Career Pathing

Career pathing: a definition

Career pathing (رسم المسار المهني) is setting out the possible sequence of roles through which an employee can move inside an organisation, together with the skills and experience that each move in that sequence requires. What it produces is a career path: the roles that can follow the one the employee holds now, in the order in which they can follow it, and what the employee needs in order to make each move.

The sequence is a possible one. It sets out roles that the employee can move into, not roles that the employee will be moved into. It also runs inside the organisation, between roles that the organisation has. Each move in the sequence comes with its requirements in skills and experience, so a career path tells the employee both where they can go next and what the move asks of them.

What makes career pathing a path and not a promise

A useful career path carries three things for every move along it:

• The next role, by name. It is a particular role in the organisation, identified by what it is called, and not a general direction. Naming the role tells the employee which move the rest of the path is about.
• What is needed to move into it. It covers the skills that the next role calls for and the responsibilities that the employee has to have demonstrated. The responsibilities count once they have been shown in the work, not once they have been assigned or described.
• How that is built from where the employee stands now. It starts from the employee’s current role and sets out how the skills and the demonstrated responsibilities can be developed from there. Without it, the employee learns what they lack and not how to acquire it.

Anything short of these three is general wording of the “there are opportunities for growth ahead of you” kind. Wording of that kind names no next role, states no requirement for reaching one and describes no way of building towards it. It can wear thin by the first performance review. When the employee and their manager sit down to review the work, that wording gives them nothing to measure progress against: no role that has come closer, no requirement that has been met and no step that has been taken.

Career pathing is not a single upward line

A career path can take more than one form, and career pathing covers each of them:

• A managerial track. It means taking on responsibility for people, so that each step up is a step into managing others. It is the track that can be wrongly assumed to be the only one, as if advancing in an organisation could only mean advancing into management.
• A specialist track. It means going deeper into the profession without managing anyone. The employee advances on it through greater depth in their own work, not through responsibility for other people. It has grades, and its pay runs parallel to the pay on the managerial track, so an employee on it can move up in level and in pay while their work remains specialist work.
• A lateral move. It is a move to another role at the same level. Its purpose is to broaden the employee’s experience, or to correct the fit between the employee and the role they hold. It does not raise the employee’s level, but it is still one of the moves that career pathing sets out.

Where there is no specialist track, management becomes the only route to advancement. An employee who wants to progress then has one way to do so, which is to move into managing people. The route can then be taken by employees whose progress in their specialism would have been of more use to the organisation, and of more use to them, than the move into management. For those employees, a specialist track would have let them advance in grade and in pay while staying in specialist work.

Career pathing describes what is possible, not what is guaranteed

One limit of every career path has to be stated openly: a career path describes what is possible and what it requires. It does not describe what is guaranteed. The limit is to be said in plain words to the employee whose path it is, not left for them to infer.

The requirements of the next role are something the employee can work towards and meet. The move itself depends on more than that. A promotion that depends on a vacancy being available, and on the needs of the business, should not be presented as a commitment to a date. The vacancy is outside the employee’s control, and so are the needs of the business. A date attached to a promotion that rests on both is a date that neither the employee nor the manager who gives it can be sure of keeping.

How career pathing differs from succession planning

Career pathing starts from the employee. Its question is where the employee can progress to: which roles can follow the one they hold, and what each of those roles requires. The path is drawn for that employee, starting from the role they hold now.

Succession planning starts from the organisation. Its question begins with a role rather than with a person: this is a critical role, so who will succeed the person who holds it? The answer is a person, but the starting point was the role.

The two can meet in one person. The employee whose career path leads towards a critical role can also be the person whom succession planning names as the successor in that role. That is not necessarily so. A career path is drawn around the employee and the roles that can follow theirs, and a succession plan is drawn around the role and the people who could fill it, so the two need not arrive at the same name.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.