8 Key Tips to Building Your Organisation’s Career Development Strategy

According to LinkedIn’s 2018 Workplace Learning Report, 94% of employees surveyed said that they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development. Clearly career development is a key tool in your organisation’s ‘attract and retain’ Talent Management initiatives. However, if you haven’t already put in place a career development strategy or if yours is clearly flagging, where do you start?

Based on our experience, here are some suggestions that may help guide you:

1. Start by understanding the organisation’s business strategy and long-term objectives. Which skills and competencies are required to support them? Which ones are currently missing?
2. Build a job role architecture that is aligned with the business strategy and enables development of consistent job families and job role profiles.
3. Consider the different types of competencies that should be included for each job role, for instance which competencies are applicable to every employee in the organisation, regardless of grade or job title; every manager or leader; those that are job family or job role-specific.
4. Anchor the competencies to your job grades/band levels. For instance, what is the minimum level of proficiency that is required for a core organisational competency for all jobs at a certain job grade/level?
5. As you build your job role profiles based on your architecture, consider which types of competencies will help to support mobility and career development within your organisation. For instance, non-technical competencies (aka ‘transferrable skills’) can often serve as the ‘currency’ that provides employees with vertical, lateral and diagonal career moves within the organisation.
6. Calibrate your job roles to ensure that there is consistency within a job family and/or a job grade/band and to aid the development of career pathways.
7. Ensure visibility of job role profiles for everyone, so that there is transparency and clarity on which competencies are needed for success in each job.
8. Provide access to a technology platform that will enable employees and managers to capture and discuss the individual’s existing competencies and those that they need to develop for their career aspirations, to agree career objectives and manage development plans.
9. Every organisation is different and not all of the above points will apply for your organisation, however the principles may provide you with something to think about as you consider your own organisation’s career development strategy.

To learn more about taking a competency-based approach to developing your organisation’s career development strategy, join me and Donald H. Taylor of The Learning and Performance Institute for a free webinar on May 7^th 2019, by registering here: Why Great Career Pathways Start with Fully-aligned Competencies’