Cracking career architecture for a 2020s career experience

3 minute read

Fuel your career path

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10Eighty helps individuals to maximise their potential and helps organisations to harness that potential. We are experts in developing leadership capability and helping organisations increase employee engagement

Michael Moran

Fuel your career path

One challenge today is that of defining career frameworks in a disrupted world. The good news is that it is easier than ever before to build career frameworks highlighting the competences that drive performance.

The future of work depends on agile career pathing solutions that allow organisations to deliver a 2020s career experience for employees that is personalised and based on employee values, talents and career aspirations. In short today’s career paths must be employee centric. To thrive in the modern business world, it is critical that roles enable employees to play to their strengths, those things that energise them. In this dynamic, rapidly moving environment, you need people who have broader more diversified capabilities, while also having the opportunity to maintain their connection to a specific area of expertise and competency as they move around the organisation.

At 10Eighty we champion the Fuel50 system which uses a path mapping capability to incorporate job functions, jobs content, skills, competencies, matching them to the values and talents of employees. Fuel50 uses an IBM framework to identify core competencies and leadership behaviours. The database has 3,000 roles and over 2,000 competences. The adoption of this 'one I created earlier approach' facilitates speed of implementation, external benchmarking and an updating capability to ensure competences do not become obsolete.

Career development is key to retention of talented employees

Employees expect to be empowered, with resources and support from the organisation, in order that they are truly able to take control of their own career path. They expect this career experience to be tailor to their values, motivators and talents. They also expect career development and will, in fact, move on if it is not available to them; there is an expectation that their organisations will make them more employable. Employees need to be able match themselves against the competences required for roles to which they aspire. The problem is that until recently most organisations have struggled to collate this base data and to make it widely available to all employees; and, all too often this was restricted a few anointed individuals who were deemed to be high potential or emerging talent. The latest generation of career pathway software, and the underpinning AI, can allow individuals to truly own and manage their careers. Organisations that fail to embrace this technology will increasingly lose talent and be unable to attract it.

Start from where you are

So, assuming this article resonates with you, where do you start? It sounds like a big ask but one of the key points made in the seminar was that making a start is the important piece, the architecture can be built process by process and will evolve as jobs and markets change. Some parts of the organisation may have clarity around their roles and competencies while others are less mature in terms of career architecture. Taking a small section of the organisation and making a trial of the framework will pay dividends that make the effort well worthwhile. I also strongly believe that by giving employees a better understanding of themselves, as to what is important, what motivates and what it is they enjoying doing and are consequently good at, is a critical first step. To quote Lao Tzu "The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." This small step, will drive up employee engagement, increase productivity and reduce attrition.

Published on The People Space 7 May 2020

Employees expect to be empowered, with resources and support from the organisation, in order that they are truly able to take control of their own career path

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