How to Build a Career Path Program for Your Organization

Building a better career is important to people who want to get ahead and create a better life for themselves and their families. Careers come in all shapes and sizes. Trades people have a career, administrative assistants have a career, real estate agents have a career, CPAs have a career and on and on. Electing not to get an MBA or a Ph.D., does not mean you do not have a career. You most certainly do. For organizations, creating career path programs is an important strategy regardless of the industry or the size of your organization. How can your company be career strategic?

First the Why

A fair question to ask is, “Why would an organization want to do this?” People are responsible for their own careers. True. However, helping them build a career has benefits for the organization as well.

• Recruit better candidates
• Better retention
• A stronger bench for succession planning
• Greater knowledge pool
• More engaged employees
• Build high performing teams

The list goes on, but let’s look at ways to create a career building program, even if you are a small or medium sized business.

Building a Career Path Program

• Begin with your strategic plan. Understanding what positions, you will need as your business grows provides the foundation for building a career path.
• Analyze each position. First, understand what each job needs to function at its optimal level. This will alert you to the skills you need in your career path program. Also, understand the different paths any position can take. This helps your employees to better build their careers and not hesitate to take a lateral or even down step in positions.
• Review your organizational chart. If you don’t have one, create one as it demonstrates the structure of your company and helps you ensure you have or will have the positions in place for growth. In addition, it helps employees see and create their path more clearly and where they might secure a mentor or coach internally.
• Identify training needs. There is a plethora of programs to fit every budget. Further, establishing coaching and mentoring internally can be important and inexpensive additions to your career path program as well as an enhancement to training initiatives. Creating timelines for implementation of training and completion of modules as well as documentation. This helps stress the importance of training and the organization’s commitment to a learning culture.
• Make HR Your Partner. Having Human Resources play a key role in establishing your career agenda is a smart move. There is no other department having the insight around career and employee development as HR has. Establishing this partnership provides HR the strategic input they crave, and your organizational staff needs, especially now.

If your organization currently has no HR department, there are plenty of HR consultants eager to assist you.

In Summary

As you can surmise, none of these endeavors are expensive or even too challenging to implement regardless of the size of your organization. Thank you for reading this blog. If you would like to discuss how to build your career path program, Let's get started