Employees tend to be more engaged when they believe that their employer is concerned about their growth and provides them with a path to reach their career goals. Organizations who don’t focus on developing clear career paths are at risk of losing their top talent because employees who feel that they don’t have opportunities to progress in their careers are more likely to leave. According to a recent article put out by Human Resources Today, even as short as ten months of perceived stagnation significantly increases the likelihood of resignation.
Career pathing is the process of charting the course of employee career development within an organization. Career paths are used to show what a typical career looks like concerning sequential positions, roles, and stages. They outline common paths for moving within and across jobs in ways that facilitate growth and career advancement. Not only do transparent career paths reduce that risk of turnover, but it has also been shown to increase profitability, morale, career satisfaction, motivation, and productivity.
Just like a map without a key, career pathing can be confusing, or downright useless, without identifying the critical competencies required for an employee to progress laterally and vertically within the organization. Competency models identify the role-specific skill requirements and behavioral examples of those skills. Competency-based career pathing links competencies with development activities, which help employees learn what they need to further their development. Using competency-based career pathing provides employees with an ongoing process to enhance skills and knowledge that can lead to mastery of their current jobs, promotions, and transfers to new or different positions.
You can apply Competency Modeling throughout every aspect of the employee lifecycle. We have decided to create a mini-series of articles outlining some of the tips and tricks we have learned along the way on how to get the most out of the Competency Modeling process; this article is Part Four of our mini-series. To read our first article in this series, Why Competency Models Fail, click here. To find out more about Competency Modeling and Selection, read our article, Are You Hiring the Wrong Fit? If you are interested in how to incorporate Competency Modeling with your training and development program, read our recent article, Is Your Employee Development Program a Waste of Money? 5 Signs It Might Be. Keep an eye out for our next article about competency modeling and performance appraisals.
