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Summary: Career pathing helps employees map growth within an organization, offering personalized plans, mobility options, and future-ready skills to drive mutual success.
In today’s tight job market, employers are finding creative ways to compete for, motivate, and retain top talent. It is not enough to keep top talent by providing a paycheck in exchange for work performed. Employees today want to feel valued and understand what their future could look like when joining a job, or when evaluating their tenure.
Career pathing gives employees a sense of the future, showing them how their work today can contribute to their future roles, opportunities, and responsibilities. This exercise has the dual purpose of giving structure to internal roles and future-proofing teams.
What is a Career Path
A career path is a roadmap for an employee’s professional growth that aligns that person’s skills, interests, and potential with the organization’s needs. Career paths are mutually beneficial for the employee and the organization, allowing both to plan for the future and make choices today to strengthen their foreseeable outlook.
Career paths may look different for each employee, even between colleagues on the same team. That is because career paths are individualized for each person, aligning future opportunities with employer needs.
For the individual, career paths show employees how their positions and responsibilities may evolve over time if they stay with the organization. Employees with a clear understanding of their next steps may feel motivated to perform well in their current role and see opportunities for development to achieve the next steps of their career path. The organization can strategize for the future needs of their teams based on their employees’ likely movements throughout the organization. They can also increase retention and strengthen learning and development programs to support their teams’ upcoming changes.
Benefits of Career Pathing
Career pathing is a strategic activity that allows employers and employees to consider the future. Effective career paths have multiple benefits for employees and their employers.
Assess skills gaps
Employers who engage in career pathing projects use information about the organization’s goals and estimated trajectories and work backward to identify the talent and skills that will be needed to accomplish each future stage of the business. Employers can then identify people within the organization who may be able to level up and assume the roles that will become important in the future.
Increased Employee Retention
Employees often leave positions where they feel they have plateaued, or that seem like a dead end. A company may have the need for the employee to increase their responsibilities or the scope of their role in the future, but if they do not communicate the needs, the employee may feel stuck and leave to find better opportunities elsewhere. Companies that invest time and resources in career paths show employees what is possible if they stick around and grow with their teams.
It also gives each party the opportunity to learn what the employee wants from their career.
- Do they want to go back to business school and ascend the ranks to the leadership team?
- Do they prefer to become a subject matter expert and remain a steady backbone in their department that their colleagues can rely on?
Different people may covet different futures and career path conversations can help companies see the potential in their team members.
Improved Employee Engagement
Employees who understand how their current work impacts their future are more likely to engage with their work. Giving employees control over their own development and showing them how to get from where they are to where they want to go is a great way to engage employees and put their future in their own hands.
Build a Leadership Pipeline
A career mapping exercise for an organization includes identifying the movements of current leaders and the openings of future leadership roles. Companies can then identify one or multiple potential candidates within their organization who may have the potential to take these roles.
Learning and development efforts can focus on the skills gap between where these individuals are now and where they need to be in order to succeed in these future roles. Building a strong leadership pipeline benefits organizations by making them ready now for the challenges of the future, and making them more adaptable to what is to come.
Personalize Career Paths
Personalizing career paths makes them more relevant, motivating, and effective for the organization. Here are some things to consider when creating a personalized career path for employees.
- Assess the individual’s skills and knowledge.
- Are they capable of the job and excelling in what they have?
- Are they adept at learning when required?
- Take into account the person’s potential and ambition.
- Are they a natural leader?
- Do they enjoy aspects of management?
- Are they more likely to excel in a support or strategic position?
- Consider employee’s goals and the timeline for their objectives.
- Is the person in a rush to become a director under the age of 30?
- Are they happy to remain in their current role for a long time before needing a change?
- Account for the person’s lifestyle plans.
- Will they stay where they are geographically or do they plan to move?
- Do they want remote work and would they leave for a job that allows it (or vice versa?)
- Are they likely to stay at full-time employment for a long time, or do they have plans that will cause them to move to part-time or seasonal positions?
Future-Proofing Teams
Leaders can use career paths to examine the future of their workforce. Assessing the future opportunities and upward movements of each of their team members allows leaders to estimate their labor needs and make plans to support team growth.
Career pathing is not the same as succession planning, but the activities may be related in some ways. Career path exercises allow leaders to highlight talent among the team, and identify who could take different positions in the future. Leaders can think about the key and most important roles to keep filled for their organization to achieve their goals, and identify the employees that could step into these roles if the current jobholders should leave or get promoted.
Types of mobility
Every career path may look different depending on the employee’s skills and interests, or the role they perform. The mobility available may also differ from one company to another, depending on the type of growth they anticipate over time. Mobility will depend on the individual’s potential and goals, and the company’s trajectory.
Upward or Hierarchical Mobility
Some employees with leadership potential may covet leadership roles, and their career paths should aim to provide this in the future.
Employees on leadership paths may seek development opportunities that center around the management of others and how to develop and implement strategy. As the company grows, leadership positions may open as others are promoted, or be added as teams grow and change.
It is important to identify possible leaders for these positions so that when the need arises, changes can be made quickly and people can be rewarded for their work and contributions.
Expansive or Lateral Mobility
Some employees may prefer not to lead others but are ambitious in the scope and breadth of their work. For these employees, their development opportunities may dive deeper into the knowledge and systems of the functions they perform, making them subject matter experts. As departments grow, subject matter experts may be necessary to provide a backbone of knowledge and skills for the teams. Similarly, there may be a need for a collaborative position to facilitate systems or the flow of information between departments as teams grow and change over time.
Employees who are not destined for management may also experience lateral moves in their careers, where changing to another department allows them to build on the knowledge they have gained while learning new things and experiencing new challenges.
Where to House Documents and How to Communicate Paths
Effective communication of career paths should be presented in multiple mediums. It is important to store career path documents in static places that can easily be found and navigated by employees interested in learning about their future.
Paths should be communicated verbally in person, to allow for discussion and questions that may arise. Documents may be housed either in employee personnel folders or in performance management software. Some organizations may choose to review career paths during annual or quarterly reviews to ensure the information is still relevant and motivating to each person.
Example Career Paths
Career paths should include time expectations, types of work performed, and types of development achieved in each stage of the path. Mentions of company growth and team needs should be included where relevant.
Customer Service Rep to Department Director
- Year 1-2: Work as an entry-level customer service representative. Develop customer service skills and shadow senior reps. Perform at a high level and demonstrate leadership qualities. Complete internal training on leadership and seek external resources.
- Year 3-4: Achieve promotion to Customer Service Team Lead once the department grows large enough to require segmentation. Manage a small team of reps within the larger Customer Service department developing management skills such as providing feedback, coaching, and handling personnel issues. Attend internal or external training about management and customer service theory.
- Year 5-6: Achieve promotion to Department Manager when skills have leveled up enough to have multiple Team Leads and groups report in. Set departmental goals and design systems to help all groups achieve their objectives. Learn about business strategy and how customer service supports other business functions. Consider continuing education or certificates from external sources. Begin to work cross-functionally with manufacturing/operations and sales leadership.
- Year 7+: Achieve promotion to Director of Customer Service. Collaborate with Directors of all functional areas of the business while continuing to support all levels of the Customer Service Department.
This career path is an upward trajectory for an employee to go from entry-level to director-level. The movements and developments center around additional responsibility in the department and increased management of others.
This type of path requires the development of management skills, strategic skills, and functional skills (in this case, customer service).
Marketing Specialist to Marketing Strategist
Year 1-2: Work as an entry-level Social Media Specialist. Receive internal training in marketing and learn some project management skills. Achieve social media goals, showcase adaptability by learning multiple platforms and mediums, and show potential in other marketing formats.
Year 3-4: Transition laterally to product marketing and grow the brand awareness of the products assigned. This step will be dependent on the growth of the company and the range of products marketed. Diversify skills and receive external training in systems and programs. Manage end-to-end campaigns and begin to collaborate in the product development process.
Year 5-6: Achieve a new cross-functional role facilitating collaboration between product development and sales teams. The new role will be developed in response to each department’s growth, and the need to have a keystone person responsible for the system that enables the flow of communications and operations. Seek development of sales trends and the sales process. Understand the product development process and all of the components that go into the cost, materials, relationships, market trends, and marketing strategies.
Year 7+: Achieve promotion to Marketing Strategist. Achieve a high strategic position within the company that works directly with decision-makers and department heads driving Marketing strategy and future planning.
This career path is lateral and expansive. The employee will not manage other people but will continue to grow knowledge, work scope, and collaboration within the organization. This type of path requires the deep development of functional skills (in this case, marketing), collaboration, and project management.
This type of career path is important to consider because not every employee wants to (or should) manage or lead others. Businesses may not have infinite numbers of leadership positions to promise to employees and should consider other paths that allow people to become subject matter experts.
Conclusion
Career pathing is a crucial step to maintaining a trained, motivated, and future-proof workforce. Career paths can be personal to individual employees based on their interests, skills, potential, and goals. Career paths tell employees their potential future roles and responsibilities, communicating what kinds of company conditions could contribute to their outlook, and what learning and development activities they should accomplish to level up from one stage of their path to the next.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does employee development fit in with career paths?
Employee development is a key component of successful career pathing projects. Employees who are expected to grow with the company may require additional training or exposure to different types of work and responsibilities to level up and achieve their potential. Employees and employers should use career paths to design individualized development programs to get from their current state to their intended future state.
What is the difference between career pathing and career mapping?
Think about going for a hike. You are on a path that you are walking, but you could take other interconnected paths. These other options would be represented on a map. A career path is the outline of one trajectory for a person. A career map shows the different options for growth available to a person.
Is a career path a guarantee of future promotions?
No! A career path is an example of how an employee’s trajectory through a company could go based on current information. Employees must understand that their employer may need to change parts of their path, or the whole thing depending on their company’s needs and the employee’s performance. For example, market conditions may require a company to change or shift its strategic plan, add new departments, or part ways with entire product lines. Career paths are not a guarantee, but a projected possible future.
How often should career paths be reviewed or revised?
The answer to this may vary depending on your business and the people in it. If your organization is growing rapidly and adding dozens of new product lines, customers, and employees every quarter, then reviewing career paths quarterly may be the best way to ensure the information remains present and helpful. A quarterly review may be too much work or too fast a cadence for organizations growing at a slower or more regulated pace. Many companies may choose to review career paths along with annual performance reviews, to track employee progress against their goals or development plans.
Andrew (Drew) joined the Remote People team in 2020 and is currently Director, Regulatory Affairs. For the past 13 years, he has been a trusted advisor to C-Suite executives and government ministers on international compliance and regulatory issues. Drew holds a law degree from the University of Otago, a PhD from the University of Sydney, and is an enrolled Barrister and Solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand.
