Career Pathing in a New Light

Business success relies on people. Hiring the best people with the best talents and keeping them. Sounds simple on the surface, and there is no shortage of tools available to help you achieve these goals.

Career pathing certainly is one tool available (described in the April/May issue of Merit Guidelines™), which if not previously employed in your business should seriously be considered as a means of retaining good talent, and protecting the investments you already have made in hiring your workforce.

But, as with so many other business tools, the effect or value you get from using career pathing (as a retention or development tool) is extremely dependent on how well you use other tools in your business toolbox, such as strategic planning, communications, clear descriptions of responsibilities, compensation plans, effective hiring processes, training and development.

Without question, all of these areas of business management, including career pathing, affect one another. But the best results are gained when they all work well together. Absent that synergy, regardless of the precision of the tool or the talent of the group using it, you will never get the best result.

Consider these inter-dependencies, just to mention a few. Developing a strong career pathing approach (allowing people to see where they are in your organization and what they have to do to navigate to other positions) depends on:

• Business/organizational planning that identifies the types of jobs required today, and as your business grows or evolves, your jobs of tomorrow
• Clear descriptions of these jobs and the skills and experiences required to perform them
• Hiring processes that "select in" candidates with the best skills, potential and interests for several steps of development within your business
• Training programs that assist with the development and skills building required to advance
• Supervisors and managers who have been developed to not only supervise and manage, but to also develop others to move ahead
• Compensation plans that enable people to be rewarded differently as skills and experience and responsibilities increase and better results are achieved
• A culture that inspires, values and rewards the development of your people, and their effective career pathing as an expectation of how your business operates

Synergy from these and other HR and business practices can make it possible to achieve the closest thing to "retention"- a supportive, developmental environment where people want to stay. A workplace where they can grow, influence the paths their careers take, and be valued and rewarded for their contributions. To get there however, your business leaders have to clearly demonstrate they want it for the business and challenge everyone to make it happen.

This is another article in our PAGE-2/Merit Guidelines™ Expanded series.