel more secure as they can easily visualize a long career in the company. They are also less stressed, have better morale, and help create a better all-around team culture. These benefits extend to everyone in the team and create a strong sense of community and trust.
The Data: Research shows that 85% of employees are not engaged in the workforce. Implementing career pathing can help bring better engagement to your entire organization!
How To Get Started with Career Pathing
If all of this has grabbed your attention, here are five steps to develop your career pathing capability.
Understand your company hierarchy
To begin, take the time to understand your organizational structure. Specifically, identify the different high-level responsibilities of each role and how positions at various levels interact.
Assess the underpinning skills
With the roles mapped out, take time to assess the underpinning skills, knowledge, and experience individuals need for the position – this is often referred to as competency modeling. Remember that skills and expertise grow over time, so consider the level of competency someone would need to start the role versus what’s required to master it.
Map out the pathways
You can now plot employee career paths with identified roles and underpinning skills. As an HR professional, you’ll most likely collaborate on this with hiring managers. Remember that pathways may go horizontal and vertical, but be sure that every step of a course offers valuable progression.
Fill in the training gaps
For each pathway, take the time to identify what’s required to move from one role to another. The gap between the skills, knowledge, and experience of each career path step highlights areas of training and development you’ll need to support employees through.
Iterate and launch
You won’t get this right the first time, so continue cycling between steps one to four to perfect your career pathing framework. Once you’re happy, you can begin to launch these pathways within your business, guiding employees through each role, the associated skills, and the required training for their relevant career path.
Remember – As your organization evolves, your roles and underpinning skills will also change. Therefore, career pathing isn’t a point-in-time exercise; HR should review the carer pathing models regularly to ensure employee progression is up-to-date and adds value for all parties.
Grow – The Ultimate Career Pathing Tool
At Grow, our mission is to build safe cultures where individuals grow, and teams achieve more together.
Our Growth Hub is the perfect place for organizations to unlock employee growth through clarity of information.
The Growth Hub helps you:
- Save time using our flexible Career Pathing templates 📈
- Align, empower, and retain employees by connecting them to roles, mentors, and learning resources 🤝
- Connect their people to our global Growth Community where everyone learns from each other through AI-driven matching based on goals & skills 💡
- Immediately match their employees to your newly opened roles based on their goals & skills ✅
