What should be the ideals of setting up an additional career track?

Question

I have an exciting opportunity to redesign the career tracks in my current company. Each department decides its own titles, job descriptions, salary ranges, and progression. I'm pretty excited, as I've seen how the nature of formalized roles and the criteria for promotion can have a profound impact on culture and morale.

What are the best rationales for setting up parallel career tracks? What are some specific gotchas to avoid?

Answer 1

I would consider that most tracks need to have at least three levels:

• Junior or trainee
• Intermediate
• Senior

Then for some tracks you might want a level that is reserved solely for the very few experts in their field who you would prefer to pay a senior management level salary to in order to retain them as technical experts rather than force them into management get a pay raise. You could call this expert level. This will help you avoid turning a great developer into a mediocre manager.

The majority of your employees should be at Intermediate level but Senior should be attainable. Expert level should be rare and should require significant contributions to the organization and/or the profession.

You should spell out what tasks (and level of independence at performing them) a person at each level should be able to accomplish, so that people can know what they have to do to move from Junior to Intermediate and Intermediate to Senior. HAving the differences described helps immensely when you have to explain to one employee why you promoted someone else but not her/him. It also helps that underperforming employee see that once the performance criteria is met, he or she can still get promoted. Some of the worst employees I ever worked with were ones who were capable of doing senior level work but who had gotten the idea that they wouldn't get promoted no matter how good the work they did was.

In particular, I believe the move from Junior to Intermediate should be automatic once certain criteria have been met. Keeping people at trainee level once they are no longer trainees is short-sighted and ultimately bad for the company. You will lose the best ones (who can easily find intermediate level jobs elsewhere) and retain the worst ones.

Answer 2

Here's what I've got so far...

DO create a new track if:

• switching between jobs at the same track is at times virtually impossible without complete retraining. For example, one cannot move from chemical engineer to software engineer without some significant education.

• you want to encourage growth in particular areas - people don't see that there is an ability to get promoted by specializing in an area.

• you need a competitive advantage for certain roles - you can't pay the base rate of an "staff member" and get the skills of "specialized staff member" - so you need to sets of roles to clean up the pay infrastructure.

Avoid:

• Creating a new track just to pacify people in your department

• Any form of favoritism

• Creating roles that won't make sense a year from now or to someone coming into the department.

• Terminology that can't be understood quickly by most managers and many employees