Career Path

The useful measure of a career path is not whether a document exists but whether an employee can answer three questions without asking anyone.

• What is the next role or level available to me?
• What would I need to demonstrate to be ready for it?
• Roughly how long does that usually take, and what makes it faster or slower?

Most organisations can answer the first, some the second, and few the third. An employee who knows the title of the next level but not what it requires is in the same position as one who knows nothing, because they cannot act on it.

The third question is the one organisations avoid, because the honest answer often involves waiting for a vacancy. Saying so is better than leaving it implied, since an employee working towards a promotion that structurally cannot happen for three years will find out eventually and will not be pleased to have worked it out themselves.

Employees do not generally leave because progression is slow. They leave because they cannot tell whether it exists.

Faced with silence, people assume the worst and act on it, and the ones with the most external options act first. That means vagueness selects against exactly the people the organisation wants to keep.

The pattern shows up in exit reasons as no growth opportunity, which is frequently reported by people in organisations that had opportunities and never described them.

This is also why the fix is often cheaper than expected. Where the opportunities are real but unstated, the intervention is communication rather than the creation of new roles.

Where they are genuinely absent, saying so is still better. An employee who knows there is no next step for two years can decide what to do with that information, and some will stay on that basis. None will stay on the basis of an answer they never got.

The default assumption is that progression means becoming a manager, and it produces two predictable losses.

The first loss is a good specialist who becomes a mediocre manager because it was the only way to progress. The organisation loses the specialist work and gains a manager who did not want the job.

The second is the specialist who leaves for an organisation with a technical track. Both are avoidable by defining a route that reaches senior pay and influence without requiring direct reports, and then actually promoting people along it, since a technical track that nobody has ever been promoted on is not believed.

A lateral move builds breadth, exposes someone to a different part of the business, and is often the most useful thing they could do next. It is also read as a sideways step or a demotion in waiting unless the organisation says otherwise.

The reading is not irrational. Where every visible signal of success is vertical, a move that is not vertical looks like an absence of one.

• Say explicitly that a lateral move is a development step, and what it is expected to build.
• Protect pay across it, since a lateral move that costs money is not a move anyone will volunteer for.
• Show examples of people who moved laterally and progressed afterwards, which is the only convincing evidence.
• Make internal moves at least as easy as external applications, which they frequently are not.

The last is where organisations undermine themselves most directly. Where an internal candidate faces more process, less feedback and a manager who resists releasing them, people learn that changing role means changing employer.

A documented career path creates an expectation that the organisation will behave as described, and employees will hold it to that.

Where a published framework says a promotion requires three named capabilities, an employee who demonstrably has all three and is not promoted has a specific grievance rather than a general disappointment. That is a reason to write the framework carefully, not a reason to avoid writing one.

• Describe requirements as necessary rather than sufficient, and say plainly that a vacancy or a business need is also required where that is true.
• Keep the framework current, since an unmaintained one documents commitments nobody is applying.
• Apply it consistently, because inconsistency in promotion is noticed faster and remembered longer than almost anything else.
• Review who actually progresses, by group, since the pattern is the only reliable test of whether the framework is doing what it says.

The alternative, keeping progression undefined so nobody can hold you to it, buys flexibility at the cost of the attrition described above. It is usually a bad trade.