How Career Pathing Can Make Your Training More Effective and Engaging

The Benefits of Career Pathing

Career pathing, the ability to group related courses in a learning management system, enables your employees and managers to establish clear career goals and identify the skills required for targeted career and succession planning. Engage, retain and grow!

Benefits of career pathing include:

Increasing employee engagement.

• Tracking the talent within your organization.
• Training your leaders for tomorrow.
• Creating an internal marketplace of talent.

With career pathing, you can address your organization’s growing need to provide professional and personal development opportunities to your employees.

Getting Started

With training administrators and learners, the focus frequently is only on courses and learning objectives. While these are certainly important, at times it’s necessary to consider the skills needed for long-term professional development. This can be daunting. There are so many ways career paths can be used that it can be difficult to know where to start.

Many organizations start with one role or one department, often leveraging an existing group of courses designed to be a career path, like role-based courseware, certification curricula or new-hire training.

Effective Skills Tracking for Succession Planning

Next, many organizations will look at what skills are needed for a specific role, and then group courses that develop those skills into a career path. Starting with the skills listed in the official job description helps.

For example, if your organization needs more customer experience managers, you might find the job description lists the following required skills:

• Interpersonal communication skills.
• Handling difficult client experiences.
• Understanding “Know Your Customer” procedures.
• Helping the elderly make financial decisions.
• Understanding customer relation management software.
• Understanding customer experience key performance indicators.
• Managing a team.

You can then use this list to identify the courses that develop these skills and group them into a career path for internal professional development. These kinds of career paths can foster internal candidates for advancement, help with succession planning, and increase retention.

Using career pathing in this way also increases eLearning engagement. When combined with skills tracking and badging on user profiles, career paths can provide learners with a sense of accomplishment for reaching different goals or stages of professional development.

Gamification to Increase Engagement

Today, many organizations are starting to leverage career pathing as part of a gamification training strategy.

Think of it this way: a badge is a reward the user obtains after completing a challenge (career path), and the challenge is made of a collection of smaller tasks (courses) and accumulation of power ups (skills). The badge is a reminder and celebration of a milestone on the user’s path to achieving a bigger goal (professional development).

In games, typically there are categories and hierarchies in the badge system, meaning the user may need to obtain five badges before earning the final and ultimate badge.

At some organizations, motivating career pathing through gamification is based on role and associated products. For example, to achieve a “Universal Banker Candidate” badge, learners first must earn a “Deposit Products” badge, a “Lending Products” badge, and an “Investment Products” badge.

At other organizations, the strategy is based on role and procedural knowledge. To be a “Deposit Account All-star,” learners must first complete badges in “Know Your Customer,” “Account Opening,” “Money Handling,” “Deposit and Withdrawals,” “Account Transfers” and “Closing Accounts.” Career pathing is an opportunity to be creative and foster engagement in ways appropriate for your organization.

• Learning Objectives.
• Skill Acquisition.
• Course Completions.
• Career Path Completion.
• Badges Earned.
• Improved Performance.
• Professional Development Goals.

BAI has almost 100 years of experience in the financial services industry. We work with over 2,300 banks, credit unions and other financial institutions to help them improve their training programs annually. Contact us today to see how BAI can help your organization: info.bai.org/contact-bai