Developing Career Paths

Career paths help companies offer career options to their employees that help them make job choices that best fit their life situations. A career path is a sequence of job positions involving similar types of work and skills that employees move through in the company.

Providing career paths and making sure employees understand them is especially important because lack of career opportunities ranks after pay as the major reason employees leave companies. One survey showed that less than 50 percent of employees believe their organization provides useful career planning tools and opportunities to advance their careers.

Developing career paths involves analyzing work and information flows, important development experiences, qualifications and the types of tasks performed across jobs, similarities and differences in working environments, and the historical movement patterns of employees into and out of jobs (i.e., wherein the company employees come from and what positions they take after leaving a job).

For companies with professional employees such as engineers and scientists, an important issue is how to ensure that they feel valued. Many companies’ career paths are structured so that the only way engineers and scientists (individual contributors) can advance and receive certain financial rewards (such as stock options) is by moving into managerial positions.

Advancement opportunities within a technical career path are limited. Individual contributors who move directly into management may lack the experience and/or competencies needed to be successful. Managerial career paths may be more highly compensated than technical career paths.

Many companies are using multiple-or dual-career-path systems to give additional career opportunities to scientists and other individual contributors such as salespersons.

A dual-career-path system enables employees to remain in a technical or sales career path or move into a management career path. Research scientists have the opportunity to move into three different career paths: a scientific path and two management paths. It is assumed that because employees can earn comparable salaries and have similar advancement opportunities in all three paths, they will choose the path that best matches their interests and skills.

Effective dual-career paths have several characteristics: Salary, status, and incentives for technical employees compare favorably with those of managers. Individual contributors’ base salaries may be lower than that of managers, but they are given opportunities to increase their total compensation through bonuses. The individual contributor career path is not used to satisfy poor performers who have no managerial potential. The career path is for employees with outstanding technical skills. Individual contributors are given the opportunity to choose their career path.

Assessment information enables employees to see how similar their interests, work values, and skill strengths are to those of employees in technical and managerial positions.