Skills for success: mastering your career

The context

Our definition of a career is changing, traditional career paths are being challenged, and modern organisations are looking at more flexible ways of providing opportunities. Careers now come in all shapes and sizes. A bit like a climbing wall, you can move up, down and sideways to develop new skills and then use them to seek new experiences.

Our client wanted employees to “own their development”: to feel empowered to build their skills and to be supported by their managers to do this. Yet engagement survey data indicated a lack of clarity on how to make this happen. The opportunity was to provide guidance for career management that resonated for an individual and their manager and could be rolled out enterprise wide. The Lodestar team was asked to partner with the organisation’s people team to create a skills-based approach to development and progression.

Our approach

We conducted a structured process of listening to understand what was on employees’ minds. We ran focus groups across different businesses, levels and geographies These provided rich insights for example, a strong appetite for transparency of what was expected technically and behaviourally, for consistent line manager support and easy content navigation. The need for a partnership between the three key players became clear.

What we did

We created a pilot project, working with business leaders and the HR business partner to define: the functional landscape of critical roles; key technical, leadership and enterprise standard skills. The resulting resources included a role map; skills-based generic role profiles; targeted skill-based development ideas and inspiring career stories. Content was supported by career conversation guides and the resulting “career framework” was deployed in an on-line, user-friendly format.

Making it stick

The pilot was accompanied by a playbook including templates, tools and tips to replicate the approach across multiple businesses, creating sustainable, business-owned solutions for the long term.

If you would like to find out more about this project and how we could help your organisation, please contact us.