Career growth is the next differentiator in the competition for talent
Flexible work and compensation aren’t enough. It’s finally time to deliver on the promise of career growth at your company.
Hiring managers and Chief People Officers alike are seeing a new trend in 2022: candidates are negotiating for career development and career growth to be part of their employment package.
This trend is reminiscent of the past when many individuals across roles and organizations started to negotiate terms which raised the overall standard. Less than a decade ago, CHROs were grappling with a rise in employee expectations for better parental leave. Employees started challenging inadequate policies and demanding companies to provide support beyond minimal government requirements. At that time, it was not uncommon for a candidate to verbally negotiate their parental leave benefits at the final offer stage. Companies had to adapt their policies and practices to show incoming candidates that the company supported employees growing their families.
The pandemic sparked people to figure out what really matters to them in work and life, and as a result, employees are demanding more of their workplaces. Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2022 surveyed over 8,000 employees, and when asked why they joined the organization they work for, the opportunity for career progression came in third right after job security and the organization’s brand / reputation.
When candidates ask recruiters if the company offers these things, the answer is often yes. Recruiters aren’t being intentionally misleading here; they’re being optimistic. Usually, the company wants to offer these things, and there are internal discussions about how to offer them but the infrastructure to deliver is another story.
Now that we’re past the initial pandemic response period, it’s time to look back on what you’ve learned about your talent strategy in the last few years and decide what lessons you’re going to apply to your future road map. Career development is a far more complicated problem to solve than other policy changes.
It isn’t easy to benchmark the skills that are important in your organization as they may not be the same as at another company. It also requires an ongoing investment to build and maintain the infrastructure to deliver career development.
A strategic approach to understanding, building, and delivering the career rewards that your employees and candidates want must be at the top of the list of priorities for you as a business leader. Here is how you can get started:
Put a career rewards strategy at the center of your total rewards package
People typically think of total rewards as compensation and healthcare benefits. But candidates expect career growth now and may even insist upon putting growth opportunities in writing because they’ve been burned by empty promises.
Career rewards aren’t a theoretical concept. It’s the real dollar value employees and candidates place on things like increased pay as a result of a promotion, or remaining relevant in a world of fast-moving skills. Investing in building the career skills needed for your business can mitigate risk where critical roles remain unfilled.
A company’s talent pool is a combination of external recruitment and internal skill development. Due to years of underinvestment in learning programs, plus a candidate’s labor market where companies can’t easily ‘buy’ new talent externally, 71% of executives report difficulty with hiring the right talent at the right cost. While 88% of workers report being satisfied with their jobs, only 60% intend to stay for at least six to 12 months.
Organizations must make growth opportunities part of the total rewards strategy in the next two to three years, if they want to become a talent destination. Investment and commitment must start at the top to prioritize skill development as a business initiative to win and keep top talent.
Think beyond the job tasks and build skills for future business outcomes
In today’s world, almost all skills have a shelf life, and people are eager to upskill and reskill. It’s a win-win for the employer and employee. Business leaders should begin looking at talent with the expectation that people’s skills will need to change over time, and not something that money can overcome. In fact, whereas the #1 method in 2020 for closing the skills gap was buying skills, in 2022 business and HR leaders report targeted learning as the primary method.
Human resources functions have a critical role to provide the underlying infrastructure. Companies using skills frameworks have enabled candidates, hiring managers, and the talent analytics team with the common language needed to talk about skills. We see this by establishing a skills-enabled job architecture. At The RealReal, the HR team partnered up with outside professional development company to create and launch career expectations by level customized for the company. This set the foundation to provide employees and people managers a guide to clarify how an employee can grow through specific behaviors and development opportunities.
Bringing career rewards to life through skills
Business challenge
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What skills do we need for the future?
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What skills do we have now?
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How do we close the skills gap?
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How do we retain and deploy skills?
HR processes
| Strategic workforce planning | Talent acquisition | Succession |
|---|---|---|
| Identify, prioritize, and invest in critical skills | Acquire new skills from outside org | Build a strong pipeline for future-ready capabilities |
| Talent assessment | Skill development | Reward |
| Identify, infer, measure, or validate current skills | Manage and develop skills inside | How we reward skill acquisition and utilization |
| Work design | Career pathing and mobility | |
| AI/automation redefines work | Employees can navigate careers through skills |
Deliver on the promise of career opportunities
Employees today are internal customers. And there’s an opportunity to treat them more like customers, building an infrastructure to fulfill their needs and tracking their satisfaction with their jobs. People have remote options all over the country, and the stigma of job-hopping is gone.
Many organizations have a Head of Employment Brand, but that role sits in Recruiting. The new role that organizations need is a Head of Employee Success. This person and their team will be responsible for:
• Helping each employee get where they want to go in their career
• Ensuring that employees receive the growth opportunities promised during recruitment
• Understanding your internal talent and matching it with open positions
• Identifying people who can be reskilled for a different role
If the infrastructure is there, the employee could have many different careers within one organization, finding professional fulfillment while lowering the company’s operating costs at the same time.
Become and remain a talent destination
Gone are the days of employers holding all the cards when it comes to a person’s career trajectory. The candidates’ market is here to stay, and with it, the expectation of career growth. Employees were already asking for these changes, but the pandemic made them a top priority.
The pandemic and the new labor market have also dramatically expanded the scope of the HR function, but the resources assigned to HR haven’t expanded to effectively meet the need. For organizations to design, build, and execute this new talent strategy without cutting corners, the learning dimension of people requires a greater business investment.
People vote by showing up at work every day, so instead of focusing on finding out why people quit, find out why they took that call in the first place. In many cases, we believe you’ll find the reason is that they seek better career development opportunities. When you invest in career growth as an ongoing process, you’ll become a talent destination for the present and future of work not the past.