How Competency Frameworks & Career pathways helped retain top scientists
In this video, I'm going to show you how to combine competency frameworks and career pathways and enable you to get, keep and grow brilliant people.
Hi, welcome to the Let's Talk Talent channel where we discuss the world of HR and talent management. We're here to help you unlock the potential in your people.
When you think about competency frameworks, and you think about career pathways, they don't always feel as if they can come together. But actually, they work perfectly. But what competency frameworks enable you
to do is give people the what – what they need to do, and how
they need to do it. And career pathways gives them the world of
possibilities: where their career could take them ultimately, and how they can strive to be the best that they can be.
Ultimately, both serve to unlock the potential in your people. So how do you go about creating that synergy between competencies and career
pathways?
So I want to take you through a case study. By taking you through the process, it will enable you to really understand how you can draw competencies and career pathways together. It starts with the exam question. The 'why?' What's the burning platform of why you're doing
this project? With this particular client it was because they were losing bioscience talent to competitors. They couldn't compete on salary. So
they needed to do something different. And in their employee engagement survey they were being told that the reason why people were leaving was because they didn't see a career within that particular business.
So the CPO took a step back and thought about how she could join and
fill in that gap. And there was an opportunity to join competency frameworks with career pathways. So the way that we did it was very, very simple. So we started with job descriptions, and we prototyped it in one area of the business. We're now on phase three, and we're looking at the whole business. But in this particular area, we were looking at scientists, who need specific skills, knowledge, probably qualifications. And the danger with competency frameworks is sometimes to get stuck in the
detail.
A competency framework should not be a replication of your job description. But by looking at the job descriptors, you can really understand what that person needs to do. We applied our model STAR, which is skills, training, attributes, and relationships. And we took
the data that we had, and we ran a number of focus groups. So we
focus grouped high performers, the leadership team, and managers to really understand what it meant to be successful in that business. And then we created a competency framework based on that STAR model.
So we started to map the pathway. And we first of all looked at the norm path. So that's how you get from A to B. So in this particular example, how you got from apprentice to Chief Medical Officer. We didn't add times, we
didn't add grades, we didn't add pay. But then we looked at the sparkles. So the different ways in which people could work across that particular
department and also across the wider bioscience industry, because I thought that was really unique because most organisations just want you to look internally within their particular organisation or
department. But they were determined to encourage people that actually at certain times of their career, they should look outside.
By bringing competencies and career pathways, we then created a playbook. This enabled people to understand how to use them. And they built that over the last couple of years to really build out and fulfil the reasoning why, what and how. Following that, we also then built a number of workshops that enabled managers and individuals to have great career conversations.
Because if you create competencies and you create career paths, and you then don't join them up and enable people to understand where can it take
me, and get feedback, then you've just created a load of stuff, right? So one of the things that I'm most proud of, and where I can see it having a
real effect on this business was the reduction in turnover.
So in July 2021, their turnover was 30%. But when they measured it again in March 2023, it was 10%. Just think about that. Is that your burning platform? If you're interested in having a chat with us, really happy to share more detail, but we love doing this project and we love joining competency frameworks and career pathways together.
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