Career Lattice: How To Shift From Traditional Career Ladders
The career lattice, a model that encourages a flexible approach to career mobility, is gaining traction in modern workspaces, challenging traditional career management practices and ladders. This shift has come about as non-traditional career paths grow more prevalent, fueled by individuals prioritizing work-life balance and organizations seeking to diversify their skill sets.
Yet, traditional career management practices and career ladders are still popular approaches for organizations to manage careers, even though these often fail to build the robust talent pipeline crucial for success. This article will explore the career lattice as an alternative approach to talent mobility. We will also outline four key actions HR needs to take to successfully adopt it. Let’s start!
Contents
What is a career lattice?
What are the challenges to the successful adoption of a career lattice approach?
How can organizations adopt a career lattice approach?
Video interview with Abhijeet Narvekar from Careers Unleashed
What is a career lattice?
A career lattice refers to a way of enabling career mobility from a 360-degree perspective. In this career progression framework, employees can move vertically, horizontally, and diagonally within and outside of their organization. It provides individuals with various career opportunities that they can explore based on their ambition, life stage, and organizational need.
A career lattice also reflects the contemporary workplace, where opportunities are not necessarily tied to a specific job, family, or role. It unlocks significant benefits for the organization to access skills, increase employee engagement, and improve retention.
Traditionally, careers were defined as the sequential progression of individuals with increasing status, responsibility, financial gains, and seniority over a period of time. This traditional approach was reflected in organizations as a career ladder, where individuals could “climb” toward success through stepwise upward progression.
In a highly predictable world, this approach worked. Employees patiently “served their time” until they were ready for the next role or until an opportunity became available.
However, the current world of work is too unpredictable, ever-changing, and fast-moving for this approach to still be beneficial. Individuals have different expectations from work and want more career flexibility, while organizations compete in a tightly constrained labor market.
As such, a career lattice approach has emerged as an excellent alternative to the outdated career ladder. Many organizations are exploring the concept under various names.
Career lattice example
Let’s make the career lattice model practical by looking at the example of Thobeka, an HR Business Partner.
A traditional career path for her would be to become a senior HRBP and, in a few years, a Regional HR Director. This upward movement is a defining characteristic of a typical career ladder for an HRBP. In this approach, her only option would have been upward movement. At best, she could consider a horizontal move of similar status and seniority, such as a Talent Consultant.
When replacing the traditional career ladder with a career lattice approach, the number of potential opportunities increases exponentially. For example, Thobeka would be able to consider the following moves beyond the conventional career ladder:
- She could remain in her current role and grow her current skill set by taking on more projects and responsibilities.
- She could ask for a temporary assignment to explore a new opportunity before committing to her next career decision or engage in gig work to develop new skills. These moves could be cross-functionally within or outside the organization through secondments or external projects. The activities could either be at the same level of seniority or even at a lower level as she wants to learn new adjacent skills.
- She could take a step back, consider whether HR is really the career for her and take a career break to realign with her ambitions.
- She could move into an opportunity at the same level outside of HR but still with the same organization. For instance, she makes use of her relationship management skills to enter Customer Success.
The career lattice approach provides more flexibility regarding what opportunities are available for individuals to navigate their careers. It also brings additional benefits to the organization in terms of access to new skills, retaining employees, and increasing internal mobility.
However, there are a number of obstacles that might prevent organizations from adopting this approach successfully.
What are the challenges to the successful adoption of a career lattice approach?
Most organizations struggle to effectively implement internal mobility strategies. Three of the top five reasons people look for new jobs are because they want to stretch, grow, and learn new skills but don’t have the chance to do so at their organization.
Several factors have constrained internal mobility:
Talent hoarding This practice refers to when managers or leaders block employees from pursuing other internal opportunities as they believe they have invested in them and have yet to receive their return on investment.
It is commonplace in larger organizations where the culture does not promote talent mobility.Lack of visibility of opportunities Traditional vacancy portals provided limited visibility of real opportunities within the organizations. Opportunities stretch further than formal employment opportunities, and the rise of gigs, talent marketplaces, and other work arrangements is leading to requirements for transparency of available options. Lack of self-insight into transferable skills Conventional approaches did not provide individuals with enough insight into the different possibilities based on their strengths and skill sets. Individuals ended up following known patterns or adopting a reactive approach toward their careers. Limiting work architecture and career ladders Traditional work architecture designed careers as a progression of jobs and levels instead of thinking about careers as a collection of experiences over time. Definitions of success In the past, we tied career success to status, responsibility, and power. Modern careers should be characterized by higher levels of autonomy, work-life-fit, and meaning which are more subjective. Lack of career data to inform decisions Limited data has been available to guide individuals about career options, choices, and opportunities. Today, more data-driven approaches allow for informed, evidence-based decisions regarding mobility requirements and professional development.
“In the past, we’ve operated largely off of jobs and occupation-based paradigm where we’re using job titles, job descriptions, occupational categories, infrastructure that was largely created at the turn of the 20th century, it was part of the industrialization of our economy. And those practices have largely been in place, and we continue to operate them.
The challenge is that we’ve had several economic evolutions in the intervening century that have dramatically changed how we work.”
Alison Lands, Head of Strategy at a talent technology company Skyhive
How can organizations overcome these stumbling blocks to successfully adopt and benefit from a career lattice approach to internal mobility?
How can organizations adopt a career lattice approach?
Below we highlight four critical actions that will help organizations adopt this approach and how HR can enable them.
Action 1: Educate stakeholders on the benefits of using a career lattice approach
The career lattice approach requires stakeholders, especially managers, to come on board with its benefits. They also need to know what it requires to successfully implement this approach.
HR will have to sell the benefits of the approach but also dispel some traditional myths related to career management.
Myth Truth Talent is owned by each manager and their business. Talent is not owned by anyone. Rather talent should be mobile within the organization as a way to engage, develop and retain employees aligned with the skill requirements that the organization has. People must “pay their dues” before being considered for another opportunity. We need to have open and honest conversations with talent about how they move in the organization and how they can access those opportunities. We must base our decisions on skill proficiency, not perceptions of loyalty. Individuals need to manage their own careers. Organizations need to create an environment where employees can drive their careers. It is a joint effort.
Start by outlining to managers how this approach can help the organization gain access to more skills, become more attractive as an employer, and keep employees engaged and motivated.
Viewing your employee engagement or satisfaction survey results is an excellent place to start. Usually, career development is one of the lowest-scoring factors. That would make for a great business case to promote the career lattice approach.
Action 2: Gather skills and career data to show how work and skills are connected within the organization
Two important sets of data enable a career lattice approach. First, HR needs to collect skills data to understand the key skill requirements of work within the organization. For example, within the role of business analysis, there are various skills, such as process mapping, documenting requirements, and working with stakeholders.
Second, HR should map these skills across the business’s job architecture to better understand how individuals could consider movements by applying transferable skills and developing adjacent skills. For example, for business analysis, we could use process modeling skills to explore an opportunity in customer journey mapping. Another option would be to develop an adjacent skill, such as data analysis, and explore other opportunities that require these skills.
Additionally, tracking how individuals have moved within the organization is useful to better understand the actual moves and the ambitions or reasons behind them. HR can do this by tracking key talent movements and experiences. They can ask individuals what motivated their decisions either via an interview or survey.
This data is also a great source of success stories. Sharing these stories over time helps you demonstrate the impact of the career lattice approach.
We have discussed the importance of data in career management with Abhijeet Narvekar, the CEO of Careers Unleashed. You can see the full interview below:
Once you’ve collected enough data, it is helpful to visualize possible career lattice moves for employees to see how they can capitalize on opportunities. Doing this at scale will require the right HR and talent technologies that enable individuals to access opportunities. You need to look for a solution that has the intelligence to help match employee skills to available options.
Several talent marketplace platforms provide these services, such as Gloat and Skyhive.
“Are there people with English graduate degrees who became CEOs? Did people stick to the linear path or follow a squiggly career path? Going from one thing to the other and then attaining the goal. If they did follow a squiggly path, did they attain the goal faster, or didn’t it matter?
So we realize organizations can use data analytics in various ways.”
Abhijeet Narvekar, CEO of Careers Unleashed
Action 3: Equip individuals to build their own skills portfolios
A key ingredient to a career lattice approach’s success is enabling individuals to understand and realistically think about their own skills. This has to be based on evidence of their proficiency or feedback provided by others.
For technical skills, this is relatively easy, but for more abstract behavioral skills, the process could become more complex.
To guide employees in their career growth, HR can help individuals identify the essential skills that have underpinned previous jobs or projects. During this exercise, it is critical to use a consistent skills taxonomy for employees to describe their skills aligned to a common language. This will allow HR to utilize this data insight in the future as the basis for potential opportunities.
A good example is LinkedIn which uses a skills taxonomy in the background. People can list their top skills and have the opportunity to complete proficiency checks to validate that they possess that skill. This is done for the public social network, but an organization can use a similar approach internally to guide individuals when validating their skills.
A financial services provider adopted this approach. They built an internal talent profile and asked employees to provide skills data that could be validated based on professional qualifications or feedback regarding proficiency level. The company used the data for development, workforce planning, and internal mobility purposes.
Action 4: Create visibility of different opportunities and key requirements
The next step is to ensure that opportunities are visible. Again, technology plays a key role here in being able to do this at scale and in a replicable manner. At a minimum, internal opportunities and their requirements should be visible and accessible to employees, along with their own skills data.
A popular method is to create internal opportunity portals that allow employees to use the data of their own skills to explore suitable opportunities and access available gigs, projects, or vacancies across the enterprise. They also have the chance to proactively signal their interest in developing certain skills. That way, individuals take charge of their careers while creating internal talent pools for the organization.
For instance, in our earlier Thobeka example, this could have been visualized as follows:
Thobeka has a view of her skills portfolio. She can compare her current skill to other roles within the organization to determine her current fit to pursue those opportunities. Depending on the amount of data and technology capabilities, Thobeka can even get recommendations on possible avenues to explore aligned to the career lattice framework over time.
Organizations, such as Mastercard, have used this approach, which created a platform in partnership with Gloat that allows more accessibility to new opportunities. The success of this approach also lies in the close alignment to development opportunities. That ensures targeted and purposeful development of skills in line with organizational needs.
A final word
Careers are changing, and in a scarce skills market, organizations need to adopt new approaches to access the required talent for success.
Career ladders are no longer sufficient to manage the changing needs of employees.
Businesses need to rethink their approach to internal mobility to develop and retain the skills required for long-term success. By adopting the career lattice approach, they can effectively navigate the changing needs of their employees and future-proof their talent management practices. That way, they’re well on their way to becoming a skills-based organization.
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