Why Traditional Career Pathways are Obsolete                           

What’s Driving the Change?

The traditional view of a career as a linear climb up the corporate ladder doesn’t reflect the complex challenges leaders face today. Emerging technologies, and economic shifts, have made career paths less straightforward than they used to be and employee needs and interests have changed and hierarchal career pathways don’t take those into account. Here we take a close look at these issues:

Change Driver 1: Work Requires More Employees and More Specialized Skills

Technology, automation, and now AI have made work more complex. For example, in the auto industry, we’ve gone on a journey from Model T’s that could be assembled on a line by a few hundred workers to computers on wheels, containing hundreds of globally sourced components pieced together by thousands of workers.  Many of these workers fill roles that require highly specialized skills that can be difficult to recruit. 

Change Driver 2: Organizations are Flatter

Organizations are becoming flatter. According to Gartner, the average manager’s number of direct reports has increased by 2.8 times over the last six years. While climbing the corporate ladder was always an inverted funnel, today that funnel is narrower. Opportunities to advance a career are less likely to be through a traditional promotion into a managerial role.

Change Driver 3: Emergence of Project-Based Cultures

Project-based work is increasingly prevalent. Project-based work refers to organizing work around specific projects, with a defined scope, objectives, and deliverables. Unlike traditional work structures, project-based work is temporary, with a clear beginning and end. For organizations, project-based work offers numerous benefits. It allows for greater flexibility and adaptability, innovation and collaboration, as cross-functional teams come together to tackle complex challenges.

What does this mean for employees with regard to career pathways? If an employee moves from one team to another, they may not be following a traditional career ladders. Modern career pathways need to somehow account for these experiences and the skills that are developed while taking them on.

Change Drive 3: Employees Want to Growth

According to Betterworks three-quarters of employees prefer to stay and grow where they are versus moving to another company. Unfortunately, less than half see a clear career path. To close this gap, companies must focus on providing employees the tools to take control of their careers along with their long-term skill development.

Taken together, these changes create the need for modern career pathways that are more likely to include a lateral move than a promotion. Nowadays, career pathways need to support the ability to add new, adjacent skills, not just increase proficiency in existing ones; we need to be able to regularly update these career pathways to incorporate new skills and consider where there is a good fit for existing ones.

Click here to read part 3 and gain insight into the Modern Career Pathway Playbook.