Technology has generated new jobs in every industry. Every company is now a tech company, as they say. Shifting social priorities have created new roles too. Emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion and on environmental, social, and governance matters have introduced corporate fixtures that weren’t common years ago, like chief diversity officers and people analysts. Remote work has opened new jobs and industries to people all over the world.

“It’s really hard to answer the classic question, ‘Where do you want to be in five years?” said Megan Wheeler, director of facilitation at leadership training platform LifeLabs Learning. “Things are moving so rapidly that it’s hard to have a window into the future about what kind of linear growth people want.”

When it’s unclear what a career will look like in a few years, skills may be a more apt gauge of career growth. Wheeler recommends thinking of the five-year question in a different way: “What are the skills that I have? What are the skills that I’d like to develop or that I need to develop in order to move into other opportunities?”

During From Day One’s September virtual conference on giving workers direction on skills and career development, Wheeler was joined by four other leaders in employee development for a discussion I moderated, titled “How Career Growth Can Be a Part of Employee Experience from the Beginning.” The group discussed how skill-building can become part of company operations and how to use coaching to reinforce new skills.

Distilling Jobs Into Skills

Employees want to learn. According to the American Psychological Association’s 2023 Work in America survey, 91% of workers say it’s important to have a job that gives them consistent opportunities to learn. Yet the relationship between learning new skills and internal mobility isn’t always straightforward.

For any job, there is a set of competencies and skills that describe the work. The IT infrastructure firm Kyndryl undertook the task of breaking down all of its different roles into skills. The company identified 19 job families, like HR and technical specialists, for instance, and within those are jobs. Each job was then distilled into 12 to 15 skills, which vary by seniority.

These breakdowns are available to anyone in the company, so workers who want to climb the ladder vertically, or scale the lattice horizontally, can see the skills they need to make the move. “It took a lot of work to build that architecture, but it does help us look at how we help people find roles,” said the company’s VP of learning and effectiveness, Mark Cousino. “The reason we made that investment is that we’re a professional services company. We match customer work with the skills of our people. By building that catalog, we also built up our entire job architecture.”

Learning the Ropes, Informally

Even without a detailed map of skills, folks can still roam about the organization asking their colleagues what it takes to do their job, it just requires a culture that makes it fine to do so. “One of the greatest things about our culture is that for a very large organization, it can feel really small, because you can ask anyone, ‘Hey, can I hear about your job? Can I hear about a job on your team? Tell me about your career.’ I’ve never been told no,” said Melissa Versino, the VP of leadership development at commercial insurance provider Zurich North America.

Without seeing the path, the ambitious are left to fumble around, hoping to be promoted or recognized for their work. “The point is people don’t even know what they need. They don’t find out until their review, they don’t find out unless they didn’t get the promotion or get the job,” said Kristy McCann, and CEO of talent development platform SkillCycle.

McCann noted that feedback given in standard performance reviews can be vague – improve your communication skills, for example – and that workers don’t necessarily know where to go to make those improvements or what “improve” means. Further, they’re often not sure how it will benefit them. “If you’re not driving the what’s-in-it-for-me factor and it’s not connecting to their goals and what they want to do in life, then it doesn’t matter what you do, it’s always going to fall flat.”

So what about overpromising on career growth? Younger talent, unaware of the work it takes to advance, often expect to be promoted in the early stages of a new job, and some employers are inflating job titles to meet those expectations. 

Instead, Wheeler recommended being upfront about what the company considers growth. “Speak to it at the interview process and in onboarding, being clear about what it is and what it isn’t,” she said. When what the employee wants and what the company needs are not the same, managers can develop individual development plans that match as much as possible, finding where new skills the employee wants can be “mapped onto” business goals.

From Competencies to Coaching

For Versino, competencies are incomplete without coaching on how to enact new skills. “The value of training takes them so far,” she said. “Coaching actually gets them across the finish line. [It reinforces] how to make these strong behavioral changes and how to actually apply this knowledge.”

Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing arm, instituted a peer-to-peer coaching program, a valuable means of ensuring career growth at scale. “We’re having senior leaders do the teaching, and so leaders as teachers is one of the programs that we built,” said Heather DeJong, who leads employee experience and leader development for AWS.

But with a company so large, quality control can be tough. The training for the trainers ensures that leaders understand the core objectives and the content. “We do a lot of videos to train the trainer on templates. A lot of these leaders want to make it a little bit of their own and bring their own context and learning to that,” she said. Originality can be good for engagement, but can come at the risk of quality. DeJong uses post-training surveys, including a net promoter score, to suss out whether the learners got what they expected and needed.

In Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things, organizational psychologist Adam Grant writes about the importance of showing people how to get from A to B. “What we overlook is that when people can’t see a path, they stop dreaming of the destination. To ignite their will, we need to show them the way.” In other words, when workers know what skills they need to grow the careers they want, they’re more likely to commit to learning. 

“Competencies are very core because it helps drive empowerment,” said McCann. “Because it’s not just what you want them to do, but it’s how you empower them to be able to see where they’re at and where they need to go.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz at Work, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.