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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 no longer align with your company’s growth objectives. Perhaps certain employees report that leaders make promotion decisions based on subjective metrics.
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, which allows you to monitor progress and evaluate the success of your career progression initiatives.
Ask yourself:
- What are the most important things we hope to achieve with our new paths for career progression?
For instance, these can be employee enablement goals like lower turnover or 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. Set a timeline & assign project ownership
After establishing the right goals, it’s time to commit to the project formally. This means putting aside time, setting clear deadlines, and assigning one or more project owners.
We recommend using Leapsome’s Goals module, which allows all project stakeholders to collaborate and leave notes on shared goals, assign ownership of specific initiatives, exchange feedback, and track objectives in real-time.
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 departments 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 for job progression as a template, you can adjust each team’s framework slightly to reflect how their role works.
5. Choose how your career progression “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? For example:
- Junior > Mid-Level > Senior > Team Lead > Director > VP
When determining how to connect your company’s career growth progress with job levels, consider these factors:
- It’s best to balance the number of levels with expectations for each role — 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.
- Create motivating job titles that accurately reflect the position they describe — Consider your internal culture and industry standards when developing your job titles. Remember that job titles should also make sense to external parties and internal stakeholders.
- Offer separate tracks for people managers and individual contributors in your company — You may have high-performing employees who want to develop their skills but don’t necessarily thrive in a people management position. This means, for example, that an “Associate Consultant” in sales could choose whether they wanted to advance to “Consultant” or “Sales Team Lead.”
6. Decide on the competencies people need to move to the next level
Once you’ve sketched out a set of levels for your framework for career progression, you’ll need to determine the competencies employees must meet to progress to the next level.
We recommend following the mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE) principle 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, fleshing it out later to encompass more job-specific skills.
During this process, you should decide on an average amount of time you expect to pass before someone can move on 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, you should have a ballpark timeline in mind to avoid employee stagnation.
“Try to move [your framework for career progression] 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 packages 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 pay at every level.
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 framework for career progression
Once you’ve finalized 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, so you should 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 why you developed it, why it’s being rolled out, and how it will work. You can make an initial announcement in an all-hands meeting or via a company-wide memo, following up during your team or 1:1 meetings to answer questions and get feedback.
Follow-up best practices for career progression frameworks
Use your framework for career progression 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
Start weaving your career progression framework into every part of the employee experience, such as your weekly 1:1s, performance reviews, employee promotion practices, and goals/OKRs.
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 allow you to 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 framework for career progression with Leapsome & help employees thrive
Today’s professionals want more career structure out of their chosen roles, which means companies have to be more deliberate and strategic in their approach to creating career paths. By implementing frameworks for job progression, you can create more clarity for both managers and employees around the skills they need to develop to progress within your organization. You can also reduce the role unconscious bias tends to play in performance reviews and assessments.
Using a platform like Leapsome to simplify the process of connecting career progression frameworks with performance review cycles, goal-setting processes, and compensation management is well worthwhile.
Leapsome’s Competency Framework tool integrates deeply with the Reviews and Instant Feedback modules, so you can use your frameworks as the basis of performance reviews and feedback. What’s more, our competency frameworks allow you to visualize development requirements and connect with our Learning module so HR teams can create the training courses employees need to grow.
Ultimately, Leapsome is the only platform that closes the loop between performance management, goal setting, employee engagement, and learning, allowing your business to navigate the changing professional landscape with a highly skilled workforce.
🌱 Prevent career stagnation and help employees flourish
Leapsome’s Competency Framework tool integrates with the Reviews, Instant Feedback, and Goals modules so employees can take more ownership over their own development.
👉 Book a demo
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