The Future of Work: Lessons in Work Architecture and Career Management (2023)

as i havediscussed in several articlesThe highly competitive labor market has made internal mobility one of the most important HR strategies.Latest LinkedIn Study (Global Talent Trends 2020)found that more than 70% of organizations now focus on “internal recruiting” and that companies with active internal career management programs have 41% higher retention rates.

In many ways, this is the illustrious future of work. We take a job at a company, move from one role to another, and our careers grow and develop through a series of projects, assignments, and roles. It's a far cry from the "pre-employment to retirement" talent management we envisioned a decade ago. It is about facilitated internal mobility and development.

There's a lot going on in this room. Providers such as Workday, Gloat, Avature and Phenom People are buildingtalent marketsto make it easy. Create providers like Degreed, EdCast, Eightfold.ai and FilteredSkill Cloudsto help derive and identify skill gaps for development. And nearly all applicant tracking system vendors are developing internal recruiting tools that allow the talent acquisition leader to source better talent in-house.

But what's it really like to do that? How do you actually create a functional career management program and internal solution?

Well, one of the vendors thatFuel50 is a pioneer in the indoor mobility market, an innovative software company (founded by two world-class career coaches) that fundamentally defined the space. I spent several hours talking with two Fuel50 customers (Vanguard and Ingersoll Rand) and would like to share my thoughts.

Fuel50: pioneer in career guidance and mobility

The original idea for Fuel50 was to build a comprehensive professional development platform for companies. The platform allows employees to self-assess their interests and skills, match them to jobs, and facilitates the creation of personalized career plans and easy-to-navigate job templates that simplify career management. In fact, it does just about everything you could want in a career management system, including matching people with mentors and identifying development programs to help people grow in their careers.

At first, Fuel50 had to evangelize the market because companies didn't have the budget for this type of system. Now that almost every company is struggling to hire and develop skills internally, Fuel50 is a hot company.

This is not an easy problem.

To be clear, internal talent mobility is not a simple problem. Yes, you can open job listings to internal candidates, but it doesn't do much good if managers don't hire less-skilled internal workers, managers hoard their employees, and you don't have the tools to find the right job. Many companies tell me that this problem is quite challenging. It is common to hear that “the easiest way to move around in this company is to quit and apply for a new job”.

I was recently in an offsite HR office at a large bank and the team had a meetingHYPO development. The head of succession management talked to the head of talent acquisition and basically said, "Stop recruiting my HIPOs, I have a plan for them." The head of TA then replied, "Well I have all the jobs they need and you really don't know what they are." This means that the disciplines of recruitment, succession management and L&D must now be linked.

The whole problem is multidisciplinary. As the following figure shows, you need a work architecture and a clear set of work opportunities (usually jobs or projects), a way for employees to identify and evaluate their interests, a way for the company to communicate its career strategy and skills needs and a way for people to fulfill their personal mission at work.

There are also important cultural issues that need to be addressed. In many companies there are internal cultures that make mobility difficult; there may be an "up or down" reward system; Salaries and employment levels prevent people from moving without promotion (a big problem); and managers aren't sure whether to make it easy for people to leave the group, block it, or simply stay out of it.

Many years ago I interviewed Cisco (a company that thrives on internal mobility) and was informed by the Head of Talent that there is a "rule" at the company: Anyone who works in a position for two years or more is "free". look for another indoor position. Managers were instructed to help and not hinder each other.

Job templates are a mess

The biggest problem of all is thatJob descriptions and job models are a mess.

In addition to being very detailed and granular, they become less important as companies grow. We are working with a large global company that is implementing Workday and wants to optimize their work architecture before rolling out the new system.

Well, the company has 70,000 employees and we found96,000 job descriptionsIn the system. It's crazy, but that's how companies grow. As I describe it, this is the "entropy problem" in economics. (Entropy is a term for “the increasing randomness in the universe.”) Businesses are getting more “random” every day.

Imagine that you are looking for a new position in this company and now you are a "Marketing Manager" - you can choose from 50 different positions of Marketing Manager, Senior Marketing Manager, Product Marketing Manager, Media Marketing Manager and so on on. You understand this.

What We Learned from Ingersoll Rand and Vanguard

Now that Fuel50 has pioneered all of this, its customers are well below the learning curve. So let me give you a few things we've learned.

Ingersoll Rand: Creating a Development-Oriented Culture

No case from Ingersoll Rand,Mike MartinHe didn't want to build a career portal, he was responding to an employee turnover and engagement problem. In 2012, the company recognized that the main reason for leaving the best employees was the lack of perceived career opportunities, and therefore turned to development planning. This led to a massive overhaul of their talent system.

Initially, the company focused on employees with high potential and called for "Every high potential needs a development plan.Then the next year they said:All employees must have a development and discussion plan.”

This mandate changed the role of management and since 2013 the company has changed. Now the mantra is "Professional development is what we do.”

To make this work, Mike and his team had to clarify the company's career models (Fuel50 and their consultants are tailor-made for this) and determine the job architecture. This resulted in a company-wide job rationalization program that was eventually reduced to 800 jobs. The expanded program was renamed Advancement in Career and also included a series of skills and competencies for each position.

This type of project is liberating for companies because it forces managers to think more strategically. Today, using Fuel50 as a platform, Ingersoll Rand enables its employees to assess their career goals, find a future role, assess their current skills (self-assessment and managerial assessment) and create development plans for growth. The entire system is a complete career assessment, personalization and development system, and Mike believes it has increased employee engagement and retention by double digits.

The organizational culture has also changed. Now, after several years of effort, the races are on"employee-owned and manager-enabled".Managers know theirsTo workIt's about asking good career questions, helping people clarify their values, helping analyze skills gaps, and helping people prepare for their next role.

The company is now adding mentors to the program so employees can find experts who will prepare them for their next role. And to further expand the development process, they also add “project experience” to the model so that people can find projects that will set them on a future path.

Today, three years later, the internal hiring rate has increased from 35% to 55%, and most internal mobility is lateral rather than vertical. This is a great topic, by the way: one of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley told me that "internal mobility is completely blocked because nobody changes jobs without a promotion." No business grows forever, and this culture stands in the way of true personal growth.

That's the big lesson I learned from MikeThis is not a platform issue.. To do what Ingersoll Rand did, you must build a project team, simplify your work architecture, and establish a leadership-focused program to teach managers and employees that development planning is not an afterthought, but for the future of the company. company.

Although Mike may not have realized it at the time, his team was actually preparing Ingersoll Rand for the future of work. Now that this program is underway, the company sees professional development as central to its mission. It helps people explore new opportunities and helps the company adapt to automation and the emergence of new jobs.

Vanguard: Driving further growth and employee engagement

Like Ingersoll Rand, Vanguard is an iconic company with high engagement. In 2013, the company realized that it needed digital transformation and began to define new ways of working.

This transformation was calledNew ways of working, and basically focused onfine tunejagile. When organizations embrace Agile, they realize that talent mobility is critical to success. When people fail to move on to new projects and develop new skills, agile initiatives are slow to get off the ground. As part of its transformation, Vanguard realized that job mobility and skills development were essential.

Vanguard also had a problem with the working architecture. At the start, the company had 7,000 job profiles for 17,000 employees. As the company grew and the job market became more competitive, employee retention began to decline and employees told managers they couldn't find a next career path with the company. Because Vanguard has such a strong family culture, career management has always been seen as "who you know where you're going".

This type of career management is endemic in all large companies. Your career depends on who you know, which blocks the philosophy of transparency and continuous growth. The CHRO of a large company once said to me, "We just spent over $100,000 hiring a CFO for one of our business units when the perfect candidateThey had just resigned, he worked at our company across the street.”

Vanguard, like Ingersoll Rand, is now streamlining its work architecture (expected to reach 2,000 work profiles).Nate Prosser, who led that effort, told me the project was cathartic and has now become strategic. Not only is job mobility facilitated, agile working methods are also gaining ground.

Conclusion: The careers of the future are taking over the work of today

It's easy to sit down and talk about talent mobility, developing internal talent and building a better career model in your organization. But doing this is much more difficult than it seems.

As these companies told me, there are three main challenges: (A) simplifying work architectures to make it easier than ever to identify and find the next opportunity within the company; (B) Creation of a set of tools for assessing and planning skills development for all employees and managers; (C) Promote a culture of internal growth, internal mobility and focus on the exchange of talents around the world.

Fuel50 is a vendor that has figured this out after a decade of effort. If we're all going to buy fancy skill ontology tools and talent market solutions, let's remember the basics and understand that when we start internal mobility, we really change everything. The role of individuals, managers and leaders will change.

It is clearly the key to future excellence and we will launch an entirely new program in 2018Academia Josh Niesento help this year.