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Follow these eight steps to develop your own career progression framework, enabling employee development and growth at your organization.
1. Evaluate your current career progression framework
The first step is to evaluate your current career progression framework, if you have one. Perhaps you have a formalized series of levels that isn’t quite working for you. Or maybe you have an informal system where promotions are given out subjectively.
Ask yourself:
- Why do we feel we need a new career progression framework?
- What’s working and what isn’t with our current framework?
- Do our employees know what it takes to advance in their careers within the company?
- What needs to change?
2. Set goals for your new career progression framework
Next, it’s time to set goals for your new framework. You can benchmark against these goals to measure your success during the process.
Ask yourself:
- What are the most important things we hope to achieve with our new career progression framework?
(these can be employee motivation; greater objectivity; lower turnover; fairer compensation leveling)
- How can we measure these metrics to ensure we’re achieving our goals?
- What type of framework would best help us achieve these goals?
3. Put aside time and assign project ownership
After finishing up with the first two steps, it’s time to formally commit to the project. This means putting aside time, setting clear deadlines, and assigning one or more project owners.
By planning for the project this way, you’ll raise your odds of lasting success. This is key, since creating a career progression framework is time-consuming. Ideally, you’ll want to come out with a solid vision that will last.
4. Decide if you’ll have general or team-specific frameworks
You’ll need to decide whether to use the same general career progression framework for all your teams or create a separate framework for each team.
Of course, each team has specific job requirements, so some companies may prefer to use several different frameworks. However, there are advantages to using a standardized framework across the board: You’ll streamline the process, save time, and align expectations for everyone.
Even if using one central framework as a template, you can adjust each team’s framework slightly to reflect how their role works.
5. Choose how your “levels” will work
The next step is to decide how many levels your framework should have. Will you stick closely to a standard structure for non-IC teams (Junior > Mid-Level > Senior > Team Lead > Director > VP)? Or will you have more or fewer levels in your hierarchy?
There are several factors to take into account here. Adding more levels offers employees room to grow and develop. But this only applies if each level truly feels meaningful. If moving from one job title to another seems purely symbolic, employees will be less motivated to advance. Try to balance the number of levels with the expectations for each role.
Along the same lines, you should create motivating job titles that accurately reflect the position they describe. When developing your job titles, consider your internal culture and industry standards. Remember that job titles must be clearly understood by external parties (clients, external partners, etc.) and internal stakeholders.
You may consider offering separate tracks for people managers and individual contributors in your company. This means, for example, that an “Associate Consultant” in sales could choose whether they wanted to advance to “Consultant” or “Sales Team Lead.”
This is because you may have high-performing employees who want to develop and perfect their skills but don’t necessarily thrive in a people management position. These employees are just as crucial to your success as managers, and they should have the opportunity to advance without being placed in a position they’re ill-suited for.
6. Decide on the competencies people need to reach to move to the next level
Once you’ve sketched out a set of levels for your career progression framework, you’ll need to determine the competencies employees must meet to move on to the next level.
We recommend following the MECE principle (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) when developing your competencies. This means the competencies you choose should cover all possible skills needed for the job, without overlapping or being too similar.
If you’re creating a standardized framework for all your teams, you’ll want to focus less on job-specific competencies, and more on overarching expectations for achievement and skills. Although you can flesh this out with some job-related competencies later on, don’t add too many hyper-specific ones. Ensure the competencies you select are truly relevant to the role.
During this process, you may want to decide on an average amount of time that should be expected to pass before moving to the next level. This doesn’t have to be the same for every employee, as some may advance early and others may need more time to develop. However, to avoid employee stagnation, you should have a ballpark timeline in mind.
“Try to move [your career progression framework] from being this horrendous check-box exercise where you’re like, This person must fulfill every skill before they get a promotion, to this point where it’s a foundational document. And it forms the foundation for having great conversations between managers and their teams.”
— Matt Bradburn, co-founder of The People Collective, sharing insights on the People Over Perks podcast
7. Establish compensation bands for each role
It’s time to wrap up your career progression framework by assigning compensation to each role.
Compensation may differ widely between companies in the same industry, depending on organizational structure and size. However, you’ll want to consider market rates when setting compensation.
You may also want to consider factors like employee location and performance. Try to keep compensation brackets standardized to avoid bias, while adding an upper and lower limit within each level for some flexibility.
“There are so many ways to build your broader compensation plans and philosophy. You’re seeing this even more with everyone being remote right now.
‘Do we tie [compensation] to a city? Do we tie it to levels? Do we tie it to skills? What kind of rates do we want to pay within a certain market...’
When you’re working through these problems, it can be really helpful to think about not just the benchmarks themselves, but how you’re actually going to apply them and what this means for your teams.”
— Matt Bradburn, co-founder of The People Collective
8. Roll out your career progression framework
Once you’ve hashed out the details of your career progression framework, it’s time to roll it out to your teams. This process can be complicated, since you’ll need to decide how your current employees fit into the framework. This is where you’ll want to enlist the help of managers to ensure each employee is accurately assessed.
When introducing your employees and managers to the framework, make sure they understand the reasons for developing it, why it’s being rolled out, and how it will work. The initial announcement can happen in an all-hands meeting or via a company-wide memo, which can then be followed up with individual 1:1 meetings to discuss specifics.
The key here is ensuring the framework is explained properly to everyone and changes to compensation or job titles are accurate and fair.
Follow-up best practices for career progression frameworks
Use the career progression framework to streamline your hiring process
Once the framework is rolled out to your existing employees, use it to shape your future hiring and recruitment process. The framework should make it easier for you to create job descriptions that accurately reflect the requirements of each role.
Make the career progression framework part of your culture
You should now start weaving your career progression framework into every part of the employee experience: weekly 1:1s, performance reviews, employee promotion practices, and goals/OKRs. Don’t just create your framework and then forget about it.
After the initial rollout, you’ll want to leave opportunities for both managers and employees to give feedback on the framework. This will help you understand what’s working and what’s not, and follow up accordingly. Consider sending out a one-time survey to gather people’s opinions.
⭐️ Development-focused performance reviews go hand in hand with career progression frameworks and are key for helping your people grow. And we’ve got tons of resources to support you!
Make sure to read our playbooks on running 360° performance reviews and leadership reviews, and download our free template with best-practice questions for performance reviews. 😉
Set up your career progression framework with Leapsome
Leapsome is the only platform that closes the loop between performance management, goal setting, employee engagement, and learning.
To create a development framework, you need clearly defined roles and skill requirements. Watch this video to learn how to set this up with Leapsome.
