Strategic Career Pathing that Benefits Both the Employee and Organization

People are companies’ most important assets and the key to sustained competitive advantage. Talent-centric organizations understand, identify, and foster high-performing people who contribute to the achievement of business and financial goals. New research by the Brandon Hall Group explores twenty talent-risk factors (see chart below) facing organizations. Three of the top four risk factors are associated with developing, engaging, motivating, and retaining top talent in an organization. Two of the top ten risks involve identifying new skills or capabilities that will be needed by the business soon and the fact that these skills and capabilities are not being developed. Identifying internal candidates who can be upskilled or slotted into job openings has a direct impact on the bottom line, as it is estimated to cost roughly 50% less than hiring externally.  

So how does an organization address the dual risks of a lack of compelling career development opportunities and identifying critical skills and capabilities? Here are some ideas for a strategic career pathing process that is forward-looking for both the individual and the organization.

Build a strategic profile for each position. Go beyond identifying the basic responsibilities, skills, and competencies in the current state by integrating real-time labor market information. By using LMI data to profile a position, you can track emerging skills, tools, and competencies and view skill adjacencies. Services like those offered by Burning Glass Technologies help you keep pace with the changing job market.

Understand and evaluate your talent. Assess your talent holistically. Identify skills that are both used on the job and skills that they may have developed elsewhere. Create a skills inventory for the individual and organization as a whole. Talent can then be matched to the strategic profile for each position based on alignment and skill gaps that can be linked to learning and development tools.

Create a career path for employees. Employees desire transparency in career opportunities. Exposing the strategic position profiles to employees allows them to identify the career moves they want to make based on their alignment and skills gaps. This information is invaluable as employees desire the versatility to move across job roles in different parts of the business to increase their expertise. The organization benefits from strategic skills development, cross-functional knowledge and improved retention rates.

The steps above are best accomplished with a talent assessment software like Frontier Signal's that can:

• Conduct rapid job analysis and incorporate adjacent or future skillsets
• Benchmark the success factors of a job role using your data
• Assess internal talent against the benchmark your data creates
• Evaluate candidates by mutual fit, so you can pinpoint talent based on your organization’s strategic needs
• Identify an individual’s skill and trait gaps and precisely align them to learning and development resources

Frontier Signal's talent assessment technology replaces time-consuming and flawed screening with automation to augment human intelligence, not remove it from decision-making.

If you would like to learn more and schedule a demo, please visit our web site at https://www.frontiersignal.com/learn-more.