Supporting employee career growth can play a vital role in your talent attraction and retention efforts. Offering career ladders ensures your people know they have a path for growth in your organization.
Which is important, because a quarter of employees report plans to quit their jobs in the next six months due to a lack of growth opportunities.
Promoting internally can save you money on the expensive hiring process, ensure you retain your star players, and help you attract better-quality hires who want to grow with your organization.
The higher up in an organization you go, the more likely a promotion is to be internal. 21.5% of C-Suite and other top positions are internal hires, compared to just 8.9% lower down the ladder.
However, there are benefits to promoting employees who start at the bottom of your career ladders, too. For instance, they have more internal knowledge on how things work. Which means they can use this to find efficiencies, boost productivity, and connect more easily with colleagues at every level.
Here’s how to get the most out of career ladders in your organization:
Connect those on similar paths
There are inevitably times, when we’re working toward a goal, where we feel disheartened. Or when we need support from someone who’s been there to solve a problem. ERGs are an effective tool to connect those who are on similar paths.
Workrowd can help you create and manage employee groups that drive real impact. It’s a one-stop shop for employees to find the latest information on what’s happening in the organization, alongside ways for them to network and share knowledge. Get in touch today to book your free demo.
Use internal and external trainers
To climb your career ladders, employees need to learn new technical and soft skills. While you’re likely to have lots of great knowledge internally, external coaches, mentors, and teachers are also useful resources that shouldn’t be underestimated.
Not only can they act as objective sounding boards, but their external knowledge and experience can prevent groupthink by ensuring that you regularly get new insights and perspectives.
There’s always a new way of doing things. Sometimes that new way of doing things can give your business a new lease on life. And in turn, help you become more competitive as more employees use their knowledge to ascend your career ladders.
Set quotas and embrace DEI
Despite the recent pushback, studies have shown that quotas and DEI initiatives are effective at weeding out incompetent employees. They ultimately help businesses become more profitable.
The London School of Economics found that adding more women increased the competency of male employees by 3%.
Organizations with greater gender diversity are 25% more likely to outperform competitors. And those with greater ethnic diversity are 36% more likely to outperform. Diverse teams make better designs 87% of the time.
In addition, diversity makes teams 35% more productive, increases cash flow per employee by 2.5x, and means businesses get 26% more job applicants.
Diversity is still something that matters to Gen Z, too. Businesses that stop prioritizing it may become less attractive employers to the first generation of digital natives. In doing so, they risk being left behind by the future of not just the workforce, but the world.
Offer mentoring
Mentoring is an effective tool for knowledge-sharing. Those who’ve already climbed their career ladders can share their knowledge with people further down. Which can be particularly useful for supporting underrepresented talent in the workplace.
Team members from underrepresented backgrounds face unique challenges that can be difficult to navigate without adequate support. A mentor can provide this support, making the employee feel more like they do belong in the workplace and can continue to climb one or more career ladders within your organization.
Send surveys to check in
The only way you’ll know if the support you offer your employees is effective is if you send surveys to check in and ask what they think of their current situation and where they’d like to go.
Workrowd can help you send those surveys.
And better yet—you can set them to go out automatically at particular milestones.
That way, the process becomes more seamless for you and employees. Wouldn’t you rather focus on supporting employees and helping them up your career ladders, rather than sending surveys?
Consider alternative paths
Not everyone wants to be—or is suited to being—a manager. Is that a reason to lose your top employees?
Being a manager requires a unique balance of technical and people skills. The truth is, a lot of people don’t have this combo (even those in management). But there never used to be non-managerial career ladders for those who wanted to grow their skills or income.
However, the world of work is changing. Many millennials and Gen Z-ers don’t want to follow traditional paths. But they also don’t see why they can’t continue to grow.
Consider having career ladders for those who want to focus on their technical knowledge without losing time to people management.
For example, you could create a principal engineer role for software developers who want to focus on knowledge over people management. They can become the go-to person on a particular area or topic. It can help streamline processes and retain internal knowledge.
Conclusion
Climbing career ladders is seen as a rite of passage for many people. However, in 2025, it isn’t for everyone. Make sure you offer a variety of options to help everyone thrive, no matter their goals.
Supporting employees to climb your career ladders, instead of them having to jump from one company to the next as is often the case, helps you retain internal knowledge and top talent.
Connect colleagues
If you’d like to empower your employees who are climbing career ladders, why not connect them via an employee group? Get in touch today to find out more about how Workrowd could help you do just that.
