Dual Career Ladders
Companies are increasingly offering different ways to design a career path that best fits the employee. Many times, it’s a way to allow employees to move up in the organization without taking on management responsibilities.
Dual career ladders have been valuable in organizations for many years, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) (1). Some definitions help:
"Career ladders are the progression of jobs in an organization's specific occupational fields ranked from highest to lowest based on level of responsibility and pay. Career paths encompass varied forms of career progression, including the traditional vertical career ladders, dual career ladders, horizontal career lattices, career progression outside the organization and encore careers." (1)
Of course, companies can’t promote all of its high performers into management, simply because of the available positions (1). Creating an option for those who want to ‘stay technical’ helps retain good employees and provide them with advancement. Turnover is most costly for employees with expertise. When high-performing employees don’t feel they are advancing and learning, they will feel stagnant and may leave the company. Their promotion to higher-level technical positions, for example, keeps the expertise and is more satisfying to the employee.
When employees are aware of their opportunities for career paths, it can increase their commitment to the company, which can lower turnover. Employees who are promoted may feel their careers have stalled and they have no future at their company. Dual career paths offer a plan for employee careers. If you see someone promoted who you think is not as qualified as you, you’ll be 23% more likely to leave the organization, according to Yale University research. The people who are promoted often are done so because of skills they have for their current job, not for management. Different types of promotions allow people to feel valued, make more money, and gain status, each of which may be more important depending on the person. Given the potential positive effects of 'job crafting' (creating positions and paths for each employee), Employees who are not engaged can cost companies more than you might expect - one study showed organizations lose from $450 to $550 billion annually in productivity due to disengagement (3).
Your spouse's career aspirations matter, too (2). If one spouse wants to take his or her career into management, it will influence the other. The important factors were materialism - importance of the pay - and salience - the extent to which the career is an important part of one's life. The effects are not just one's own assessment of career salience and materialism, but when considering the spouse's. If one spouse has a high salience, the other may adjust.
Companies also have turned to using two types of performance appraisals, one for management skills and another for technical skills. This may help promote people based on their skills, but not erase the potential for promotions and designations based on technical ability. Individually-based performance jobs, like sales, don’t give a lot of opportunity for development of team or management skills. This can cause problems in promoting.
For example, Spotify has developed dual career path options (they call career 'steps') for employees (see the company sources 4 and 5). Realizing that the typical career path was, in effect, a career change from technical work to managerial work, the company wanted to empower those who wanted to stay in their same job type. Spotify mapped four levels of the organization at which responsibility increases, from the individual worker to ‘squad’ (team) level, to ‘tribe’ (inter-team) level, and finally to management (highest) level. Employees are encouraged to explore career paths, but an internal editorial (5) gave suggestions one might find interesting. The author stated the early is not the best time to develop a career path. Wait until you have experience in the job and maintain flexibility in your job path and in your openness to paths.
Topics
Careers, Performance Appraisals, Promotion
Student Discussion/Questions
Ask students to investigate different performance appraisal consultants. They are easy to find online. Search technical appraisal and management appraisal and you'll find different types with different KSAs (knowledge, skills, abilities) to be rated.
The Spotify sources (4 and 5) are from the company and give a view of what organizations are thinking about with dual career paths. What other companies can students find online that are doing similar things?
Sources
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-qa/pages/termdualcareer.aspx
Pluuta, H., Büttgenb, M., & Ullrich, J. (2018). Spousal influence on employees’ career paths in dual ladder systems: a dyadic model, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 27:6, 777-792. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2018.1531849
https://engineering.atspotify.com/2016/02/15/spotify-technology-career-steps/
https://engineering.atspotify.com/2016/02/08/technical-career-path/