HR Best Practices

Career Management Tooling

Through our daily work with over 1300 organisations, we see many examples of innovative thinking in HR. In this series of 14 best practices we define true "best practices" in HR nowadays. In this third case study of this series we will focus on Career Management Tooling with an example of a Top Employer in the Banking Industry.

With the significant changes happening in the labour market, Top Employers understand that everyone’s career path is different. As fewer employees nowadays wish to follow a ‘traditional’ career path, leading companies to offering their employees the opportunity to self-manage their careers.

Career Management Tooling in the Banking Industry

This Top Employer (Global, 130,000 employees) is experiencing rapid changes in their industry, and knows that the current competency framework will need to be updated to reflect future business needs. A changing business landscape also means changing workforce needs. As a result, this Top Employer has developed an online career management tool with two main purposes. Firstly, to help its people (as well as HR, who play the role of career development facilitators) to identify potential career paths within the company and to connect them with career opportunities available internally. Secondly, to use the Big Data from their employee feedback to redefine the company’s competency frame-work (once the tool has been completely rolled out globally in 2018).

The tool operates using a tailored algorithm, where staff feed their personal data into the system by uploading their CV’s or their LinkedIn profile. They then fill out a self-assessment form, detailing their competencies, as well as tagging themselves as ‘experts’ on certain topics, where they can make themselves available as mentors. The tool stores this data in a central repository and benchmarks employees against the existing data in the system. From there, it proceeds to recommend personalised career opportunities within the company. An example of this would be the suggestion of a role that the employee did not know existed previously, or a specific career path that the employee could possibly follow, or a subject matter expert the employee could connect with (for example; mentoring).

After that, it’s up to the employee to reflect on the learning and development implications, in partnership with their manager and HR playing a facilitating role in the process. This tool was created to serve as a prompter of new, previously unconsidered opportunities that may not have necessarily been considered in the past.

At the time of release, it is too early to share detailed results on the impact of this tool across the entire organisation, as the firm is currently testing the tool with a pilot group of around 1300 employees. Top Employer will continue to solicit feedback from a wide range of stakeholders involved in the pilot group testing and satisfaction among employees will be tracked via a question in the company’s employee survey covering the topic of internal mobility. We will monitor these results and provide feedback in the upcoming months.

Our Conclusion

We believe this tool is useful as it creates transparency on the opportunities within the company and it helps staff to identify where they need to develop. Also, the Big Data it generates will be exceptionally useful for the organisation to gauge its skills gaps, as well as for individual employees to identify unfamiliar career paths that might not have been obvious to them (for example, moving across different functional areas).

Launching the tool also helps HR position itself as a connector and a facilitator, while allowing employees the freedom and flexibility to drive their own careers. We do however, understand that one tool alone cannot create a culture where employees manage their own careers. Next to providing the right tools, the key to success is having a human filter to properly map individual capabilities to organisational realities, so that realistic career expectations are generated and managed. It seems likely that such a tool will work best in global organisations with a large offering of internal opportunities and a strong HR presence to guide employees on how to take full advantage of the available options and tools for developing their careers.

Curious about the previous topic we've discussed in this series of case studies? Gain more insights on Succession Planning.