Career pathing framework: How can an employee define their own career journey?

Every employee and every company is unique. 

Each person's ambitions and career prospects are different. That’s why it is essential to create a personalized career pathing framework that is adapted to your people’s needs.

According to PwC Global’s 2021 Hopes and Fears report, 77% of workers are ready to learn new skills or completely retrain. With so many people motivated to upskill, retrain and grow in their careers — and the Great Resignation fresh in everyone’s memory — it would be a shame for HR not to listen to them! 

There is a solution to satisfy their needs and desires: career path personalization.

In this article, we'll explore the benefits of a personalized career path framework, and how employees can define their own career journeys.

What is career pathing? Definition and benefits

Career pathing is the process by which an HR talent development professional works with an employee to define their potential development and evolution within the organization. It involves defining goals and identifying the skills and experiences an employee must acquire to achieve them.

Unlike the traditional career ladder, where moving up the ladder is the only career possible, career path personalization takes a broader, customized approach to each individual. A personalized career path can include not only promotions, but also internal vertical and horizontal (or lateral) mobility, upskilling, job changes and training opportunities designed to help employees develop specific skills.

While a career path may require an initial investment of time and energy on the part of the employer, it pays huge dividends in terms of employee engagement. A 2019 LinkedIn Learning report found that 94% of employees would stay with their company longer if it invested in their careers. On the other hand, employees who are unsure of the role that awaits them or the skills they need to advance are more likely to be frustrated with their position and seek employment elsewhere.

Employees who see a path for growth within their organization are not only less likely to leave, but they are also more likely to perform at their best. Clear performance benchmarks and promotional opportunities are invaluable for increasing engagement, and a Gallup study found that engaged teams are 17% more productive than their unengaged peers.

How personalized career pathing benefits the whole company

By using a personalized career path approach, you put the employee at the center of your strategy. Your employees are the lifeblood of your company. Putting their career journey at the heart of your HR strategy will improve talent retention, as you align your goals with their desires and development.

Listening to their ambitions and professional projects will greatly help you implement an employee-centric approach, building loyalty and offering them a personalized employee experience.

For more fulfilled employees: Increased motivation and meaning in their work

With a personalized career pathing framework, employees can showcase their ambitions, experience and skills. They can chart a course for a career that reflects who they are.

By expressing their needs and desires for evolution, they feel more listened to, supported and therefore more fulfilled. As we all know, a fulfilled employee is one who is more invested in his work, more productive and more likely to stay at your company.

For HR managers: Increased engagement and retention

Personalizing each employee's career path means improving motivation, commitment and retention of your talents.

HR benefits when employees are self-motivated and more engaged in learning new knowledge and new skills. A BVA Institute Study revealed that 36% of employees believe that motivation is the first variable that can influence potential career development.

Offering personalized career paths is bound to be to your advantage and can follow a very simple strategy: Employees express their expectations and needs in terms of evolution, the company offers them a personalized development according to what they have expressed and employees feel more fulfilled. They are therefore more committed and invested in their work. If they are more committed, they will be more loyal to the company. 

In short, you can enhance employee engagement and ultimately improve your turnover rate and talent retention. 

For leaders: Improve business performance and show impact

For the company, a fulfilled and motivated employee is also a more efficient employee. They will be able to carry out their responsibilities more efficiently, i.e., to provide a better quality of work in less time. This allows companies and their managers to improve their results.

Personalizing their career (and the whole process mentioned above) allows companies to move quickly and confidently through major industry inflections such as the Great Resignation, quiet quitting or the green transformation while delivering on business objectives.

How can employees define their own career journey?

The 3-step guide with 365Talents

Step 1: Empower your employees

Engaging your employees is a crucial step to make them drivers of their career. By inviting your employees to get involved in various projects, they can give their opinion, feel listened to and recognized, and see that you value their expertise. They can also already begin to feel empowered in their career development as they evolve in their role and responsibilities in real-time, providing concrete experiences to discuss their next evolution during individual interviews.

But you can also empower them in their daily development. By making them owners of their career path through self-declaration and self-assessment of skills and competencies, they are drivers of their career progression and their career choices. This is the best way to reveal all their (many) talents and to involve them in career pathing.

To do this efficiently and effectively, you can use tech solutions such as 365Talents: We place your employees and their skills at the heart of our strategy and our tools, in order to guide you in enacting a people-based strategy.

Your employees self-declare their skills, which are added to a unified database and skills framework that is unique to your company.

Then, our platform provides suggestions for opportunities – whether projects, trainings or new job mobilities. It even offers an explanation so your people can see why a certain opportunity might represent an interesting path for their career. Thanks to the information provided, 365Talents helps employees to continuously complete their profile to highlight all their talents. Their strengths are dynamically matched to the skills required for each of the declared opportunities. 

If the employee does not yet have the necessary skills, it offers them appropriate training, so that they can eventually apply for the opportunities that correspond to their skills and abilities. 

As a result, each employee can develop and define their career internally as they wish.

Step 2: Support each employee in their development

Of course, this approach requires a good knowledge of oneself and one's skills to be able to evaluate oneself. Your employees need your help to evolve professionally.

Moreover, according to the Opinion Way study, "79% of employees surveyed believe that supporting professional development should be at least as important a role for the employer as any other, and for 15% it even takes priority over other obligations.”

It is therefore essential to support your employees in any career development process and prospects. But how can you support them individually? The co-construction of personalized career paths with each of your employees requires an effective large-scale deployment.

That's why at 365Talents, we have a module dedicated to managers and HR. Our Feedback Manager feature allows you to give an opinion and an evaluation on an employee's skills. With relevant feedback, managers can help employees plan their career journey with assignments and projects that are best suited to their development goals. 

Our AI makes visible the best mission for each person and the right person for each mission and each project so that each employee can be totally involved in their evolution. This makes it easier to scale up the personalization of career paths.

Step 3: Identify the right tools

In order to offer personalized career paths and to properly support your employees, it is essential to have the right tools. Having the right tools that strictly meet your needs is essential if you want to build personalized career paths. But above all, it is essential that the tool you choose corresponds to your values and your vision.

If you are motivated by creating a personalized and positive talent experience that fosters engagement by allowing your employees to chart their own career path, 365Talents is perfect for you. 

Each employee has desires, motivations, and skills that they are sometimes unaware of. On their side, HR has many development opportunities that are just waiting for the right candidates. It is then necessary to find a way to match the skills and competencies of each individual with the corresponding current opportunities.

The Skills Intelligence we use places the employee at the center of their evolution, promotes their development, estimates their level of expertise and responds to their development needs. Above all, it is the employee themself who determines their career path, with the help of HR to support them. They declare their skills and competencies on their profile, and indicate which opportunities they are interested in. 

On the HR side, they declare the internal opportunities on the software. And that's where our AI comes in: By analyzing the skills possessed by the employee and those needed for the opportunity, it matches the employee's interest to the declared opportunity by making personalized suggestions. In this way, your employees can define a career that fits them.

We don’t believe that the only way is up. Sometimes, you start in one place and end up somewhere unexpected. Or someone introduces you to an opportunity that changes your entire journey. That’s why it’s so important to use an employee-centered career pathing framework.

Schedule a demo with 365Talents today and find out how you can help your people chart their own course for progress.