The average shelf life of skills is less than five years. Helping employees learn and upskill is imperative to both their continued success and a company’s bottom line. However, training employees is not enough.
A survey found that 45% of college graduates will stay at a job for two years or less. By the age of 35, a quarter of workers will have held at least five or more jobs. With unemployment at a historic low and quit rates at a high, employees dissatisfied with their career development can leave a company and land a new job with a salary increase.
Challenges Graduates Face Early at Modern Workplaces
Recent graduates jump from a controlled environment to a place of constant struggle, anxiety, confusion, and exhaustion. Without them getting acclimatized to their new environment, they do not understand what their employer expects, impacting their wellbeing, morale, and motivation.
Companies are indirectly affected who will not get the best out of them before their adjustment period is over. For one, graduates entering the workforce may feel that they took what’s available to them rather than what they wanted.
There are aspects of work-life that are unglamorous. Priorities change, and they are re-affected to a different project. They may do other types of work than what they were hired for. Spending time on tasks unrelated to your core skillset may quickly douse enthusiasm.
Social interactions also change with the change of teammates. It becomes hard for coworkers to leave their moral judgment of someone at home and maintain a neutral temper.
They are accountable for their success and failures. Unlike in student life, mistakes cost employees who may not tolerate it more than once, adding pressure on graduates early in their careers with infrequent feedback, which can be subjective, terse, or inconsistent.
The lack of transparency and communication results in employees not applying for internal jobs. Without transparency, engaged employees look externally for opportunities.
The solution: Career pathing facilitates the conversation employees wish for. An AI-based workforce planning with deeper assessments and long-term plans, necessary to capture skills gaps, identify opportunities, and transition talent to where they’re needed and where they want to go with career pathing.
Facilitating Career Pathing Through Workforce Planning
Workforce planning helps talent management teams to enable each employee with a map of a clearly defined route to their next role(s) within an organization to encourage employees.
Instead of hiring externally, talent acquisition teams can expand their talent pools to qualified employees, often reducing time and capital spent during the search. Designing a career pathing extends their internal mobility efforts, integral to a successful talent mobility strategy.
The career ladder involves helping employees climb from lowest to highest based on level of responsibility. Career pathing encompasses various career progression forms, including traditional vertical ladders, dual career ladders, horizontal career lattices, and career progression outside companies.
Benefits of Career Pathing to Organizations
- Aligning employees’ career goals with their strategic goals helps organizations differentiate themselves from the labor market competitors. Even a relatively small company can have a positive impact on employee loyalty. Organizations not investing in workforce planning and training and development risk losing talent to their competition.
- Identifiable career pathing is an essential aspect of retention plans and retains vital talent. Workforce planning teams must identify talent central to their business strategy execution. Along with mentoring employees with high potential and moving proven performers into new roles fitting into skills developed over time.
- Career pathing decreases turnover after an economic downturn. Workforce planning teams confront shortages in areas where they need to attract and retain experienced workers.
- Talent management can keep younger workers as they may be least interested in pay increases and are most likely to learn new skills.
What does Career Pathing mean to Employees?
- It empowers employees to own their career development. The workforce planning team can assist them in understanding the following steps, enabling them to determine which skills and competencies align with their career goals.
- They can assess career goals, skills, experience, and education to understand skills gaps and necessary training.
Building a Thriving Culture with Career Pathing
An essential exercise for the talent acquisition team during career pathing is creating an inclusive culture that enables a diverse workplace to thrive. A diverse and inclusive workforce planning can reap the already proven benefits, including a wide array of experiences and perspectives.
Testimony to an inclusive company’s success is that companies are two times likely to exceed financial targets, three times more high performing, six times more innovative and agile, and eight times likely to achieve business outcomes.
Of course, workforce planning must require a proactive approach to create a talent pipeline to develop and nurture long-term relationships. It must include aligning the talent acquisition strategy with the business strategy, attracting and finding the right talent, assessing them, focusing on developing your talent, and monitoring outcomes, and adjusting accordingly.
Importantly, give employees reskilling options and use AI-based talent management platform to allow their professional growth and development to occur organically based on interests, goals, and motivations for best results.
Workforce planning must involve helping employees stay invested in their career journey. It allows them to see job groupings aligned to specific competencies and skills, map their futures at your company, assisting them in collaborating with supervisors and talent management to determine career trajectories and reskilling programs.
Never in history has talent management and workforce planning teams been more vital. AI-driven talent intelligence platforms like Draup will be the driver of change and improvement of workplace culture in the future. AI and NLP can facilitate long-term workforce planning and employee engagement.
It will be exciting to see how companies will understand trends and possibilities of AI and implement the technology in recruitment, learning and development, and grievance redressal.
CEO & Co-Founder of Draup, Vijay Swaminathan, will speak more on early-career talent acquisition and touch upon diversity and inclusion, building a talent pipeline, implementing a successful talent acquisition plan, and engaging early-career talent more successfully.
