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.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.
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. 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.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. 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. 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.
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