The Future of Work: Lessons In Job

Architecture and Career Management

BY JOSHBERSIN · PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 9, 2020 · UPDATED FEBRUARY 10, 2020
As I’ve discussed in several articles, the hyper-competitive job market has
made internal mobility one of the most important strategies in
HR. LinkedIn’s latest study (2020 Global Talent Trends) found that over 70% of
organizations are now focused on “internal recruiting” and that companies
with active internal career management programs have 41% higher
retention rates.
In many ways, this is the famed Future of Work. We take a job in a
company, we move from role to role, and our career grows and evolves
through a series of projects, assignments, and positions. It’s far different
from the “prehire to retire” talent management we envisioned a decade ago.
It’s all about facilitated and developmental internal mobility.

There’s a lot going on in this space. Vendors like Workday, Gloat, Avature,
and Phenom People are building Talent Marketplaces to make this easy.
Vendors like Degreed, EdCast, Eightfold.ai, and Filtered are building Skills
Clouds to help infer and identify skill gaps for development. And almost
every applicant tracking system vendor is now creating tools for internal
recruiting, enabling the talent acquisition leader to better source people
internally.
But what’s it really like to do this? How do you really build a program and
solution for internal career management that works?

Well one of the vendors that pioneered the internal mobility market is Fuel50, an
innovative software company (founded by two world-class career coaches)
that essentially defined the space. I spent several hours talking with two of
Fuel50’s customers (Vanguard and Ingersoll Rand) and I want to share
what I learned.
Fuel50: A Pioneer in Career Pathing and Mobility
Fuel50’s original idea was to build an end-to-end career development
platform for companies. The platform lets employees self-assess their
interests and capabilities, it matches them to jobs, and it facilitates the
creation of personalized career paths and easy to navigate job models that
make career management easy. In fact, it does just about everything you’d
want in a career management system, including matching people to
mentors and identifying development programs to help people with their
career growth.
In the early days, Fuel50 had to evangelize the market because companies
didn’t have a budget for this kind of system. Now, as almost every company
is struggling to hire and build skills internally, Fuel50 is a hot company.

This Is Not A Simple Problem

Just to make it clear, internal talent mobility is not a simple problem. Yes,
you can open up job postings to internal candidates, but it doesn’t do much
good if managers won’t hire internal people with lesser skills, managers
hoard their staff, and there are no tools to find the right job. Many
companies tell me this problem is quite challenging, it’s common to hear
“the easiest way to move around in this company is to quit and apply for a
new job.”

I was at an HR offsite for a large bank recently and the team had a session
on HIPO development. The head of succession management got into an
argument with the head of talent acquisition and essentially said “stop
recruiting my HIPOs I have a plan for them.” The head of TA then replied
“well I have all the jobs they need and you don’t really know what they are.”
In other words, the disciplines of recruiting, succession management, and
L&D now have to be linked together.
The entire problem is multi-disciplinary. As the figure below points out, you
need a job architecture and clear set of open positions (often gigs or
projects), a way for employees to identify and assess their interests, a way
for the company to publish its strategic career and skills needs, and a way
for people to fulfill their personal mission at work.
There are major cultural issues to deal with as well. In many companies
there are internal cultures that hold back mobility; there may be an “up or
out” reward system; salaries and job levels prevent people from moving
without a promotion (a big problem); and managers aren’t sure if they
should facilitate people leaving their group, block it, or just stay out of the
way.

Many years ago I interviewed Cisco (a company that thrives on internal

mobility) and the head of talent told me there was a “rule” in the company:
anyone who worked in a job for two years or more was “free” to look for
another internal position. Managers were told to help and not get in the
way.

Job Models Are A Mess

The biggest problem of all is that Job Descriptions and Job Models are a mess.
Not only are they too detailed and granular, but as companies grow they
start to make no sense. We are working with a large global company that’s
implementing Workday and they want to rationalize their job architecture
before they implement the new system.

Well, the company has 70,000 employees and we found 96,000 job
descriptionsin the system. It’s insane, but that’s how companies grow. As I
describe it, this is the “entropy problem” in business. (Entropy is a term for
“the increasing randomness in the universe.”) Companies just get “more
random” every day.
Imagine if you’re looking for a new position in this company and you’re a
“marketing manager” now – you may find 50 different marketing manager,
senior marketing manager, product marketing manager, media marketing
manager jobs, and on and on. You get it.

What We’ve Learned from Ingersoll Rand and Vanguard

Well since Fuel50 pioneered all this, their customers tend to be pretty far
down the learning curve. So let me give you some things we’ve learned.

Ingersoll Rand: Creating A Development-Centric Culture

In the case of Ingersoll Rand, Mike Martin didn’t set out to build a career
portal – he was responding to an employee engagement and turnover issue.
In 2012 the company realized that the biggest reason top people were
leaving was the lack of perceived career opportunities, so they turned their
attention toward development planning. This resulted in a massive rethink
of their talent system.
Initially, the company focused on high-potential employees, mandating
“Every high-potential needs to have a development plan.” Then the next year
they said, “All salaried employees need to have a development plan — and a
discussion.”
This mandate changed the role of management, and since 2013 it has
changed the company. Now the mantra is “Career development is what we
do.”
To make this work Mike and his team had to clarify the company’s career
models (Fuel50 and their consultants are tailor-made for this), and fix the
job architecture. This turned into a company-wide job rationalization
program and eventually narrowed down to 800 job titles. The expanded
program was now called “Career Progress” and also included a set of skills
and competencies for each job.

This kind of project is liberating for companies because it forces managers

to think more strategically. Today, with Fuel50 as the platform, Ingersoll
Rand enables employees to assess their career goals, find a future role,
assess their current skills (self-assessment and managerial assessment), and
create development plans for growth. The entire system is a complete career
assessment, matching, and development system – and Mike believes it
increased employee engagement and retention by double digits.
It has also changed the organizational culture. Now, after several years of
effort, careers are “employee-owned and manager enabled.” Managers know
their jobis to ask good career questions, help individuals clarify their values,
and assist with skills gap analysis and helping people prepare for the next
role.
The company is now adding mentors to the program, so people can find
experts to help them prepare for the next role. And to extend the
development process further, they’re also adding “project experience” to the
model so people can find projects that set them on a future path.

Today, three years later, the internal hiring ratio has grown from 35% to
55% and the majority of internal mobility is lateral rather than vertical. By
the way this is a big issue to address: one of Silicon Valley’s most successful
companies told me that “internal mobility is completely blocked because
nobody will change jobs without a promotion.” No company grows forever
and this culture gets in the way of real personal growth.

The big lesson I learned from Mike is that this is not a platform problem. In
order to do what Ingersoll Rand has done you need to create a project team,
simplify your job architecture, and put in place a leadership-focused
program to teach managers and employees that development planning is
not an after-thought, it’s core to the company’s future.
While Mike may have not realized it at the time, his team was actually
preparing Ingersoll Rand for the future of work. Now that this program is
running, the company sees career development as core to its mission. It
helps people move to new opportunities and helps the company adapt as
automation and new jobs emerge.

Vanguard: Driving Employee Growth and Engagement Even Higher

Vanguard, like Ingersoll Rand, is an iconic company with high levels of
engagement. In 2013 the company realized it needed a digital
transformation so it started to define new ways of work.

This transformation was called New Ways of Working, and it essentially

focused on lean and agile. As companies adopt agile they realize that talent
mobility is essential for success. If people cannot move to new projects and
develop new skills, agile initiatives are slow to start. So as part of its
transformation Vanguard discovered that job mobility and skills
development was essential.
Vanguard also had a job architecture problem. Initially, the company had
7,000 job profiles for 17,000 employees. As the company grew and the job
market became competitive, retention started to drop and people were
telling leaders that they could not find the next career in the company.
Because Vanguard has such a strong family-like culture, career
management was always considered “who you knew is where you go.”

This type of career management is endemic to all large companies. Your

career is dependent on who you know, which blocks the philosophy of
transparency and continuous growth. The CHRO of a large company once
told me “we just spent over $100,000 recruiting a head of finance for one of
our business units when the perfect candidate, who had just resigned, was
working in our company across the street.”
Vanguard, like Ingersoll Rand, is now simplifying its job architecture
(expecting to get down to 2,000 job profiles). Nate Prosser, who led this
effort, told me that the project is cathartic and has now become strategic.
Not only is career mobility easier, but now agile ways of work are taking
hold.
Bottom Line: Careers Of The Future Take Work Today
It’s easy to sit around and talk about talent mobility, internal talent
development, and building a better career model in your company. But
doing it is much harder than it looks.

As these companies told me, the essential challenges are three: (A)
simplifying job architectures so it’s easier than ever to see and find the next
opportunity in the company; (B) creating a set of skills assessments and
development planning tools for all employees and managers; (C) driving a
culture of internal growth, internal mobility, and focus on talent sharing
around the world.

Fuel50 is a vendor that has figured this out over a decade of effort. As we all
go out and buy fancy tools for skills ontologies and talent marketplace
solutions, let’s remember the basics and understand that we are really
changing everything when we start internal mobility. The role of individual,
managers, and executives will change.

It’s clearly the key to high performance in the future, and we will be
launching a whole new program on the Josh Bersin Academy later this year to
help.
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