As a worker yourself, you should not think it is too much to ask to have a job that does not involve just a series of repeated tasks and mundane activities. Of course, you would want your job to be a fulfilling and well-paying one. On the part of employers, one way of helping workers achieve this goal is to proactively develop career pathways. Through this, the organization becomes a place where employees are happy, the improvement of the workers’ skills continues, and productivity is constantly going up.
Why Are Career Pathways Important?
Basically, the logic behind the development of career pathways is for the employer’s improvement as a whole. Generally speaking, career pathways help boost professional development. This is through a program in which employees become the subject of various career plans. What it does among anything else is increase the skill sets of the employees, which then results to an increase in their confidence as well. And for those employees who feel that they have become better in terms of their professional or technical skills, it becomes easier to stick together. This is what happens especially when there is significant improvement throughout an employee’s progression in his or her career. This can also lead to reduced employee turnover rates and costs of training new employees. Lastly, a company’s career pathway program for employees tends to be very attractive to newly hired staff members because they can somehow see what’s in store for them in a company.
How Are Career Pathways Structured?
If a career path program is structured correctly, it will allow employees to implement everything they have learned into their actual work. Aside from this, such a program lets employees gain better function in the organization and get a bigger chance at promotion.
Career pathways are designed in such a way that progression is measurable for each stage. This is important as it improves the success rates of employees and it also lessens the pressure on them to be progressive in a short period of time. In case the program fails, it is the decision of the employer whether there must be additional mentoring to guarantee returned improvement, or the employee should just be offered a different role. Every step in a career path must be well calculated to ensure success. Otherwise, the company is the one to suffer the cost without getting anything in return.
Promotion at Work
Many companies are still implementing formalized promotion paths. In this structure, those candidates who are able to meet the requirements and expectations in the first level automatically are considered for promotion to a higher level that comes with bigger employee benefits.
Professional Career Pathways
In comparison to the corporate ladder, a professional career pathway requires candidates to have some sort of licensing or educational criteria to obtain. In many cases, the objective requirements involve more complicated and difficult skills certifications. What this means is that there could be a required third party licensing or concrete proof or evidence of any specialized degree.