A well-designed career path should show employees exactly what the demands and requirements of each role are, so they know what each job involves and the progression criteria for moving from one job to the next.

Each role in a career path should be clearly outlined, showing the scope, responsibilities, and requirements (knowledge, skills, competencies).

It’s important to be clear on both the similarities and key differences between roles, as well as the training and development that is available for people wanting to progress into each role.

Career paths show all the possible career opportunities within a particular function. More advanced career paths map out both permanent and project-based opportunities laterally across the organisation, based on skills requirements.

This is an example of a simple, vertical career path design within a function:

Organisations including Mastercard, BP and Rolls Royce have also developed functional dual ladder career paths. This enables employees to choose either a managerial or specialist technical career path depending on whether or not they want to manage a team.

Here's an example of a dual career path for engineering roles:

More advanced career paths show how employees can move around the whole organisation, using their skills to change disciplines by moving laterally between functions, or moving up and across an organisation through a cross-functional promotion. 

More advanced and varied career paths like these have become more important as employees increasingly prefer to move away from a traditional career path in favour of progressing laterally and vertically, through a more complex web of opportunities, skill enhancements and role transitions.  

One of the main barriers to organisations implementing career paths is the often chaotic state of their job data. Rather than a defined structure, many businesses have added roles as they have grown, or perhaps acquired or merged with another company.

When jobs are added without oversight, the result is often hundreds or thousands of job titles, sometimes just slight variations of each other, with inconsistencies in salaries across roles and regions.

The same inconsistencies can also apply to job descriptions, often stored in a variety of locations and formats.

This affects the creation of career paths in several ways:

• Job titles have less meaning and therefore little bearing on job content. Inaccurate job titles can lead to misunderstandings about what the role entails. 

• It’s difficult for employees to understand what levels jobs are at, and the differences between jobs at different levels.  

• Without standardisation around how skills and capabilities are talked about on job descriptions, it becomes harder to understand the actual skills required for roles.  

 Though basic career paths can be defined without a job architecture in place, they will be limited to individual job functions and won’t give a clear picture to those looking for a wider range of opportunities. 

This means that, though there may be opportunities for people with transferable skills to move from one function to another in an organisation, there is no visibility of these opportunities because of a confused and inconsistent job architecture.

Creating a structured job architecture

A well-defined job architecture is essential for effective career pathing. Many organisations struggle with fragmented job data, where job titles, descriptions, and progression opportunities lack consistency.

RoleMapper solves this challenge by enabling organisations to update and maintain job architecture with speed and agility, mapping employees to job descriptions and managing job grades and levels

By implementing a structured job architecture, organisations can:

• Provide employees with a clear understanding of available career opportunities.   

• Identify overlapping skills between roles, enabling smoother lateral and cross-functional moves.  

• Create consistent role levels, making career progression transparent.

Using a skills framework for career mapping

RoleMapper's AI-driven skills intelligence enables organisations to identify the range of skills within the organisation.

Creating a skills framework provides the ability to view the range of skills across an organisation, and more importantly, detailed data of the category of skills and the level of competence for each employee.

This detail then feeds into key business use cases, including career pathing. This enables organisations to:

• Support employees in developing the skills needed for their preferred career paths.  

• Align learning and development programmes with evolving role requirements.  

• Ensure workforce agility by tracking skills supply and demand across the organisation.

Organising roles into job families

RoleMapper enables organisations to categorise jobs into structured job families based on skills and capabilities.

By grouping roles in this way, businesses can:

• Define clear career pathways within and across job families.  

• Enhance internal mobility by highlighting opportunities beyond traditional hierarchical progression. 

• Support a skills-based approach to talent development, where employees can move laterally or diagonally based on skills rather than just job titles

Book a demo to learn more about how RoleMapper can enable the development of career paths.