Establish an Enterprise-Wide Career Path Framework

Use a consistent career path framework to facilitate employee development and build your talent pipeline.

  • Lack of clear career paths is the number one cause of employee departure.
  • Although employee development continues to be a priority for HR, employee development initiatives continue to fall short and prove to be ineffective.

Executive Summary

Critical Insight

  • When a career path framework is nonexistent, it creates complexities in being able to transition employees to various departments and functions. Career pathing instead becomes unique to every functional area and departments in the organization.
  • HR leaders are looking for ways to provide employees with a realistic picture of career path options beyond the traditional vertical job ladders. This was the traditional “career ladder” approach.
  • A “career lattice” approach can be used by managers and employees to plan outside the traditional vertical movement to also include lateral and even downward movements to reach long-term development goals.

Impact & Result

  • An enterprise-wide career path framework with consistently defined career tiers, competencies, and proficiency levels ensures that both employees and managers can clearly identify transferrable skills and potential career path opportunities.
  • A structured career path framework also helps integrate a variety of HR programs that are often disjointed. This saves time and effort and enables a consistent employee experience.
  • A career path framework should identify: generic core and common competencies, consistent proficiency levels for each competency, and job family specific competencies and proficiency levels by tier.

Research & Tools

1. Prepare for project launch

Establish goals, measures of success, number of tiers, and governance guidelines for your career path framework.

2. Select and build out competencies

Select core, common, and job family specific competencies, and minimum proficiency levels for your framework.

3. Create administration guidelines

Create administration guidelines to help develop a successful career path framework.

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