Career pathing programs are more than powerful methods for boosting employee engagement and encouraging individual career development. When implemented effectively, they’re also creative drivers of organizational success. Here’s how to build a career pathing program that will give your company — and your employees — a competitive advantage:
Step One
Identify organizational goals. What’s your pain point? Are there companywide skill gaps that need to be addressed? Is it difficult to find qualified, top talent to fill key positions? Are most of your high potentials concentrated in one department or area? Take a look at your company, as a whole, to uncover your particular pain points, and then create organizational goals based on correcting those issues.
Step Two
Build company-sponsored career paths that align with your strategic needs and meet identified organizational goals. This might mean creating multiple paths that prepare employees throughout the organization to take on a hard-to-fill key position, or introducing plenty of opportunities to gain expertise in necessary areas (like IT). Creating paths that encourage employees to move through the company, gathering competencies and skills, in specific ways will support overall organizational growth and help eliminate those pain points.
Related: Building a Career Development Culture With Career Pathing
Step Three
Track employee progress and monitor learning with a dynamic, competency-based program that offers insight into organizational trends and development. Encourage employees to move along their company-sponsored career paths by promoting or transitioning top talent into new roles based on recorded progress. This ensures you’ll maintain fully stocked talent pipelines, while boosting employee motivation and engagement. Tip: Consider including training and talent development resources for managers and HR professionals as part of your career pathing program, too. Training managers to mentor, coach, and guide employees effectively helps ensure the organization reaps the full benefits of a strategically designed and well-implemented program.