Founder & CEO of Reverb. Author of Female Firebrands: Stories and Techniques to Ignite Change, Take Control and Succeed in the Workplace.
getty
As the Great Resignation puts retention at the top of everyone's to-do list, one thing employers may overlook is the importance of internal career growth. Companies often unintentionally give preference to external candidates while overlooking internal talent. Investing time and energy in developing tools like career paths that encourage internal growth is one way to help support talented employees.
What Are Career Paths And Job Families?
A career path shows how internal movement happens in your organization whether through promotions (vertical growth) or changing disciplines (lateral growth). When you're ready to create internal career paths, start by discussing the goals of the career paths and how they will be used. While they’re useful for compensation and leveling, when managers use career pathing guides to discuss performance, development and promotions with employees, they usually have a greater impact.
The number of job families you create is determined by how many different disciplines there are in your organization. A job family is a group of similar positions. For instance, you may have job families for engineering, marketing, product management, etc. Within each family, there are different roles, such as SDE I, II and III for software development engineers. Large companies also have different levels of people managers such as managers, senior managers and directors.
The Importance Of HR And Business Collaboration
The keys to successful career paths are leadership buy-in and approval. A good career path should simplify career conversations between managers and their team members, help with career planning and clearly document what's expected in each role at different levels. A well-built career architecture is likely to be approved by leaders since it makes their jobs easier while increasing employee retention and engagement.
Years ago, I created several technical career paths for a large global organization. I’ve never personally worked as an engineer or a technical program manager. While I knew what kind of information to include and how to structure a career path, there's no way I could have captured all of the necessary technical skills that make people successful in those jobs. Collaborating with managers helped me fill in several critical components of the job architecture, including the level of complexity and decision-making that defined each job level, what technical skills were required to advance from one level to the next, and how much hands-on technical proficiency was required of managers vs. individual contributors.
When HR and business leaders collaborate, it makes the career architecture more accurate and more easily understood by employees and managers. Managers and senior leaders will have maximum buy-in when they’ve contributed to and approved the final version.
Levels, Promotions And Salary Data
Leaders will have to decide on the number of levels, whether they want a flat or hierarchical organization and how frequently promotions should occur. The following questions can help clarify your expectations:
• How long do we expect people to stay in one level before getting promoted?
• Do we prefer more promotions with smaller increases or a flat structure with fewer levels?
• Are there separate career paths for individual contributors and people managers? What are the pros and cons?
• How will our structure support both vertical and lateral moves?
If you're new to this kind of work, don't hesitate to call in an expert, like a compensation professional for instance, to help analyze market data and create a salary structure that fits well with your levels and titles. It’s always worth reviewing internal data too, before making sweeping changes.
A Step-By-Step Approach
Creating career paths for the first time may feel daunting, but there’s no need to get overwhelmed. The project can be broken down into clear steps that can be approached in stages, depending on how much time you have. Here are some tips based on my experience:
• Start with a simple framework and get agreement on how to document it. Do you prefer a spreadsheet or a narrative document? What roles and levels need to be included? Are there separate paths for managers and individual contributors?
• Prioritize by starting with just one job family, then use the same approach for others.
• Create a managers’ working group. Choose people who care about the work and understand the value.
• Consider looking into compensation data for the roles you're working on.
• Find a mentor or leader who can act as a sounding board if you get stuck.
• Pilot first, then make any final tweaks and adjustments. This prevents the rollout from getting delayed due to perfectionism.
• Identify early measures of success and ways to gather feedback from everyone who uses what you've built.
Once you've put your plan in place, celebrate when it's done and thank everyone who participated.
Creating Career Paths To Retain Top Talent
One of the most gratifying parts of creating career paths is that it’s easy to see an immediate impact. You’ll hear people reference them in promotion conversations and performance feedback. Managers will routinely use them in career conversations with their teams. Most importantly, you should see the number of internal moves and promotions increase over time. That makes all of the hard work worthwhile.
Forbes Human Resources Council is an invitation-only organization for HR executives across all industries. Do I qualify?
