Career Development

What is career development?

Career development is the planned, ongoing growth of an employee's skills, experience, responsibilities, and roles over the course of their working life, shaped jointly by the employee and the employer. For an organization it is the set of programs, conversations, and structures that help people see where they can go next and how to get there.

Key facts

• Also called: Career pathing, career planning, employee development, career growth
• Owned by: The employee, with their manager and HR or Learning and Development
• Main tools: Career paths, development plans, training, job rotation, mentoring, promotion criteria
• Related structures: Career system (the organization-wide framework), succession plan
• Recruiting link: A visible development offer is part of the employer value proposition and supports internal hiring

Career development and career paths

A career path is one route through an organization: the sequence of roles a person can move through, with the skills and experience each step requires. Career development is the broader activity of helping a person grow along a path, or across several, over time. See the entry on career path for the route itself.

Development is not only promotion. A lateral move into a new function, a job rotation through several teams, a stretch assignment, or job enrichment inside the current role all count. For many people they matter as much as a change of title.

Career pathing

Career pathing is the practice of mapping the possible routes from a given role to others in the organization, so that an employee can see the options and the requirements for each. A career-pathing map usually shows vertical moves (the next grade up), lateral moves (a different function at the same level), and the skills, certifications, or experience that separate the current role from each target.

Pathing works when it is specific. "Senior Analyst to Analytics Manager: lead two cross-team projects, complete the people-management course, and demonstrate budget ownership" is a path. "Opportunities for growth" is not. A good map also admits that paths branch, because a person who starts as a recruiter may become a recruiting manager, a sourcing specialist, an HR business partner, or a people-analytics lead.

Career system

A career system is the organization-wide framework that career pathing sits inside. It holds the job architecture of levels and families, the criteria for moving between them, the processes for promotion and internal application, and the development resources on offer. Where career pathing answers "where can I go from here," the career system answers "how does movement work in this company."

A career system usually has four parts.

• Job architecture: job families, levels, and the competencies attached to each.
• Movement rules: how promotions are decided, how internal openings are posted, and who may apply.
• Development resources: training budgets, mentoring, coaching, and rotation programs.
• Review points: the scheduled conversations, often annual, where the employee and manager look at progress and update the plan.

The link to a succession plan is direct. Succession planning identifies the roles the organization cannot leave empty and the people being developed to fill them, and a career system is how those people are developed.

Building a career development program

A program starts with a development plan for each employee, written with their manager, that names one or two target roles or skills and the actions to reach them in the next year. The organization then supports the plan with training, assignments, and feedback. Promotion criteria are published so that the path from one level to the next is visible to everyone, not just to people whose managers happen to explain it. A stay interview is a useful check on whether the plan is working, since the question "what would make you leave" usually surfaces a stalled career first.

Why career development matters in recruiting

Career development is part of what a candidate is buying when they accept an offer. A posting or interview that can describe a real path answers a question experienced candidates ask. It also feeds internal hiring: an organization that develops people has internal candidates for its senior openings, and every role filled from inside turns the external search into a more junior one. The reverse is also true. When development stalls, people look elsewhere, and the talent management problem becomes a recruiting problem. Job promotion decisions, made on published criteria, are visible evidence that the development offer is real.