Career pathing is central to any Human Capital Management strategy. Properly executed, career pathing enables companies to attract, retain and develop talent, and mitigate losing top employees by ensuring that proper succession planning is in place.

Career pathing and career planning should always be viewed as a partnership between employer and employee. By embracing this approach congruence can be achieved between an individual’s goals and aspirations, and the organisation’s needs.

As part of the career planning and career pathing process, a Personal Development Plan should be developed for each employee. Great care should be taken to ensure that the necessary coaching, support, education, training and development is in place to ensure that personal goals and development milestones can be achieved.

Career pathing and career planning should be tailored to meet the needs of the younger generations, and unless this is done, it may prove difficult, perhaps impossible, to retain the skills of these employees.

Technologies and business methodologies are constantly changing, and therefore skills and competencies required by business will also change over time. It is therefore imperative that companies monitor the environment on an ongoing basis, to identify future skills needs.

Once these have been identified, this information should be communicated to current employees enabling them to re-skill if necessary which will ensure that valuable resources are not squandered developing skills for which there is no demand.

I strongly suggest that companies attach great importance to development, if you are wanting to attract and retain the best talent.