Why Career Planning Without Competency Models Is Just Scary!

“***Organizations' futures may depend on their solutions and their ability to offer career development to everyone.” – Beverly Kaye, Lindy Williams***

Career Planning Today

The story is often the same. An employee is told that if they are interested in other job opportunities, they should look at the company’s career maps, a pre-defined path for typical progression that usually shows what it looks like if you want to move up within a particular function. But is that realistic today?

With the impact of digitization, AI, and automation, how current are those maps? With many choosing to retire later, and the scarcity of available positions at that level, moving up may not be an option. With increased awareness and desire for work/life balance, people are often more interested in expanding their breadth than in moving up to management. Career ladders have given way to the “career lattice” (like a rock climbing wall) — where the number of future opportunities are greater and can significantly expand a person’s horizons.

Employees are directed to existing job postings, which identify immediate organizational needs for which they may not have the appropriate skill sets… at least not now.

The other alternatives include “talking to HR”, which could be difficult due to the scale of the organization or comfort level of the individual, or “talking with your manager”, which could be difficult if the manager isn’t good at conducting career discussions, doesn’t understand the skill requirements of roles outside their function, or doesn’t want to lose a good employee.

Career development impacts engagement and retention

According to CEB, a lack of future career opportunities is the primary driver of attrition, topping compensation and manager quality. According to Bersin Research and Glassdoor data, career development and learning are almost 2X more important than compensation, benefits, and work environment for talent acquisition and retention.

Organizations want to be able to help people achieve their potential, and use that as a value proposition for recruiting, but supporting the promise may fall short.

“We encourage employees to own their careers and design them, but they become frustrated when we can’t deliver on their aspirations. They feel like we’ve broken our contract with them.” – CEB

The easy solution: competency models.

Competency models empower employees to own career planning. Because competency models identify the role-specific skill requirements and behavioral examples of those skills, they have the ability to empower each employee to own their own career planning. This eliminates the HR or manager tollgates.

Once you have role-based competency models, enable people to self-assess against the skill requirements for the role or roles they might want next, so they can evaluate whether or not they want that role, and if so, what skill development they should pursue to prepare themselves (aka competency-based personalized learning). In this way, they can explore job options in a safe environment, and then be able to take action to develop, engaging their manager or HR as appropriate, once they know what they want to pursue. Developing capabilities to meet the requirements for a new role is called reskilling.

Reskilling also helps people who may not have a good job fit currently to find a better place within the organization where they can thrive.

You can’t reskill without a competency model.

Competency models support career development conversations with managers and HR

Career assessments also help managers to have more insightful and comfortable conversations about career planning. They no longer have to fear the conversation they are not equipped to conduct. Instead, they can direct a team member to perform their own career scenario planning, and then follow up to talk about how they can support the prescribed tactics and experience opportunities.

And it helps HR who doesn’t have the capacity for regular robust career development plan discussions with everyone in the organization. Even when they do have career conversations, with the rapid pace of changes in skill requirements, would they even know the new requirements of all organizational roles? Competency models, easily accessible through a competency assessment system, ensure everyone knows what each job looks like.

“Do we want to be able to attract and retain our people?”

According to Work Institute's 2017 Retention Report, career development was both the most common reason people left and stayed with an organization.

In a tight labor market, the ability to demonstrate that you have systems that promote ongoing career development is a key differentiator, especially for top talent with the skills you need.

Ask yourself, “Do we want to be able to attract and retain our people?” And if the answer is yes, put the scary loss of acquisition and retention behind you. Explore how using a competency model assessment for career planning can:

Drive the best recruits to select you
Provide employees with a reason to stay
Provide a good employee in the wrong job with the ability to find their place
Provide the right/personalized career development recommendations for each person
Provide your managers with the ability and confidence to support data-driven career conversations
Provide HR with the ability to manage career planning at scale

According to thought leaders Beverly Kaye and Lindy Williams, development professionals who discover the secrets to building career development systems that last create cultures of growth and engagement.