There might have been a time when employees were satisfied working in the same role, with the same expectations, for 40 years until retirement. That’s changed.
According to Gartner, only 46% of employees feel supported in trying to grow their careers at their organization. This signals a clear expectation from employees and a failure from many organizations to meet these expectations.
Opportunities for career growth aren’t just about promoting employees or making them feel like they might get promoted soon. It’s about fulfilling each employee’s inherent desire to make progress in their day-to-day work while making your organization a more attractive place to work (and grow) for top talent.
Career growth is a key priority for strategic HR, not just a perk for job listings. HR plays a key role in building a structured, scalable strategy for promoting growth organization-wide, in a way that goes beyond annual performance reviews and promotion conversations.
Key takeaways
Many employers equate the term “career growth” with “promotion,” which can make building a career growth strategy intimidating. Leaders worry that they’ll have to promote everyone with a career growth plan, which isn’t realistic or possible. But the two terms aren’t equivalent.
Career growth is about supporting employees as they build skills, pursue new opportunities, and network with individuals who can enhance the work they do.
Career growth can be inherently rewarding for employees, but organizations can also find ways to reward growth through different privileges or employee engagement activities. Promotion is moving employees up from one level of seniority to another. While promotion often comes at the end of a period of career growth, you can have the latter without the former.
With career growth, employees can be supported wherever their career takes them next, whether that’s a promotion, a lateral move to a more rewarding role, or growing their skills to become a stronger collaborator. Whether you plan to promote an employee in the near future or not, supporting their career growth should be a priority.
In fact, you should be building a career growth strategy independently of your plans to promote them.
Career growth leads to significant benefits for both employees and employers, meaning you can draw a direct link between it and the outcomes that matter to you.
Employee engagement is a multifaceted endeavor, affected by a range of factors. But a sense of purpose and growth is essential to keeping employees engaged. A career growth strategy helps employees find a sense of satisfaction in their work and contributes to their own personal growth and sense of self-worth. As employees are given opportunities to grow that balance their own personal objectives and your business’s goals, you’ll see engagement improve across the board.
Employees with stronger skills — both soft skills and job-specific skills — perform better at work. Your career growth strategy can directly impact their performance and productivity, since it gives you a framework for identifying skill gaps and improving skills organization-wide.
One in three employees who left their role cited a lack of career growth as a reason for leaving. Many employees want to feel like they can grow within your organization, even if that doesn’t translate to an official promotion. By helping them chart a path for that growth, you can show your willingness to invest in their growth, making them more likely to stay with your organization for the long term.
Leaders are incredibly difficult to replace. Not only are the actual recruitment costs expensive, but tons of hidden costs come into play, as well. Lost institutional knowledge is incredibly slow and difficult to rebuild. Disruptions in strategy take time to correct, potentially slowing down essential projects.
A career growth strategy allows you to identify and develop future leaders internally, ensuring you have a steady flow of candidates to replace leaders when they leave.
Revenue-per-employee is essentially an average of employee productivity, represented by impacts on your organization’s bottom line. Because career growth helps employees become more productive — as well as helping you reduce recruitment and onboarding costs — it ties directly into this crucial metric.
Role clarity impacts everything from productivity to employee satisfaction, but employees don’t just want clarity on their current role. They also want clarity on how they can grow within your organization. Employees who can’t get a clear answer on how they’ll be supported in their growth and what that growth will look like are more likely to find growth opportunities elsewhere. Even if they stay, they’re more likely to be less engaged and productive.
When you make supporting career growth a priority, you need to start by building clarity into potential career paths and growth objectives. You can do this by:
Performance management is a practice through which you can identify top performers, build support structures to help all employees grow, and align everyone’s day-to-day work with broader business objectives. It pairs naturally with strategically supporting career growth.
Performance conversations, whether they’re traditional performance reviews or more frequent 1-on-1 meetings, become an essential touchpoint for growth.
By embedding development goals into every conversation, employees and managers can align on these goals, check in on progress, and keep expectations clear — for both camps. These conversations give everyone involved a clearer picture of employee skills, allowing managers to help employees chart a clear path for developing essential skills.
Performance management rarely happens in a silo, since one of its key objectives is tying individual performance with broader trends and objectives. By combining your performance management efforts with your career growth framework, you can keep career growth aligned with your overall business strategy.
Continuous, structured feedback, also an essential part of performance management, ensures employees get the guidance they need as they grow.
Managers are the front line for career development initiatives, and HR plays a key role in ensuring they have the support they need to do so. Leaders may be the ones determining the career frameworks that employees can follow and HR might helm initiatives to improve growth throughout the organization, but managers shape the way growth happens on the ground.
To that end, managers must become coaches for their direct reports, rather than just purely evaluating employee progress towards development goals. HR’s role in this? Giving managers frameworks to follow and tools to use.
For instance, with psychological safety being such an important part of having honest growth conversations, HR needs to support managers in establishing that safety. That can be done through sharing best practices, adding metrics for psychological safety in performance reviews for managers, and prompting leaders to lead by example.
Another essential part of this? Accountability. By holding managers accountable for their team’s career growth, they have a stake in contributing to that growth.
Manager enablement is essential to supporting career growth throughout your organization. As you’re making space for employees to find their career objectives and get support in meeting them, look for ways to support managers in their own work with employees.
Not every single growth objective an employee has needs to be tied to some broader organizational goal. But if you want to see a return on the investments you make towards supporting career growth organization-wide, you need to tie that growth with your overall strategy.
Say you’ve identified specific skill gaps in your organization that mean you’re behind the competition when adapting to market trends. Prioritizing growth that contributes to plugging these gaps doesn’t just help make you more competitive, it can help give employees a greater sense of purpose as their growth contributes to a broader mission.
With HR as a strategic partner, leaders get a view into how the organization’s strategy trickles down into individual development goals and, likewise, HR can support managers in aligning these goals with leadership’s strategy. This way, investments you make into career growth translate directly to measurable results for your organization as a whole.
Strategic HR depends on demonstrating ROI on HR initiatives so leaders will buy in and dedicate more resources to them. By aligning career growth frameworks with broader strategy, ROI becomes self-evident.
Supporting employees as they grow — and aligning that growth with broader objectives — depends on psychological safety, transparency, and communication. But there’s another essential element that makes these initiatives much easier to implement, measure, and optimize.
The right tools.
15Five is a performance management platform that supports everything from building better performance reviews to streamlining manager enablement and aligning objectives organization-wide. Growth Studio, is our suite of talent development tools that gives HR and people leaders everything they need to develop, retain, and grow their people. IDPs, PIPs, succession planning, and Explore Talent all in one place.
Want to see what 15Five can do for your organization? Book a demo here.
Employees want to grow. They want to feel like they have opportunities to build up their skills, take on more responsibilities, and contribute more to your organization’s mission. Your role? Supporting them in that growth and tying their objectives to the organization’s broader strategy.
HR is more than just the go-between for this essential initiative. They guide leaders in deploying the right initiatives, empower managers to support their teams, and build a continuous feedback system that allows employees to both grow and access better growth opportunities.
Between the tools at your disposal, the data you collect, and your expertise, you can build a scalable system that makes career growth a long-term priority that contributes to everything you do.
15Five can help you build that system. Find out how.