Steps to Creating Dual-Career Ladders at Your Company

In order to set up an effective dual-career ladder program at your company, you need to make sure your dual-career ladders are as valuable as management career paths.

Steps to Take
If you’re interested in setting up a dual-career ladder program for your employees, there are some steps you can take to get started:

1. Look at your company’s environment and see what types of tracks are currently available—Almost all organizations have a management track, but you should look at what additional tracks you could potentially offer your employees.
   
   For example, if your company has an IT department, you may want to create a technical track for those employees to follow. You may also want to create a professional advancement track for employees who want to move up in their jobs without having to take on a management role. If you’re in the bio-technology or healthcare field, you may also want to consider a scientific track.
   
   
2. Next, you’ll want to develop the levels that are within each track—These alternative tracks should balance against your management track. Since the management track has been in existence the longest, and people understand it, it’s a really solid matrix to balance your other tracks on.
   
   For example, when you look at taking an employee from a line worker to a lead worker to a supervisor to a department manager to an area manager, you have to see what’s equivalent to that in the alternative tracks in order to provide equal levels to employees.
   
   
3. After that, you have to look at your internal equity—You must ensure that there is equity between all career paths. If you put these dual-career ladders together, you need to ensure that each ladder is close to the others in what we call “internal equity.” If you don’t and employees perceive them as not as valuable, you’ve missed your mark.
   
   By internal equity, I mean that you must identify what the compensation, benefit and perk structure is—and it needs to be pretty close to the compensation, benefits and perk structure of the management track.
   
   For example, if you have a supervisor at compensation Level 12 who is promoted to a manager and moves to compensation Level 13, which not only provides a 5 percent pay increase but includes a parking space and an extra week of vacation, then someone in a professional, technical or scientific track that is promoted from a position in compensation Level 12 to compensation Level 13 should receive a similar raise, increase in vacation and parking space for the similar promotion. This is critical to be successful at creating dual-career ladders.
   
   
4. Lastly, you need to identify development paths for your dual-career ladder employees—These steps need to be spelled out very specifically so that employees interested in taking this dual-career path will know exactly what they need to do to get from point A to point B.
   
   So, for example, if you have a programmer who is doing heads-down programming and they want to become a project lead on a team, then there need to be steps identified so the employee can gain the skills, competencies and abilities needed to achieve that goal.

Dual-Career Ladder Development in Action
I used to work for a call center in which a majority of the staff were people who sat by the phones all day taking calls. In and of itself, it was a pretty dead-end job. At the time, we had a very, very high workers’ compensation ratio. In order to bring it down, I developed a program where employees performed peer reviews for ergonomics and we would certify certain individuals to walk around and give feedback to their peers who were not working in ergonomically correct positions and were at risk for injuries.

In this manner, the dual-career ladders grew on their own. The company higher ups took a look at what was going on and basically said, “OK, from this exercise, we see that we have people who can mentor other people and so we’ll give them the ability to refine these skills and from there they can go to a customer service position. Or if they want to stay on the operations side, here is the pathway they can take to go into a supervisor position.”

For example, if the employee wanted to go into customer service, then they could enter the customer service career ladder and that would take them up to Lead Customer Service Rep, supervisor, manager and potentially even director, eventually.

When you start to look at the natural progression of where people want to go in their careers, and build a program to meet the needs of the changing organization, you’re going to find ways to add value—to both your employees and your customers. 

If you’re interested in setting up a dual-career ladder program for your employees, there are some steps you can take to get started.