Employees need to feel like they belong at your organization. That sense of belonging doesn’t just come from being accepted by their colleagues; it’s about feeling like they have a future with you. But in too many organizations, employees have no visibility on what they need to do to grow, or how their individual performance goals map to broader objectives — or their own progress.
That’s where career paths come in. They create a trajectory every employee can follow to identify the next step in their growth (and the step after that), as well as linking their day-to-day work with whatever that next step is. When you have a robust framework for doing this, you increase employee engagement, improve retention, and get stronger performance outcomes throughout the organization.
Here’s how.
Key takeaways:
Career pathing means an employee, their manager, and leaders work together to map potential career paths for that employee. It’s not just about promotions or changes in roles, but about helping them identify opportunities for growing their skills and becoming experts in fields relevant to these paths.
It’s important to distinguish career pathing from career mapping and career development:
A structured career pathing process doesn’t just give an individual employee a better look at what their career can look like, it also makes sure all employees have that same chance. Structure keeps things fair, and makes career pathing a priority rather than just another item on a manager’s to-do list.
Career pathing involves three core components:
Career pathing is an essential element of long-term workforce planning, since it allows managers and HR teams to have a clear map of where team members might end up within six months to a year. This gives them a better understanding of short-term and long-term talent needs.
Employee career pathing gives every employee a clear idea of how they can grow at your organization. That helps keep them motivated and makes them feel like their work has purpose. That leads to positive impacts throughout the company:
But investing in career pathing doesn’t just bring you these benefits; it’s also a risk management strategy. Not having a career pathing framework means you risk everything from accelerated turnover to employee disengagement and low productivity.
Goal-setting gives employees something to aim for and managers a standard to measure their performance against. But goals don’t work in isolation. If they’re not aligned with broader objectives, employees might be doubling up on work or, worse, working against these objectives. From an organizational perspective, you need an employee’s growth to align with your broader strategy, and that doesn’t work unless their goals support their career growth.
Short-term goals give employees something to work towards on a daily, weekly, or quarterly basis. But they’re also the milestones that build towards broader career growth. They give employees milestones to hit along the career path you build for them, which makes that path more concrete, rather than just a plan in a Word document somewhere.
Imagine a marketing coordinator at a mid-size B2B company. Their initial role is to support campaign execution, including scheduling social posts, reporting on performance, and coordinating with designers. A career path for them might lead to a role as a Senior Marketing Specialist or Channel Manager, to a Marketing Manager, to finally a Director of Marketing.
That broad path then has individual goals or thresholds to meet. The Senior Marketing Specialist role, for example, might involve goals like owning a full campaign end-to-end, increasing lead generation for owned campaigns, and presenting a post-campaign analysis to show learnings. These goals serve a skill development purpose, as well as being a roadmap for hitting each step on a career path.
Building a career path from scratch every time can feel like a significant burden. But when you define clear frameworks for what advancement looks like for each role and which role leads to the next, you have a robust template for building any career path you’ll need.
Rather than focusing exclusively on role-based progression, career paths should list the skills required of an employee at each stage of their growth. That means identifying relevant skills, tying them to specific roles, but also using competency levels in each skill as a milestone.
Career paths need to be personalized to each employee, recognizing both their strengths and what they need to work on to grow. They should also reflect an employee’s interests, their personal goals, and their performance history.
Continuous feedback allows managers and employees to stay aligned about goals and progress made towards them. It goes beyond a yearly performance review to build in opportunities for feedback in day-to-day work, weekly meetings, and team check-ins. When managers prioritize feedback, employees perform better and goals are more attainable.
The goal of career pathing is two-fold: motivating employees to grow and ensuring your organization has the talent it needs to support its strategy. That’s why your career pathing strategy should be closely tied to your talent needs. Identify the roles you’ll need to grow, the existing employees you’re likely to need to replace soon, and the roles that might not be as relevant as they once were.
From the organization level, drill down to individual departments to map how junior members grow to senior levels, management, and, eventually, leadership. Include relevant skills, responsibilities, and direct reports where appropriate.
Identify common performance goals for specific roles, and connect them with the criteria for advancing from role to role. This gives managers a roadmap for tracking progress over time, while ensuring that goals contribute to an overall objective.
Tracking goals, roles, and performance manually creates more administrative work for employees and managers alike. That’s why dedicated performance management tools allow managers to connect goals with data from performance reviews, check-ins, and more.
Want to see how dedicated performance management tools like 15Five support career pathing? Learn more here.
HR might set your career pathing strategy and build frameworks for charting progress, but managers are the facilitators of that strategy. They’re on the front line, helping employees find a path that works for them, supporting them as they work toward their goals. The responsibilities they carry in that process include:
While these responsibilities fall squarely on managers, they shouldn’t be handling them alone. HR and leadership each have a responsibility to enable and empower managers to take on this role. That can include giving feedback on their own performance, giving them access to learning resources, or providing coaching.
If you’re relying exclusively on spreadsheets and manual reports to map and manage career paths, you’re creating an unnecessary administrative load for managers, leaders, and employees alike. Using the right software supports three key functions:
Using a centralized performance management system that integrates with everything from your HRIS to your chat apps and documents, you can manage career pathing from one place without any manual data entry. It gives you a single command center for supporting employees in building their careers.
Want to see what the right tool can do for career pathing at your organization? Check out 15Five.
Career pathing doesn’t just make sense for the organization’s talent needs; it allows employees to see a future for themselves at your company. When you dedicate time and resources to mapping that future for them, showing them how they can grow, and supporting them as they work towards that growth, you’re helping them stay engaged.
That engagement has ripple effects throughout your organization, leading to a more collaborative workforce, better performance outcomes, and higher retention.
Prioritize employee career pathing, and you’re building a resilient talent pool of top performers.