A common question I get from my clients is “who is doing career development right?” Everyone else is always interested in hearing some of the ideas and best practices of what other companies are doing to promote career development and growth inside of their organization. Over the past few years, I’ve been collecting publicly available best practices of examples of how companies are thinking and doing career development inside their organization, and I wanted to share 7 of them with you.
1)NBC Universal Teaches Their Employees How to Manage Their Careers
In 2023, NBC Universal rolled out their Talent Lab, an experience that helps employees learn the skills and mindsets that are needed to grow their career. According to SVP of Talent Development Rebecca Romano, These 2-3 hour sessions which they’ve run throughout the year focus on helping employees develop their self-awareness, business acumen, and relationship building skills so they can identify career goals, and spot opportunities to take within the company.
2)Cisco helps employees move internally as the organization transforms
Oftentimes, logistics, spreadsheets, and organizational red tape can hold back internal mobility, but two leaders at Cisco, Zohra Yafai and Alicia Lopez (TA and L&D Leads) are working to remove that to help employees find new roles.Moving internally isn’t always easy, but Cisco is working to make it easier for employees to identify new opportunities, and navigate the transition into those opportunities. As the needs of the business change, so do talent and skill needs. Cisco’s Talent Acquisition and Learning and Development Leads teamed up to partner on helping the business redeploy talent to emerging areas of need. Working alongside the business, the company identifies areas of need, and then leveraging both the Talent Acquisition and Learning and Development teams, works with employees who have identified they are interested in making a change to help them land new opportunities. The TA team helps with resume reviews, interview prep, and all the things that would often hold back a change. Meanwhile, the L&D team makes sure they have the skills they need to do these new jobs effectively through onboarding and training.
3)Bank of America Builds Internal Mobility team to grow mobility and retention
Sarah Holmgren is a Talent Mobility Advisor at Bank of America. Part of her job is to help employees identify their next move within the Bank, as well as to develop insights about how to grow their careers. Through 1:1 coaching Sarah helps internal talent both identify new roles and move to different parts of the organization as well as to strengthen employee career confidence and acumen to continue progressing in their careers. What started as just a solo effort has blossomed to a team of 12, who has helped over 13,000 employees within the bank.
4)Ethena Defines an Employee Led Career Development Strategy
As a rapidly growing startup in the HR compliance space, Ethena began noticing a worrisome number in their employee engagement report. While the overall report was strong, one area of opportunity revolved around career growth and development. In their survey, employees noted that as a result of the rapid growth and change, it was difficult to understand how people could advance, what career development meant, and what the metrics and measurements were for things like promotions and roles. Led by their VP of People Melanie Naranjo, Ethena embarked on a listening tour to better understand from employees stood with career development growth. Through these conversations, they learned that employees thought of development growth in one lens: vertical (promotions) – without a vertical promotion, employees felt that their career was “stagnant.”
Instead, Naranjo and her team proposed a definition of growth that was much more expansive, and redefined that definition for the organization. In addition to the definition of career development and growth, they began communicating and articulating this to all employees throughout the employee lifecycle. They went a few steps further: First they developed a framework and leveling guide, so that employees could better understand how each of the levels differed from one another, and directionally, what you need to demonstrate at each of the levels. They also set metrics in terms of how they at the company level would measure how effective they were with respect to career growth. Having that baseline defined as well as a commitment to measurement was important to seeing the progress that they were making. Finally, they got people managers involved. They focused on defining expectations for people managers with respect to career development and growth, and then provided training and reinforcement to ensure managers were able to do their role effectively. The result of this was that they were able to increase employee satisfaction from 72 to 90% within 2 quarters.
5) Johnson & Johnson Makes Career Development Accessible For All
J&J Chief Learning Officer Sandra Humbles has a large remit – with a team of 2,000 she is responsible for leading 2,000 L&D professionals across more than 120 learning organizations at J&J. And part of her goal is to identify how she and her team can connect everything they do to how J&J thinks about talent.
Part of this is on display through J&J Learn, a career development program that is accessible to all 150,000 employees at J&J. J&J Learn starts with getting employees to share their own reflections and insights on what they think about their careers and how they might want to grow. And through a tech enabled platform, it makes recommendations on learning opportunities, people, and projects/experiences at J&J that employees could use to guide their own career development and growth. In one year of launch, 50,000 employees logged into the platform. When it comes to career development, Humbles and her team rely on a framework called the 3E’s: Education, Experience, and Exposure. J&J learn focuses on providing employees with personalized ideas against the 3E’s within J&J, and then J&J empowers their managers to help their employees bring those plans to life.
6) Zapier Uses Secondments to Promote Mobility and Avoid Layoffs
Companies regularly go through up and down cycles. While many have resorted to laying off people during the down cycles, Zapier has taken a different approach: Secondments. When doing workforce planning during the pandemic, Zapier realized that they were going to be hiring less people, and thus, they did not need to rely on acquiring talent, which meant their team of talent acquisition professionals would not be in high demand. Instead of laying people off, they decided to offer those professionals an opportunity to move internally to another department. A key here, was that they provided employees with the creativity and agency to share the skills they had but also to select the places they could go.
7) Zillow Builds a Pipeline of Future-Ready Managers
One of the challenges that exists today is that many managers end up becoming managers even though they may not have either the right skills or right training (or both) before they take the role. To solve for this, as well as to focus on inclusive and equitable career pathing, Zillow creating an aspiring manager program for their employees. This program is meant to improve the pipeline of employees who are ready to take on their first people management role, and includes a year of programming, content and resources. The purpose of this is to both make people aware of the opportunity and give them the right information they need to better understand what it actually takes to become a people manager at Zillow. Through this program, Zillow was able to improve the bench strength and pipeline of it’s people managers in a number of functions and business units. (link) via Kameko Leung.
8) Wunderman Thompson Builds Career Platform to Improve Visibility and Career Pathways for Early Career Employees
Starting your career in the ad agency world can be challenging, and it has become especially challenging as a result of the pandemic. Aware that many of their early career professionals crave relationships, visibility, and connection, Wunderman Thompson built a platform to connect their employees to advancement opportunities as well as a place where they could learn and advance their own connections and social capital with other employees. To date, 73% of their employees have used the platform ,
Note: If you are doing something interesting or impactful around career development inside of your organization I would love to learn more about it.