Create a career path
You’ve probably seen it at some point in your career — a great employee who worked hard and loved the company but left the organization because there was nowhere to advance. The only way to move up was to move out.
“It’s just essential that you have a career path, and if you don’t, you’ll allow people to get landlocked in their jobs, and they’ll get to a point where they don’t aspire for something anymore,” Cargile says.
The first step is to evaluate your organization from entry level to the top spot and identify all the steps in between.
For example, at WNB, the highest position is a senior portfolio manager. The entry-level position is typically in customer service or administration. But how does someone get from a customer service position to that senior portfolio manager? Cargile looked and said that the second rung on the ladder is the analyst position. From there, someone goes to the junior portfolio manager position, and then moves into that highest position. There may be smaller steps in between each of those, but those are the major steppingstones that people would progress from bottom to top.
With each job category, establish salary ranges so employees can also see a financial incentive to progress with the organization.
“We want to create a culture where, with every step up, there’s a compensation for that,” he says.
And typically an employee will remain in his or her current position for a year before having the opportunity to move up again.
“Part of our culture is we want people here for our careers,” Cargile says. “We’re not looking for a person who wants to be a clerical person, and then move to the next job somewhere else for more money.”
Having a clearly defined career path can also help both your recruiting and retention efforts. Potential employees see opportunity for advancement, and current employees learn from the ground up, so it creates less animosity than if you hired someone in from the outside, like Cargile previously did.
“We just didn’t do it that way before,” he says. “We hired for the job instead of the career, but now when we’re hiring, we’re hiring the entry-level because someone has moved up, and we have an opening at the entry level.”
Despite your best intentions of creating a vertical career path, also recognize that some people may not choose to climb your ladder and would be happier staying at any given level. Either way, the ladder will meet everyone’s needs, and it will also better meet your clients’ needs.
“Some people are just happy in administration,” Cargile says. “They like solving the day-to-day problems and working every day with clients. Then they’ll have some type of management role in that part of the business. Then we have some who aspire to be portfolio managers, and the background in administration service just gives them so much more advantage than just starting at the portfolio management level — they really learn how things work.”