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    • Action plan

    Create career paths for your employees

    Medium effort

    High impact

    With career progression the consistently top-ranked reason why people leave jobs in Britain, showing that your business can provide stimulating and rewarding career paths is essential for talent retention. Use this plan to both find out what your staff want from developmental opportunities and how to structure it in a way that works across all roles and responsibilities.

    • We’ve designed our action plans to be completed in the order of steps laid out and explained why each step is important
    • Customising your action plan lets you set your own completion dates, assign tasks to others and get notifications
    • Helpful tools are provided for certain steps while a tracking metric at the end will help you determine the long-term success of your effort
    • A downloadable PDF version of each action plan is available if you’d like to compete it offline
    What's involved? Ways to use this action plan Measuring impact
    1

    Do you have an organisational chart with defined job positions and descriptions? If not, make one

    Impact: medium

    Why will this help?

    An organisational chart gives employees a clear view of where everyone fits and where future opportunities lie.

    Organisational chart explainer

    An organisational chart, also known as an org chart, is a useful tool that businesses can use to display the structure of the company and show staff what progression looks like.

    Organisational chart template

    Creating your own organisational chart will help to map out the structure of your company and give greater visibility over roles to new starters.
    2

    Discover how others have made important changes to the way they build career paths

    Impact: medium

    Why will this help?

    Learning from the experiences and lessons of fellow business leaders is the best way to direct your own improvement efforts.

    Empower your staff with motivating career paths

    Few workers want to be confined to one role for the whole of their careers, so the ability to progress within a company is key if an employer wants to both attract new recruits and keep long-standing members of staff.
    3

    Define the skills or experience each member of staff currently possess and add this to your org chart

    Impact: medium

    Why will this help?

    Mapping skills to all members of staff lets you clearly see where gaps lie and therefore where career development makes most sense.

    4

    Set up one-to-one conversations with each member of the business to find out what career progression looks like for them

    Impact: high

    Why will this help?

    You've got the insights from inside your own business, now it's time to see how those line up against best practice examples.

    5

    Create a prioritisation list of changes that can then be used to create a new company handbook for setting career paths

    Impact: high

    Why will this help?

    Creating a document will crystallise your learnings and help set in place a new way of doings things going forward.

    What can I do with this Action Plan?

    Start this Action Plan

    Add some extra information to this plan and we’ll help you get it done.

    • We’ve designed our action plans to be completed in the order of steps laid out and explained why each step is important
    • Customising your action plan lets you set your own completion dates, assign tasks to others and get notifications
    • Helpful tools are provided for certain steps while a tracking metric at the end will help you determine the long-term success of your effort
    • A downloadable PDF version of each action plan is available if you’d like to compete it offline

    Download and print

    Get a printable template for this Action Plan, fill it in with some target dates, and share it with your team. Pin it on the wall where everyone can see it.

    Get the printable Action Plan

    Learning Groups

    We also run Learning Groups on these topics where you can join other leaders tackling the same challenges.

    Find a Learning Group

    How will I know if my action plan is working?

    Staff satisfaction survey results

    Staff satisfaction surveys help gauge sentiment at regular intervals

    Why this metric?

    Whether gathered anonymously or not, staff satisfaction surveys help gauge the sentiment of your people as changes are made and impacts felt.

    How do I start tracking?

    Use an online survey to get feedback from members of staff three and six months after making changes to see what impact it has had.