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Career development is a critical component of an organization’s employee value proposition. This fact is one reason HR leaders and their teams continue to reimagine ways to help workers develop their careers. But as noted in this new Gartner article, only 39% of surveyed respondents said they are interested in internal opportunities despite their organizations’ efforts to provide them. While this sentiment has various reasons (see Figure 1: Why Employees Are Interested in External Roles), many employees feel they must search externally to gain new experiences. This article shares tactics for creating new sources of experiences and development in an organization. One example is Texas Dow Employees Credit Union (TDECU), which uses “career experiments,” in which employees try different career options without the formality of applying for a new role. TDECU does this by breaking roles/jobs into tasks that employees from different business areas can perform. TDECU prioritizes high-level tasks that overlap between roles, meaning employees in high-supply roles will already be proficient or can quickly upskill. Once these tasks are identified, TDECU uses temporary mobility to shift the overlapping tasks from an established employee, who is already working in a high-demand role, to a “transferred” employee, who will temporarily own some of that role’s responsibilities. This tactic also provides a trial period for the transferred employee to work in other parts of the business, which enables development. As a bonus, here is a one-page template I created that can help you think through which roles might be broken down into tasks and serve as the basis for this form of career development.
