One of the biggest challenges that organizations face is turnover due to employees seeking better opportunities elsewhere. But what if you could offer them a similar level of development within your organization? It’s important to consider how to ensure that your talent wants to work for you, and also can envision staying with your organization as they grow professionally. One of the most effective ways to do this is to practice career pathing in order to create career development frameworks.

Career pathing is when an employee (sometimes with the help of management) creates a course within an organization for their career path and development. In order to do this, employees must take a careful and honest look at their career goals, skills, required knowledge, experience, and behavioral traits. It’s also important to take a look at the differences in requirements between progressing laterally or vertically within an organization.

Why you should develop a career path
Career paths are an excellent way to ensure that your talent knows how to find out about different job options, including higher level positions, lateral moves, or entirely new roles. This ensures that your employees will be more likely to stay within your organization, reducing turnover. Employees will see the value in being employed at your organization, as they will see that you are putting effort into making sure they can develop professionally.

Integrating competencies and career paths
Building competencies into your workplace is simply good business. Breaking down jobs into essential competencies changes the way development programs can be designed and delivered. Once competency-based job profiles are in place you can begin creating a development process that supports flexible career “latticing”. While traditional ladder career paths are hierarchical and uni-directional, competency-based career paths enable everyone to see a wide variety of logical career moves across multiple departments. Employees can clearly see the skills, behaviors, and abilities they need in order to make a variety of career adjustments.

Having the option to learn and grow beyond traditional hierarchical pathways is essential to staying challenged and engaged. This is especially important for organizations wishing to retain millennial workers, who expect to be continually challenged.