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How to build a career progression plan for your employees

Creating an effective career progression plan can help you to boost employee retention, helping them to develop their skills and role in your business. This involves looking at the nature of your employee’s role and its potential to expand in the long-term. Read on to learn about how to create a career progression strategy for an employee’s role.

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What is career progression

Career progression usually involves an employee moving up – laterally – through a business’s hierarchy. As they become more familiar with their role’s responsibilities as well as how your business works, your employees might feel like they are ready to take on more complex tasks or manage junior staff. 

Progression is a great way to reward employees who are loyal to your business. Perhaps they have helped your business to grow, understand how to solve some of the challenges your business has faced and have successfully retained their training. They might already be helping more junior employees on tasks through being a buddy or mentor. They might be interested in progressing further through the company and already demonstrate many of the skills and personal attributes necessary for this. 

Step-by-step for creating a career progression plan

A solid career progression framework usually involves creating a step-by-step process that looks at a particular role and how it provides opportunity for progression. 

Step 1: assessing your pre-existing career progression plan

You might have a career progression plan already in place. Before you start making any changes to career progression, it’s worth considering any potential issues that this framework already has. You can use this this time to find out whether there is any room for change. Take a look at whether there are some roles in your business which have more potential to stagnate than others.

Maybe some roles have a lot of room for growth, while others require their employees to stay in that role for a longer period of time. You could create a chart that outlines the current hierarchies that are in place and whether they’re effective, looking at scope for creating new roles within the business. Perhaps look at whether some roles have better employee retention than others, using data gathered from employee surveys to help you to figure out whether this is because there’s little room for career progression. 

Step 2: What needs to be improved?

This stage provides a good opportunity to look at how you might be able to improve your career progression plan. You might re-assess the metrics you’re using to assess employee engagement, happiness and retention. It is useful to get this right so that when it comes to measuring the success of your career progression framework, you do this in a way that provides meaningful, actionable results. 

Furthermore, consider deciding what the most important outcomes of your career progression framework. These could be improving retention, training, attracting talent or sustaining engagement. 

Step 3: Assessing the career progression of your current employees

Now that you have considered scope for career progression by looking at whether your current plan is effective, it’s worth discussing career plans with your current employees. It’s important to find out whether the employees themselves are looking for more opportunities to grow and whether they think they’re available to them. In a one-on-one meeting, you might try to answer questions such as:

  • What are your employee’s long-term aspirations within the company?
  • What are their professional and personal goals in general?
  • Are they able to resolve conflict effectively?
  • Do they have leadership skills?
  • What talents do they have?
  • What training and/or growth opportunities do they currently have?

By asking employees about their own experiences, you can find out from them directly how they might be feeling about their role. If they are dissatisfied with the career progression currently available to them, they are more likely to look outside your company for these opportunities.

Step 4: Creating different levels for your framework

Now that you know what changes to make, the needs of your employees plus the metrics you’ll be using, it’s time to create a new career progression framework. 

To do this, you’ll first need to consider the different progression levels that should be available for each role. These will be different depending on the nature of your business, as well as the role. You might simply create a progression that ranges from junior, to mid-level, to more senior decision-making roles. 

It might also be appropriate to include different progression options for some employees, giving them the choice between different senior positions. This can also provide more progression options to employers looking to harness the particular skills and qualities of their employee. 

You may also include vice president or chairperson as the endpoint of an employee’s career progression plan, however, whether this is appropriate will depend on the role as well as what kind of business you run. It might be the case it’s only appropriate for certain qualified members of staff to progress to this level, such as in a healthcare business or law firm. 

As well as creating a career progression path, you might also choose to group certain roles by pay band. This creates a useful standard whereby candidates and employees know how much they can expect to earn via their band.

Step 5: deciding how and why an employee progresses

Now you’ve got a path for employee progression outlined, it’s worth looking at how long it would take for an employee to move up your company’s hierarchy. Your employees might already have questions about how long it would take them to receive a promotion if they have the right skills and experience. Therefore creating conditions including a timeframe for progression can be useful. 

Timeframe is just one way to decide whether it’s right for an employee to progress. It’s useful to have regular check-ins or one-on-one meetings with employees to find out whether they have the skills and experience yet to progress in your business. You could have a one-on-one meeting or competency interview with an employee to assess whether it would be right for them to progress in their career. 

This also might be a good time to look at your current learning and development plans to see whether they offer your employees the ability to learn skills that might help them to progress. You might offer managerial qualifications training to an employee who is looking to move up to a manager role. Training opportunities are a great way to make sure your employees are fully prepared for any new responsibilities they might face when they progress. 

Step 6: succession planning

When you’ve got a working career progression plan in place, you can also start identifying where there are gaps in your talent pool. By looking at these weak areas, you can assess whether it’s possible to fill these with internal candidates (and therefore progressing them), or whether it’s necessary to hire externally. 

When you make a succession plan part of your career progression plan, it means that you’re more likely to choose the right internal hire. Internal hires are useful in that the candidate already has knowledge and experience of your company’s processes. This also means you’re more likely to retain pre-existing talent in your company, as you are providing progression opportunities to internal hires who already show great promise.

Having an effective career progression plan can help you to boost employee engagement, retention and overall happiness. Being able to spot and develop talented employees who show potential is a great way to help your employees to grow in their role. By creating a career progression plan, you can identify role stagnation areas and provide employees with more opportunities to move vertically in your business. This also gives you the chance to identify your employee’s own personal aspirations and what they are gaining from the experience of working with you.

Your career progression framework will likely depend on the role and how your business hierarchy works, so it’s worth taking the time to create a unique framework that works for you. 

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