How can you create an effective career pathing program for your employees?

These might be steps to embark on a rewarding career journey to achieve your aspirations. - Assess Your Situation: Utilie assessments and feedback to understand your skills and organisational dynamics. - Set SMART Goals: Establish specific, measurable, and time-bound goals as your success roadmap. - Skill Development: Identify necessary skills through a personalised development plan. - Networking and Mentorship: Build a professional network and leverage mentorship for growth. - Monitor Progress: Regularly review and adjust your career plan to stay on track. And of course embrace challenges and adapt to changes for career success! Good luck!

In an organisation, there are lots of data and documents about the clients, business and processes. What about the employees? What can we do with the information from employees’ bio, performance appraisals, medical, leave info? Can we go further with psychometric information and perhaps even their aspirations? Immediate challenges would include compiling the data from various sources! It is also important to map out business needs clearly, by engaging key stakeholders, analysing jobs and work scopes. Charting these needs out and translating them for organisational development, HR activities is critical. Overall it’s a massive effort but when done, it can improve the productivity of every employee and the output for the business.

Career pathing should have two main goals; 1) what does the organization need and what can it sustain (worst and best case scenario). 2) what can we provide to our employees for development (worst and best case scenario). For employees there are always options to provide career pathing if management is trained appropriately on coaching and opportunities.

The 1:1s with managers & appraisal process should include listing down employees' career aspirations & alignment check with the projects they are allotted. This is as critical as evaluating if they are achieving organizational goals.

You need a basis of first really knowing your people and what aspirations they have. Often times people are placed in positions simply because they have the required skills but aren't a good fit for that position. They may struggle every day and often have learned how to mask their true feelings about it in order to keep their job. It's never too late to make organizational changes. Talk with your employees, and have them do DISC or other "personality" type assessments to find out where they might be a better fit. Skills can be taught but having an employee be fulfilled in their position will take them further and be willing to give more to the company than someone who is in a position they really aren't happy in.

The first step must be to take a holistic view of a team member. By taking a holistic view, focusing on the whole person, and respecting their role as a friend, employee, family member, community member, etc, you close the gap that we often see when employees feel disconnected from the organization and not valued as a person and team member. This empowers them to feel recognized and respected as a person and not just "a worker-bee". This holistic approach empowers the organization and team members to co-create a personal development plan that aligns their career goals and development opportunities with the needs and vision of your organization.

To create high-performing teams which are future leader hotbeds, career pathing programs must balance company needs and employee interests, likes and passions and look at all members of the team (vs. just the stars or the people who ask for one). Identifying the next meaningful role that will add the necessary skills for each individual (particularly up-and-comers) allows you to put a plan in place towards it and to know what types of skills are needed for each colleague (i.e., top talent probably will need skills beyond the scope of the current team or assignment, while colleagues in support roles, with strong performance and skills but less development runway will probably need more technical depth. )

Assessing the current talents as well as the potential among the employees is essential for the success of a career pathing program. And indeed, analysing your current and future organisation and the roles withing is equally important. What shouldn't be missed out is the communication of the vision of the company and what it means in terms of roles and expectations. A good communication plan will trigger the workforce's innovative thinking. Openness to different career paths should also be clear to employees: not everyone needs to climb the ladder, and there are more moves than just vertical ones.

One of the advantages of working for the largest employer in the United States, the Federal Government, is that the occupational series and titles are defined with the job's requirements. There are clearly written competencies, evaluation guides, flysheets, and standards that can be provided to those seeking employment and current federal employees. Using these tools, an individual can identify gaps in knowledge and experience to create an Individual Development Plan to prepare for their desired career. Most of the jobs in the federal space do not require a degree. This means low or no-cost training resources can be used to advance and meet job requirements. Self-leadership, motivation, and personal success depend on the individual.

Having carefully written career paths for employees allows them to plan and decide how long they want to stay with the company. When career growth is ambiguous and not written supervisors and Human Resource professionals cannot provide that information to employees that inquire. Leaders, managers, supervisors, and HR should be able to provide a basic career map for at least the predominant jobs within the organization. Career paths are especially important for scientific, technical, and professional positions with a combination of education requirements, technical expertise, and soft skills. These positions are usually harder to fill because of the nature of the work and requirements. Known career paths lead to retention.

The best career paths balance organizational needs and employee interests and passions. They are predicated on good, constant communication that allows for a deep understanding of what each member of the team wants to accomplish. Knowing the destination, after all, lets us know what to put in the backpack. The objective is designing employee-centered career trajectories that marry their strengths and meet the needs of the organization. This allows managers to ensure employees are exposed to the right experiences, those that will enrich their skillset and uncomfortably stretch them, preparing them for their next bigger role, benefiting company results along the way.

Organizations tend to get limited because managers do not know what is available for their direct reports. It is critical that managers are empowered with knowledge but also the ability to help their directs grow in the organization.

Basis the alignment between employee's own career goals & organizational mission, projects should be allotted. This will ensure more effective objective setting & inclusive milestones.

When career paths are regularly part of discussions, it increases the engagement and motivation of employees. One step further is to allow employees to explore ideas and projects part of their time. It boosts the innovation and studies have shown it has led to important breakthroughs in companies, which of course also boosts career paths. An interesting idea to explore is to set learning goals as a way to support employees in their growth. Especially when that learning goals is set by the employee themselves. For instance, someone wants to learn to lead meetings better and sets that as a goal for the coming 3 months. This could be supported by asking for feedforward from colleagues.

Effective internal career programs are essential for developing company Human Capital and engaging top talents. - Company should implement entrance questionary reflecting newcomer career goals and preferences alongside with skills possessed. This data shall be analyzed by Talent Management teams. - Individual Development Plans should be a part of each employee yearly evaluation. - Defined milestones and performance indicators should be in place for each role and level of seniority and should be available for employees. - Promoting Internal Career page and crossfunctional roles. - Encouraging a culture of learning and development by fostering trainings and upskilling programs.

Applying change management methodologies is critical to the career pathing plan. I like to use ADKAR change management methodology -awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement when co-creating a development plan. Organizations very often skip providing "awareness" to employee development plans which often leads to another gap because the organization fails to gain buy-in from the employee.

Managers must be prepared to let talented team members move on. Foster a culture that lets people move on to the right jobs for their growth- to the ulterior benefit of the firm. Admittedly, onboarding new team members, bringing them up the learning curve, and maybe even getting back into the nitty gritty for a bit is hard work. But this impulse to preserve intact a team that is working at peak has a high cost: not letting people move on and get the developmental experiences they need to prepare for bigger jobs. Employees quickly conclude that doing a good job means being penalized and typecast. This can be very detrimental to organizations and is a surefire way to kill engagement.

Often employees are too passive: they aren't taking enough ownership of their career. It comes down to creating a culture which support career development: having programs, managers who tend to the question regularly, and employees taking an active role.

Training from the top on what tangible opportunities are available is critical. It's also important for a manager to understand how to offer development when their are no titles or fund available. This may be coaching, horizontal growth, skill development, mentorship, etc.

A key question here is- who should perform all these roles? This often falls onto the shoulders of HR or Organisation Development teams and it sends shudders down the already maxed out and lean teams that they have. My advice on this is to discuss priorities, secure strong management support before deciding to do this. Outsourcing to vendors to support parts of the work eg career counselling, staff training could be useful too

Organizations are now introducing L&D budgets which may go beyond themes that directly relate to employees' KRAs. There is a strong reason for this. Employees, when they upskill in alignment of their own career aspirations become most engaged resources for an organization.

A 2023 study from Cornerstone found that 73% of workers want to have clear visibility about their career path inside their organization. More important, if they don't, 61% are more likely to quit. Therefore, I believe retention metrics are the main KPIs to measure and justify the investment in career organizational planning.

This is possibly one of the most challenging aspects! It is important to apply a data centric mindset and start identifying variables to track, create processes and platforms to track those variables (hopefully with automation!) and design useful dashboards and analytics to help present, visualise the collected data. It is a MASSIVE effort and it will require both resolve and resources to do this. There will be short term pain but hang on for the long term payout! Now, who would be the best person to drive this sort of efforts in the organisation?

Regular monitoring of Employees' progress in terms of utilization of L&D budget as well as how well they have applied the learnings in their day to day jobs ensures that Career pathing is 360 degrees effective.

Make sure you reach out to leaders in other functions of the company and get feedback from them as appropriate. That will give you insight into other skills that will benefit your team member and help them support that other leader. Additionally, it could open future doors for those new developmental roles for your team.

Make sure to build a career pathing program that fosters these conversations at regular intervals and allows for frequent feedback in between. Also keep an eye out for how every other team member will continue to grow and contribute, and use the career pathing effort to foresee who can be a backup for whom. In this way, your program not only helps develop employees- it builds resilience into your organization and allows for all team members to develop an expanded skill set, even if they remain in the same team for all their careers.

Regular reviews gives continuity to this entire initiative. One thing to consider during reviews is to ensure that employees are the ones who should speak more & managers should play the listener role. This will ensure that the initiative is implemented in the most inclusive manner possible.

All cited methodology must bear transparency and commitment for time bound execution. Review and feedback for corrective action must be accurate and effective. Last but not the least taget to be achieved in phases with chetish of success after each phase.

Every manager needs to do the 'career pathing exercise' for their team members on a regular basis. It involves - - Assessing current strengths and improvement areas - Understanding aspirations - Skills and competencies needed to achieve aspirations - Alignment between strengths needed to achieve organizational and personal aspirations - Creating a plan and support to develop these strengths While career-pathing exercise is driven by every manager, it is not limited to their team. Managers need to be generous and think about the organizational interests and not just the interests of their team. A holistic career pathing exercise can create a robust leadership pipeline for the organization while supporting employee aspirations.

Have a strong and strategic sucession plan and ensure that it aligns to the career goals of employees and the business needs. It is important for companies to help their employees grow and develop within the organization. Therefore, leaders and human resources should work together to identify critical roles in the organization and identify talent that might be a best fit for the critical roles in the short term and the long term. In identifying potential successors for roles, the business needs and the career goals of the employee must be considered. In addition, there should be an evaluation of employee performance and the capability gaps that need to be addressed to help the employee prepare to step into the critical role identified.

Employee engagement requires that you engage your employees. Career pathing, the belief that an employee can grow in your organization is crucial for retaining employees, specifically high achievers/performers that crave novelty, recognition, and growth.