Guest Contribution by Jon Spratt
In today’s competitive business climate, you can no longer afford to ignore your engagement and retention issues. Quality talent can make the difference between success and failure, and we can show you how to engage and retain your top people.
In this post, we’ll look at the following points:
- Why you should deal with your engagement & retention issues;
- The importance of career development programs;
- How to create a quality career pathing program.
The pain of employee turnover
We all know that hiring is time-consuming and expensive. The best way to combat this painful use of time and resources is to reduce your company’s reliance on it – in other words, do a better job of keeping your best talent on board.
To do this, you need to foster higher levels of employee engagement, which naturally leads to better retention rates.
But as you know, achieving employee engagement is easier said than done. While millennials now make up the majority of the workforce in most regions around the world, according to Gallup only 29% of them are engaged in their jobs.
This leads to two big questions that, if you’re like most companies, you’re facing on a daily basis:
- Highly talented individuals have more opportunities at their fingertips than ever before, so how do you convince your best talent to become your most loyal talent?
- Employee retention and turnover is the #1 challenge facing organizations today (source). How can you, as a key stakeholder in your organization’s talent management strategy, make an impact on this massively important challenge?
Career development programs: highly effective, but underutilized
Given these harrowing statistics around employee engagement, it’s no surprise that leading organizations are turning to career development programs as a solution. The potential results are evident.
According to a recent study by the analyst firm Brandon Hall Group, 65% of organizations with a solid career development framework in place report higher talent retention, and 64% report higher employee engagement.
But given its effectiveness in addressing these key challenges, it’s perhaps surprising that most companies are not using modern, effective career development programs – the foundation of which is establishing career paths for the employees in your organization.
What are the barriers to career paths?
There are two major barriers that typically derail effective career pathing programs:
- Lack of a clear map of an organization’s jobs identifying the competency and skill similarities between jobs across the entire organization.
- Technology that gives HR teams the tools to map their organization, and allows employees to navigate through those positions to build their paths.
How to build a career pathing program that works
That’s why leading HR teams are turning to Career Path Navigation software like HRSG’s CompetencyCore.
CompetencyCore expedites the process of both mapping your organization’s world of work and giving your talent the visual, intuitive tools to navigate through it.
Once you’ve mapped your organization’s jobs and associated competencies, employees can add their own competencies, knowledge areas, and education to complete their personal profile:
With the organization’s jobs mapped and the users’ profiles completed, the employee engagement can really begin. Employees start by exploring jobs in their organization; then they identify their target dream job and are presented with several potential paths to get there:
Best of all, the software will show them their percentage match for each job, based on the information in their profile.
When they click on a job, they can see the gaps they need to fill to qualify as a good fit for their next step up the path:
A great employee starts with a great map: As the employer, it’s up to you to provide this map so that employees don’t feel like they’re wandering aimlessly.
Make sure that your employees can chart their course to success. Let’s chat about your organization’s retention challenges and how HRSG has helped organizations like yours get their career development programs on track. Request your demo of CompetencyCore to get started.
