Create a career path programme (or lose your best people)

With talent scarcity continuing to challenge many organisations, looking after your current team has prime importance. Losing good people because they feel their ambitions are better served elsewhere can mean a loss of expertise that’s hard to replace.

In an era of flat, lean structures how should Essex businesses go about creating career paths that provide short and long-term options for their people?

A defined career advancement roadmap can provide employees with clarity on how to develop their career within your organisation. This will support employee retention, provide a sense of purpose and increase long-term engagement.

Setting up your career path programme

The first steps in creating a career path programme is having clarity on the organisation structure, the roles required to deliver your business plan and the skills required for people to successfully undertake each job role.

If your business is thinking long-term, it may help to create the organisation chart of your future organisation to take account of new products and services, markets, or teams you will need over time.

Job definitions will enable you to share with your teams, the key responsibilities, skills and certifications they’ll need to possess to progress into their target role.

Creating a roadmap

A career path roadmap will help your people understand how they can progress within the organisation, and what’s required at each step. This approach will help your people understand how they can advance, and the options open to them across the organisation. This tool can be particularly effective for those considering a lateral move or specialising their skillset, and provides the variety of options that reflects the reality of most people’s career progression.

Moving Forward

How can your business support your people to move along the path?  Defining existing formal and informal training opportunities will enable you to define the activities that employees will need to successfully complete before they are able to progress.

Closing gaps in the availability of training and development activities will ensure there’s a clear route for people across your organisation to gain the skills required to elevate their career.

Create Your Career Path Programme

Turning the sum of your planning into a practical Career Path Programme will enable you to provide existing people, new hires and potential employees with clarity on how you’ll support them to achieve their career goals and benefit from making a greater contribution to your organisation.

This will require management buy-in to support the development of existing teams, alignment with your performance and development review system, as well as integration with your business plan and budget to ensure resource availability over time and investment in the skills that will benefit your long-term growth.

If your business has a talent and skills challenge that needs a fresh approach, we’re here to help.

An exploratory conversation with our workforce development specialists can identify the most effective ways to build a career path programme that supports your long-term recruitment and retention needs.