The Careers Proposition

Increasing numbers of employers are investing in developing compelling ‘employee value propositions’.

Their aim is simple: to offer tailored, business aligned, packages of rewards, benefits, career opportunities and values that will help them to win and keep the talent they
want and need.

Aquarius has been working with a number of different clients to develop a key component of these packages - individual career propositions, tailored to different target audiences and reflecting each organisation’s own brand, style and HR models. Although the solutions look and feel different, some common guidelines are emerging:

Career Path Maping:

• Don’t try to map every possible pathway – it will look like bowl of spaghetti!
• Focus only on the most appropriate ‘next steps’ for each role – allowing for choice and differing capabilities
• Map some vertical and some lateral/diagonal pathways to show what is possible and encourage the right mix of breadth and depth

Generic Role Profiling:

• Review your role profiles - many organisations still have more different job descriptions than they do different jobs!
• Career Mapping provides a great opportunity to standardise, genericise and shorten job descriptions; creating a single role profile database that can be used to support the full range of HR activities from recruitment through performance and organisation design to
  reward

Careers Toolkit:

• Showing people the possible pathways is only the beginning of the story, both staff and managers need help to make good career choices – from simple selfassessment
  tools to detailed careers advice
• There is a huge variety of excellent tools out there – some of the best are the simplest – like helping managers to learn why, when and how to have good career conversations with their people. Be selective!
• There are real opportunities to use people all over the organisation, not just in the line and HR, to help others to make good career choices

Implementation:

• The intranet is a practical and powerful way of communicating about careers. One of our customers reports that their careers page has the second highest hit rate on their intranet!
• The intranet is a great solution, but it’s not the whole story. Issues of accessibility and ease of use mean that paper is still important. Issues of capability mean that training, development and continuing communication are needed too.
• The real challenge is to build a culture in which career discussions and plans are an integral part of the way the business and it’s people are managed