Career Path Programs Retain Employees By Helping Them Move Up

There’s a common refrain in exit interviews — “I wanted a new challenge.”

Are employees at your company saying it when they leave? And, an even better question — are you giving them opportunities to advance and develop?

Hearing frustrations around how to get ahead in exit interviews is one reason Imgur built out a formal career path program. We spoke with Jill Kelly, director of people ops at Imgur, about how she built a program from scratch in our recent webinar, “How to Create a Career Path that Motivates Your Talent.”

[bctt tweet=”We want to to make sure our talent knows they can move ahead in their career — here.” username=”reflektive”]

The program also helped them standardize their promotion process so employees had confidence in what they needed to get to the next level, and move away from “empty promotions” — an increase in salary when the employee isn’t given increased responsibilities or tasks.

“We want to to make sure our talent knows they can move ahead in their career here at Imgur — they don’t need to leave the company to get ahead in their career,” Kelly said. “It also helps us to identify the skill sets they need to move up in the company.”

The benefits of a career path program include:

  1. Helping employees visualize upward growth
  2. Enabling more conversations about growth and development to take place with managers
  3. Setting clear expectations for career progression, including the expectations and skills needed at each level

Learn more about the ROI of career path programs and the model Imgur uses in our webinar, available free to stream online.