Career Pathing Examples
It’s important to remember that no two career paths will look the same. Progression can be vertical, lateral, or even a mix of the two.
Vertical Career Pathing
Also known as ladder pathing, a vertical career path involves advancing up through an organization’s hierarchy to a higher-paying position with increased responsibility.
Accounting Example
An employee might start by being responsible for entry-level bookkeeping. After a time, they’re promoted to a senior accountant position. From there, they become a partner, managing projects, teams, and clients. Eventually, if all goes well, they may one day end up as CFO or even CEO of the firm.
Marketing Example
As part of their degree, a college student interns with a marketing agency and is later hired as a junior marketer. During this time, they’re trained as a specialist in content marketing before eventually becoming a content marketing manager with their own team.
Lateral Career Pathing
Instead of going up a ladder, an employee’s career path can also take a sidestep to a different role, organization, or even industry. Regardless of where it leads, it can be equally rewarding if the aim is to learn new skills or have different experiences.
As you’ll see, an upward trajectory is still possible after a lateral move, which is also called lattice pathing.
Healthcare Example
Someone starts their medical career as a support worker or healthcare assistant. After a few years of showing promise, their employers assist them in studying to become a registered nurse.
During this time, this individual becomes interested in healthcare technology. They turn down a chance at management and instead leverage their knowledge to train in health informatics. From this fresh career, a completely new progression path opens.
How to Set Up a Career Pathing Framework
44% of employees don’t feel their organizations have compelling career paths. This means you can instantly get a leg up on almost half of the competition by putting in a bit of work in this area. But where should you start?
1. Assess Your Needs
You can’t start planning a compelling career path without knowing your business’ own needs. Use (or first create) an organizational chart for your company, to review all the team members, roles, and reporting hierarchies within your business, visualizing the connections between individuals, teams, and departments.
How well does the chart align with your business models and goals? Auditing your organizational chart will give you a chance to re-organize departments or teams (if necessary) to create a more vertically or laterally structured organization.
2. Define Job Roles and Responsibilities
Using your chart as a reference point, review each position. List out a job description, including the skills needed to perform the role and its responsibilities. Detailed descriptions will help clarify where vertical and lateral pathing opportunities exist.
Next, look for any overlap between those listed skills and roles to identify what upskilling and reskilling are relevant for each path. Consider conducting a skills gap analysis, too — you might find there are new roles your workforce may be interested in as well.
During this step, remember to involve key stakeholders from your L&D teams. As training experts, they can help you forge practical and appealing career paths.
3. Develop a Career Map
Unlike a career path, which is specific to an individual employee, a career map draws out every possible career path within an organization.
Think of a career map like a guide to a big city's public transportation system. Depending on where you start, some destinations have shorter, quicker routes compared to others. Similarly, different vehicles are better suited for different journeys.
A career map will give greater developmental transparency to your teams, so design one for each department that accounts for its most common career paths. When finished, shift to connecting the maps via lateral, interdepartmental career paths.
4. Identify Employee Career Goals
Next, help your employees help you. In other words, during their next one-on-one or regular performance review, ask them what opportunities interest them the most. Formalize this feedback in an individual development plan to build a framework and accountability.
5. Plan Employee Career Paths
With the needs of your business in one hand and the goals of your staff in the other, it’s time to find a happy medium where both objectives line up.
Vertical progression will likely appeal to ambitious employees, so plan learning and development around management and other associated skills for these individuals. Alternatively, those looking to diversify their career paths may prefer a lattice-based path with its opportunities to learn new skills or gain experience in other areas.
Remember, employees often want guidance regarding their career development. 78% of learners expressed the need for course recommendations based on their career goals, so this is where you, the employer, can make a difference.
That same report also found that employees with learning opportunities are 3.5x more likely to feel supported in achieving their goals.
6. Monitor Team Performance
Realistically, not everything will go perfectly according to plan, which is why every career map and pathing should have room for flexibility. Some employees may not excel as you hoped, while other team members might reveal hidden talents and abilities that are valuable in roles other than the ones you’re aiming them at.
Track and monitor team performance using reviews, employee engagement surveys, and a learning management system (LMS). Some HR software platforms can streamline this step and free up your teams to focus on helping workers reach their career path targets.
Data may show that one team member needs mentoring while another requires greater access to on-demand training. It’s up to your team to help everyone stay the course and adjust when necessary.
