Job-hopping is the new normal, especially for the Gen Z and millennial population. In fact, according to a 2023 study from ResumeLab, a striking 83% of Gen Z employees identify as “job hoppers,” with only about one-third of the 1,100 surveyed saying they plan to stay in their current role for more than two years. But what’s behind this trend?
Job-hopping is the new normal, especially for the Gen Z and millennial population. In fact, according to a 2023 study from ResumeLab, a striking 83% of Gen Z employees identify as “job hoppers,” with only about one-third of the 1,100 surveyed saying they plan to stay in their current role for more than two years. But what’s behind this trend?
Image sourced from resumelab.com
Many employees simply don’t see a future with their current company. They experience professional FOMO (fear of missing out) and chasing new opportunities elsewhere. This trend of frequent job changes can create significant challenges for businesses, leading to high turnover rates and increased recruitment costs.
If this sounds familiar, career mapping could be the solution. It helps keep your employees on board by offering them a clear, rewarding path within your company. Here’s a complete guide on career path mapping.
What’s Career Path Mapping?
Career path mapping (also called career pathing) is all about giving employees a clear and detailed picture of the job opportunities available within your company, helping them see a future with you rather than looking elsewhere. Here’s how it works:
- Employers create a comprehensive roadmap that outlines all the job roles within the company.
- Each role comes with a description that breaks down the skills, competencies, and experience required to succeed in that position.
For instance, if you’re currently a marketing assistant looking to level up to a coordinator, the description might say something about you needing to master email tracking tools to successfully transition into a digital marketing specialist role.
- Employees are then encouraged to chart out their own career paths, mapping out how they can move from their current position to their desired role within the company.
Take a data analyst who’s been dreaming about becoming a data scientist, for example. They might map out steps to acquire skills in using data enrichment tools along the way.
- To support this, employers offer a range of training and development opportunities, guiding employees from point A (where they are now) to point B (where they want to go).
Now, the journey isn’t always a straight line upward. While some steps will involve vertical moves (we’re talking promotions and salary increases), others may involve lateral shifts into different departments.
Both paths are valuable for encouraging employees to grow, learn new skills, and keep advancing in their careers. Plus, building these clear paths can help expand your hiring pool in the long run.
Components of a Career Map
A solid career map should include these must-have goodies:
- Job description role cards: Think of these as the cheat sheets for every position in your company. They should break down the role’s seniority, who they report to, and the tasks they tackle daily.
If you have a Sales Manager role, the card should outline that it’s a mid-level position reporting to the Sales Director and Head of Sales, and detail tasks. Basically, everything someone needs to know before they get started in their mapping.
- Role competencies: You’ll want to include some core competencies, job-specific skills, functional know-how, and leadership traits right next to each role.
For example, if you’re looking at a Sales Representative position, you might note that strong negotiation skills and a knack for making international calls are key for success. This way, everyone knows what’s expected and what they need to bring to the table to succeed.
- Personality types: Don’t forget to sprinkle in those soft skills and character traits! Whether it’s being assertive or having a big heart, knowing these traits helps your awesome team find the career path that suits them best. Plus, using personality and behavioral assessments, like Myers-Briggs, for instance, can really clear things up.
- Learning and development opportunities: Encourage employees to hit the ground running with training programs or cool internal initiatives like job shadowing. This way, they can get the skills they need to smash their professional goals.
Benefits of Career Path Mapping
By now, you’ve probably got a good grasp on what career paths are, so let’s talk about the many benefits they bring to the table.
1. Improving Employee Retention
Hiring new staff is pretty pricey. In 2019, the average cost per hire was $4,129, but last year in 2023, that number jumped to $4,700, a 14% increase, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). So, knowing how to hold on to your current employees is a financially smart decision.
Image sourced from Linkedin.com
Plus, offering internal career growth and internal mobility keeps your team pumped, engaged and ready to work their hardest for you. LinkedIn’s latest data shows that internal hiring can greatly improve employee engagement and retention.
In fact, those who have moved internally have a 64% chance of staying for three years, while those who haven’t moved at all only have a 45% chance, as you can see from the graph above.
Rather than just waiting around while your employees are secretly chatting to recruiters and scouring for new roles on LinkedIn, internal recruiters should team up with Learning and Development pros to nurture your existing talent, provide valuable training, and map out clear career opportunities that make staying with your company an easy choice. This will help keep your best employees on board.
2. Boosting Employee Engagement
Most organizations are grappling with some serious employee engagement issues. When team members feel unfulfilled, they’re more likely to jump ship for a job that actually excites them. Just take a look at Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report for the eye-opening stats:
Image sourced from gallup.com
Low engagement costs the global economy a whopping $8.9 trillion, which is about 9% of global GDP. The numbers break down like this: only 23% of employees are engaged, while a staggering 62% fall into the “not engaged” category, and 15% are actively disengaged.
This disengagement takes a massive toll on productivity, innovation, and the ability to drive organizational change. The successful corporations of the future will not only be about raking in profits but will also prioritize cultivating thriving employees who can handle anything that comes their way.
One of the best ways to foster these engaged and thriving employees is by offering solid incentives to stick around, which is a core goal of career mapping. So, what can you expect by giving employees a reason to stay? Well, it turns out that happier employees would be willing to put in more effort at work if they felt happier in their roles.
3. Identifying Skills Gaps
For those of you who don’t know, skills gaps refer to the difference between the skills an employee currently has and the skills needed for their job. Unfortunately, the situation isn’t looking great at the moment. Currently, 70% say there’s a skills gap holding back the transformation of their business, and almost 40% say that the skills gap at their company has worsened in the past twelve months.
Image sourced from springboard.com
Simply hiring new employees isn’t enough to bridge those gaps. Plus, as we mentioned earlier, there’s an unnecessary cost that comes with doing that. To tackle this issue, companies should commit to assessing and developing their internal talent, showcasing what an internal career path looks like. If you’re wondering about the benefits of this, PWC has your answer.
They found that fewer than half (46%) of workers surveyed say they moderately or strongly agree that their employer provides adequate opportunities to learn new skills that would be helpful for their careers.
So, creating ample opportunities for all employees to develop skills on the job is critical. After all, a little investment in training and education today can lead to a more loyal workforce tomorrow.
4. Enhancing Diversity in Leadership
It’s quite eye-opening that nearly 80% of talent professionals have pointed to “diversity hiring” as the most significant trend in the recruiting industry. But, this focus on diversity shouldn’t just be about bringing in new faces from outside. It should also be a super important part of how we nurture existing talent within our own organizations.
When you set up a solid career progression framework, you create a clear path for everyone to follow, which means everyone gets a fair shot at moving up. This helps level the playing field for women and people of color, and tackles any biases that might hold back people with physical disabilities.
So, by bringing career mapping into your workplace, you’re really pushing for inclusivity and equal chances. With clear career paths laid out, employees from all backgrounds and experience levels can easily see how they can climb the ladder to leadership positions, making your company a more diverse and exciting place to work.
Best Practices for Career Path Mapping
Ready to start career mapping and give your brilliant employees a clear path to success? Here are some simple (yet effective) steps to guide you through the process:
1. Create Your Starting Point
The first thing you want to do is help your employees figure out their starting point. It’s all about pinpointing where they are right now in their career journey. We mean, it’s hard to know how to get somewhere if you don’t know where you’re starting, right?
Encourage your employees to take a good, hard look at their current roles. They should reflect on their day-to-day tasks, the skills they bring to the table, and their job titles. A little self-assessment can go a long way here. Ask them to jot down their responsibilities, accomplishments, and any challenges they face. This reflection helps clarify their strengths and areas for improvement.
Having a copy of your company’s organizational chart is invaluable at this stage. Share it with your team so they can visualize where they fit in the grand scheme of things. About 65% of the general population are visual learners, so this can really help those who need a little extra clarity.
2. Think about the end goal
When it comes to career mapping, they must think about their big, long-term goal. Or, what they really want to achieve down the road. For now, let’s call that their final destination. But it’s important to know that this destination isn’t set in stone, and it can change.
Encourage them to dream big and think about what they really want to do. Maybe they want to move up to a manager position, switch careers, or even have self-employment ideas they want to try on their own. Whatever it is, remind them that it’s totally okay for those dreams to change as they grow and learn.
While they’re working on their career map, it’s important not to get stuck on just one goal. Sometimes, they’ll come across a cool detour they didn’t expect, and that’s fine. Keep things flexible and open to new ideas because who knows what great opportunities might arise. The key is to keep their eyes on the prize, but also be ready to explore new paths that might lead to even better places.
Just like using a sales planning template to outline the steps to reach a target, they should view their career path as a living document, adjusting it as they gain experience and insight into their strengths and interests.
3. Work Out the In-between Steps
Free to use image sourced from stockvault.net
Now it’s time for employers to help their employees sketch out the steps that’ll take them from Point A to Point Z. This means mapping out a career journey that includes the specific job roles they should aim for, the people they should connect with, companies where opportunities exist, and the promotions they’ll need to snag to reach their big goal.
Encourage your team to think of their careers as a jungle gym rather than a straight ladder. There are twists, turns, and maybe even a few monkey bars along the way. It’s perfectly okay if their path doesn’t look like everyone else’s; most successful careers aren’t a straight shot anyway.
4. Work Out Learning and Development Needs
With that shiny new career map in hand, it’s time to take a hard look at how well your current employee development systems can help them move up the ladder. You’ll want to determine what training or mentoring programs you already have in place to support your employees on their journeys. If you’re feeling a bit lost, here are some quick ways to get there:
- Survey your team to see how they feel about the learning and development opportunities available to them. A little feedback can go a long way.
- Conduct exit interviews (or dig up the notes from past ones) to find out why people are packing their bags and leaving your company.
- Take a close look at your mentoring, coaching, or job shadowing programs to see how effective they are. Are they helping your employees grow or are they just taking up space on the company calendar?
5. Provide Comprehensive Training Programs
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
After assessing where the gaps in your training might be, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and create programs that help your employees flourish. This could mean:
- Setting a budget for training to make sure there are resources available.
- Encouraging leaders to take on mentoring roles so that employees have guidance and support.
- Arranging job rotations to give employees hands-on experience in different areas of the company.
You’ll need to hold performance reviews to see how well employees are adapting and applying their training. But when assessing your employees’ performance, don’t just focus on their final deliverables.
Use time-tracking apps to determine how long it took them to complete specific tasks they learned during the training as well. This way, you’ll know which aspects of your training program you need to improve. If you find an employee still spends a lot of time generating subject lines using ChatGPT after your ChatGPT sessions, for instance, then you know you need to make some changes to those specific modules.
6. Increase Employee Awareness
Once your career map is ready to go, make sure to share it with everyone in the company (both your seasoned pros and fresh faces) during onboarding. This way, everyone can see the new opportunities available within the organization.
Don’t forget to sprinkle in some inspiring success stories of employees who’ve successfully transitioned into new roles. These stories can be just the motivation your team needs to start thinking about their own career growth.
Final Thoughts
So there you have it! Career path mapping is the ultimate secret to keeping employees motivated and helping them stay ahead and invested in your company.
By laying out clear paths for growth, you boost retention and cultivate a vibrant workplace. Get started, invest in your team, and watch them shine!
