Career Plan: A Tool to Retain and Attract Talent

By: Katherine Díaz (HR Remarkable Talent)

Defining a strategy to attract and retain talent has become a challenge for companies due to the impact of generational integration in work environments.

How about planning a sustainable strategy to attract and retain talent that also improves productivity and generates consistent results?

Have you considered providing your company’s talent with a structured career plan?

A career plan is a strategy that helps establish professional and personal goals and allows you to:

• Identify the steps, stages, and resources necessary to achieve them.
• Outline an action plan to develop the competencies and skills required to foster the business’s evolution and growth.
• Establish your employees’ short, medium, and long-term goals, aligned with the company’s organizational goals.
• Communicate what you can offer your employees in terms of career development and evolution.
• Specify which benefits you can offer your employees regarding their professional development. 

Why the career plan is a tool for talent retention?

Nowadays, employees value career development more than ever and research shows this. According to LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report, “companies with a strong learning culture have higher retention rates, more internal mobility, and a healthier management process compared to those with lower levels of engagement.”

In fact, 53% of Gen Z employees (who were born after 1996) value learning as a tool to explore possible mobilization and internal development paths, according to the same LinkedIn report.

What are the benefits of a career plan? There are many, however, I will highlight four:

1. It improves our employees’ experience: It increases motivation because we provide them with tools, accompany them, generate closeness, and help them be better people and professionals every day. It’s a scenario where everyone wins, both the organization and the employees.
2. It increases the ability to attract and retain talent: It offers growth and sustainable development over time, something that complements their salary. It’s more than promotions and job changes since development of skills, competencies, and professional abilities also takes place.
3. It increases productivity: If employees feel motivated and accompanied, we build a sense of belonging, a loyalty toward organizational values and objectives. This promotes that they feel more committed to the company.
4. It improves the company’s reputation or branding: Our talents are the main ambassadors of our services and products. When they are committed and satisfied with the company, they become our best promoters, attracting other equally enthusiastic and dedicated talent.

How to get started?

1. Review your business plan and organizational objectives.
   • For this analysis, keep in mind the main human resources indicators: turnover, main reasons for leaving, etc.
2. Identify organizational areas where you would like to start, according to your priorities.
3. Do a job analysis and define positions and their levels. (For example: trainee, junior, regular, and senior.) Specify the knowledge, skills, and competencies necessary by level to achieve organizational objectives.
4. Analyze the compensation and benefits structure and define an attractive package by category, position, and level.
5. Define responsibilities and indicators by level as well as an effective and easy-to-use measurement tool.
6. Perform an assessment of behaviors, motivators, and competencies of the people that occupy those positions and their performance results. Then, match them with the profiles you defined in the previous point to identify opportunities.
7. Structure concrete actions to develop skills necessary to achieve results and help employees achieve their objectives and growth.
8. Consider allocating salary increases tied to your business’s growth and achieved results.
9. Each year, consider a career plan review (with specific actions in your business plan and budget).
10. Define a meaningful communication strategy and incorporate the career plan to your employees’ onboarding process.
11. Present the career plan as part of your benefits and perks in the talent recruiting process. Define a structure and consider it for the next budget.

The author is president and chief executive officer of the HR Remarkable Talent human capital consulting firm; she has three decades’ worth of experience and is certified in Talent Assessments and Performance Evaluation.

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