Avoid an Employee Exodus with Career Mapping

One of the best ways to retain staff and advance the interests of your company is through career path mapping. After the recent health crisis of Covid-19, many people are coming back to the workforce with a new career and job goals. That means employees are deciding to leave their current employer in search of other, more rewarding opportunities. 

Helping current workers develop a career path can assist them in creating a new goal or identifying vital interests they can pursue on the job. In addition, members of HR, management, and recruiters can provide career plan map opportunities that will encourage workers to stay by investing in their strengths and career goals. 

What Is a Career Map?

A career map is a written plan that outlines where someone is in their career, where they want to go, and what steps will lead to that outcome. 

Each employee can have a career progression map with their employer. Creating the career map includes finding resources and a mentor who helps employees reach the success they want. When you support your team with a career path model, it can benefit the business and the employee’s career.

Why Implement Career Paths as Training and Development

Mapping careers is helpful for employers and employees in the following ways:

• Helps in retaining your top long-term employees
• Provides purpose to those in all positions
• Brings in the highest achievers as new hires
• Increases the number of experienced, diverse, and qualified workers
• Creates an employee-centered culture where they feel valued

The Top Reason to Implement Career Mapping

The number one reason to consider career mapping for your employees is that it can help retain them. A current shortage in the labor market as people choose not to return to the workplace or pursue a new career post pandemic means retaining staff is now more important than ever. 

Taking steps to ensure you keep your staff is essential for organizational longevity. A career map can be a big part of that process. Employees who do not feel invested in are more likely to have their heads turned by other organizations and what they have to offer.

Few people want to stay in the same role forever, especially if they could grow professionally somewhere else. Implementing a culture with career maps gives a clear way forward for all employees by providing achievable development and training milestones.

If you haven’t already invested time and resources into mapping career paths for employees, then this is a great opportunity to do so. While it might seem like a considerable undertaking, it can be broken down and implemented to create a more focused, satisfied, and incentivized workforce.

How to Make a Career Map

Building a career map has several steps to understand. It includes creating an organizational chart, defining each position, documenting job skills, determining training needs, creating training programs, and tracking subsequent career path development. 

Update the Organizational Chart

If you have no organizational chart, this should be your first step. This is a diagram that shows the structure of the company. It details each role or position and how they work with each other. 

If you already have a chart, determine whether it remains fit for purpose in relation to your current business plan. Adding work roles, positions, or teams may be needed to get things up to date.

Define Positions at the Company

As you work through how to create a career map, the next step is looking at job descriptions. Your career pathing framework should have the responsibilities for each written out, along with certification, education requirements and necessary skills.

Be detailed and add as much information as you can. For example, add KPIs that pertain to the job. This will give you a clear idea of the level of person suitable for the job going forward. 

This is also called job profiling and can let you put specific roles into a cluster if similar. Each cluster is a family that has jobs with the same features and characteristics.

Build a Roadmap for Skill Tracks

Once you have the job descriptions completed, look at the bigger picture. Create a roadmap for different teams, functions, and departments. How and why do people advance? Is advancement, whether it be through the company ranks or in terms of professional development available to everyone or a select few?

For example, a HR assistant might be entry-level in the human resources family. When progressing in their career, they may well go through being a recruiter, benefits specialist, and an assistant director before flying even higher.

But not all jobs will have a direct advanced role. If there aren’t many specialized positions, there might still be additional paths to take or areas of the business that are of interest. This can be a boon for helping employees find the right career as they return to the office, even through a lateral move.

Learn Training Needs

The next step is determining how to move people across the course of their career to higher jobs. This can begin with documentation of the training opportunities you already provide and might also include:

• Some departments hiring from outside while others recruit internally
• Mentorship opportunities available from leaders and peers
• Sending surveys to staff about what training is desired
• Reviewing exit interviews to learn more about why workers leave.

Build Training and Development Programs

Another step in how to map out your career map for employees involves looking at your overall training. This can take time and resources if you haven’t invested here in the past. Is your current training still helpful to the business? Are there growth areas in your sector that require skills your workforce currently lacks? Maybe an employee has suggested specific training to you that would be of benefit to the company? Determine what needs you have and develop your training around them.

This might mean changing things, but that’s okay to get the results you want. Vertical growth programs should be a part of your plan. Then make sure you build the plan into your budget. If you are looking for the right way to take your business to the next level, build a coaching culture, which all the leading companies offer.

Map Your Career

At this point, you can start rolling out the career mapping program. For new hires, this should begin during onboarding. Those already with the company can undergo the process during performance reviews or at meetings specifically scheduled for career mapping. 

Depending on the size of your company, it is essential that you have managers on board. During meetings, managers have the chance to talk to their team about short and long-term expectations and goals. This may also mean training management for this task. Your managers should be responsible for facilitating the process and will need to be aware of job options someone can move into.

Ensure that ongoing training is something managers not only schedule but actively support, and that the career map is included in each employee’s file.

Extra Tips for Career Mapping

While you create career maps, there are a few tips to help you. Implement these in your management and talent acquisition strategies to ensure you move forward successfully.

Make it Simple

Flexibility is helpful, so there’s no need to be too strict with your career maps. Too much detail might be discouraging instead of encouraging. They should show that employees have options at the company rather than forcing them into one direction that they may not be happy with.

Remember the Goals

Career maps are made to benefit employees and employers. While each map is tied to an employee and their abilities, they also must be related to the company’s overall goal. There’s no point in creating maps leading to positions that the company will not need.

Let Employees Have a Say

While career maps must fit the company’s aims, they should also consider how employees want to move forward based on their own ambitions, skills, and knowledge. It should be an inclusive process where employees feel comfortable (and hopefully excited!). This also ensures the map is both achievable and realistic for the organization and its workforce.

How Everytalent Can Help Managers, Recruiters, and Employers

Having a career path map for your employees has many benefits. It’s also a must have when organizations want to find and invest in new people. That’s the point where Everytalent can help your organization. 

Rather than spending time and money on in-person career fairs, let us help you conveniently handle the process online. You can build an event, promote it to the audience you want, and broadcast it to as many people as possible. It’s fully interactive and engaging so that you can speak with each potential employee seeking employment.