Too Many Chiefs? Try Dual-Career Paths.

Many times small and medium-sized companies have a difficult time keeping talented employees because of the lack of career growth for the employees at the company. With all management positions filled, and without the prospect of vertical growth at a company, a talented employee can become discouraged at the lack of prospects in terms of career growth and advancement. These individuals are much more apt to be shopping for a new position with another company rather than focusing their talents and skills on helping the company grow in the long term.

The key to overcoming this dilemma is to develop multiple career paths at the company. Developing non-managerial career paths at a company will allow employees who are not currently in a management position to continue to grow in their career within the company and helps the employee to continue progressing and resolve to remain with the company rather than looking for a better opportunity elsewhere.

To develop multiple career paths, there are a certain key elements to remembers and put into place:

Look at your company’s environment and see what types of tracks are currently available—Almost all organizations have a management track, but you should look at what additional tracks you could potentially offer your employees.

Kelley Zanfardino with HRTools, recently wrote the following:

“If your company has an IT department, you may want to create a technical track for those employees to follow. You may also want to create a professional advancement track for employees who want to move up in their jobs without having to take on a management role. If you’re in the bio-technology or healthcare field, you may also want to consider a scientific track.”

Managers who find themselves in organizations where there are steep learning curves or if high employee turnover would be detrimental to operational efficiency should especially focus on ensuring that all employees are on a progressing on a career path else they will find the employee will, in time, become dissatisfied, disinterested, and will leave the company.

Next, you’ll want to develop the levels that are within each track—These alternative tracks should balance against your management track. Since the management track has been in existence the longest, and people understand it, it’s a really solid matrix to balance your other tracks on.

Zanfardino again says that: “when you look at taking an employee from a line worker to a lead worker to a supervisor to a department manager to an area manager, you have to see what’s equivalent to that in the alternative tracks in order to provide equal levels to employees.”

After that, you have to look at your internal equity—You must ensure that there is equity between all career paths. If you put these dual-career ladders together, you need to ensure that each ladder is close to the others in what we call “internal equity.” If you don’t and employees perceive them as not as valuable, you’ve missed your mark.

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Simply a title or some additional responsibilities won’t do the job here. It requires actual commitment to career growth, with the added bonuses and benefits. A title and new responsibilities will make an effect on the short-run, but in the long-run, then employee again will see the inequality in the positions and will take the alternate career path as a lesser-valued position within the company.

Lastly, you need to identify development paths for your dual-career ladder employees—These steps need to be spelled out very specifically so that employees interested in taking this dual-career path will know exactly what they need to do to get from point A to point B.

Employees need to know exactly what is required of them in order to be considered for a position. Otherwise, there appears to be favoritism within the company. With specific guidelines, employees not only work on improving themselves in order to qualify to be considered for a position, but it encourages them to improve themselves outside of work through acquiring new skills, learning new things pertaining to their current position, keeping up on industry news and readings, etc.

Overall, there seems to be little drawback to developing clear career paths in the workplace. Having alternatives to traditional management cuts down on employee turnover by giving employees a sense of having a career and not just having a job. Work, each day, then become an investment to the employee, rather than a chore to be done in order to collect a paycheck.