1. Gather internal and external data
Start by benchmarking your current efforts with internal data. Here are some of the first exercises we suggest from our career mobility fundamentals workbook:
Conduct an internal survey: Examine current efforts as well as employee awareness and sentiment (i.e. Do employees know about/understand existing tuition assistance policies? Do they check internal job postings? How often?).
Ask the hard questions: Do ALL employees actually believe your opportunities are accessible? Pay attention to trends among demographics and role types.
Explore managerial enablement: Do your mid-level managers and floor supervisors believe that career mobility is possible? Are they equipped and motivated to help their team access new opportunities?
Run a macro trend analysis: Look at macro trends in the talent market to inform your Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) efforts across many dimensions, including competitiveness, job creation trends, and ways to evolve existing roles.
2. Align on mobility goals and desired outcomes
Company-wide career mobility is a cross-functional initiative that implicates (and benefits) multiple teams throughout the org.
As such, your leadership should meet to set goals and expectations before setting out to design your strategy.
Align goals to business impact: Define measurable goals that align with unique business outcomes and illuminate knowledge, accessibility, and equity gaps.
Establish a system to measure ROI: Start tracking the key value drivers that lead to positive program ROI as you implement career mobility initiatives: talent attraction, retention, DEI, improved education and skilling, and job movement.
3. Identify 2-4 key career pathways mapped to priority roles
Career pathways are the cornerstone of any career mobility strategy. They motivate your employees by helping them visualize a path forward in your organization.
To identify key career pathways to pursue and promote, start by:
Evaluate current career pathways: Look for a few well-trodden career pathways within your business and the roles/positions along the way. It’s useful to think of roles in terms of exempt/non-exempt status, skills and experience requirements, and mobility potential especially with frontline positions.
Take inventory of your current talent pool: Look for the few frontline jobs where the greatest volume of “source” talent exists.
Identify hard-to-fill roles: Establish a dozen or so critical roles that will be hard to fill in the future.
Design clear career pathways: Create career pathways that take employees from frontline to gateway to entry level to destination roles. Then, provide employees with the appropriate education and training to achieve career mobility.
For a full list of the step-by-step exercises in this process, check out our career mobility fundamentals workbook.
4. Rally internal champions
As the capital of any company becomes increasingly centralized in its people, the prominence of the CHRO will continue to grow — as will the business problems they’re expected to solve. Cracking career mobility is no small undertaking, so rallying internal champions is critical.
Use storytelling to inspire: Employee success stories, employer savings, improved talent attraction or career mobility case studies from other successful HR innovators enabling internal mobility at scale.
Find your team of champions: Help others see the multi-layered impact of a culture of opportunity and encourage them to join your workstream and play an active role in launching this solution.
Pro tip: Use our career mobility champion's toolkit to access all of the data-backed talking points and case studies you need to champion career mobility as a company-wide initiative.
Identify the right partners to accelerate your vision.
Partnering with the right people takes the guesswork out of internal mobility and sets the stage for sustainable growth.
Although every organization’s vision for mobility is unique, the hallmarks of success and failure within a mobility program are not.
Taking a DIY approach to mobility reveals several areas where internal pipelines stall before they’ve even started:
With a DIY approach, scalability becomes impossible...
Complex organizations need complex solutions: A copy/paste approach to smaller-scale mobility pilots does not translate across complex organizations.
Manual solutions aren't scalable: DIY efforts tend to be highly manual and lack the right infrastructure to drive adoption and measure success.
Limited programming is prone to lose momentum: DIY approaches tend to be limited to one or two job families or role types which can overlook potential onramps to other (unarticulated) pathways as well as talent. Overwhelm causes programs to fizzle out.
...and education and skills seldom align.
Curation of learning programs requires a deep expertise of the learning landscape: To create an effective network of education and skills provider, you must not only have a deep understanding of your peoples' needs as learners – including the right flexibility and modalities – but also expertise in the credential and skilling landscape to determine which programs (out of millions) will best align people with the skills they need.
Huge lifts in resources: Even at the pilot level, this is a herculean task – now multiply that by the number of priority roles you have.
Equity can be compromised: Asking employees to parse credentials for themselves is inequitable and unintentionally discriminatory, favoring those with insider knowledge.
Beware of choosing the wrong partner.
Choosing the wrong partner will drive results similar to a DIY approach – but at a higher cost. A quick way to judge the fitness of a partner is to ask them for their outcomes and ROI data.
Specifically, a great partner will be able to provide you with:
Employers who work with Guild benefit from all of the above.
We work with leading Fortune 1000 employers across a number of industries to turn your unique goals for internal talent pipelines and equitable mobility into actionable steps with measurable progress indicators and outcomes.
Explore the ROI we help companies achieve below.