How much can clear internal paths raise retention? Up to 34 percent, according to a practical guide from Gartner. That is not a soft benefit. It is a measurable business outcome tied to a disciplined approach to growth. This guide distills the latest evidence into steps HR leaders can implement immediately.
Understanding Career Pathing
At its core, what is career pathing? It is the structured process of mapping how people grow, from the skills they have today to the roles they can credibly step into next, aligned to business demand. Gartner frames the shift as moving from rigid "ladders" to flexible "lattices", where people can progress up, across, or diagonally as work evolves. A complementary view from the McKinsey Global Institute underscores why this matters: a global analysis of labor-market data finds roughly two-thirds of skill development happens on the job, not in classrooms. The paths you create and the experiences you enable become your most powerful development lever.
The importance of career pathing is both strategic and human. Strategically, it turns your workforce into an internal supply chain for critical roles. It cuts external hiring costs and accelerates time to productivity. On the human side, it answers the employee's enduring question, what is career pathing in practice for me, with specific, credible options they can act on. Deloitte's skills-first playbook makes the case for progression based on demonstrated competencies rather than degrees or tenure. This shift expands opportunity and builds resilience as role requirements change.
Effective career pathing frameworks share several components. They start with a transparent role and skill architecture: clear levels, proficiency definitions, and the capability building required to advance. They replace single-track ladders with multiple routes: management, expert, cross-functional, and project-based. They invest in development infrastructure, from capability academies to mentorship, stretch assignments, and an internal opportunity marketplace, ideas advanced by Josh Bersin’s research on pathways and capability academies. They also run on governance and data: who owns the architecture, how managers are enabled, how decisions are audited for fairness, and which outcomes are tracked.
The benefits compound. Employees see tangible mobility options. Organizations gain an engine for skill growth where it actually occurs, real work. McKinsey research identifies stepping-stone jobs that drive outsized mobility and pay growth. If you design paths that route people through these roles, you accelerate advancement. The Gartner analysis connects path transparency and flexibility with improved retention. Deloitte's guidance shows how a skills-first approach widens the talent pool and reduces structural bottlenecks. Results vary by context. Mature role architectures and strong manager enablement amplify impact. Treat career pathing as a managed system, not a one-time HR project.
Types of Career Paths
To operationalize what is career pathing, it helps to name the major models. A traditional, linear path advances within a function, for example analyst to senior analyst to manager. This model works well in regulated or specialized domains. A dual career path offers parallel tracks, management and expert. Employees can grow influence and pay as a principal engineer or staff scientist without people leadership. That serves as a critical retention tool for top technical talent.
Non-linear paths embrace lateral moves and cross-functional experiences. These lattices, highlighted in the Gartner perspective, recognize that the shortest route to a future role often includes sideways steps that build missing capabilities. Entrepreneurial paths focus on venture-building skills, either outside the company or through internal incubators and product spinoffs. This path appeals to builders who scale new offerings from zero to one.
Many organizations also design project-driven or marketplace-driven paths where employees stitch together gigs, rotations, and secondments into an individualized portfolio. McKinsey's emphasis on stepping-stone roles is especially relevant here: you can formalize certain jobs as mobility accelerators that bridge major transitions, for example from operations to product through a program manager rotation. The point is not to force fit one track. You need to make multiple credible routes visible and supported.
Implementing a Career Pathing Strategy
If you have asked what is career pathing in execution terms, think in four moves: assess, define, implement, improve.
Assess your organization’s needs. Start by mapping demand and risk. Which roles are mission-critical over the next 12 to 24 months? Where are your biggest skills gaps by location or business unit? Which roles have high turnover or long time to fill? Use internal data, such as attrition, internal fill rate, and promotion velocity, and external signals like market demand and automation exposure. Incorporate the McKinsey notion of stepping-stone roles by analyzing your own mobility patterns: which roles historically lead to higher progression rates or salary growth, and for whom? Codify these as priority waypoints in your architecture.
Define your career pathing framework. Borrowing from Deloitte’s skills-first approach, write down the standards that make your system real and fair:
- Role and level architecture: job families, levels, scope, and decision rights.
- Skills taxonomy and proficiency rubrics: the discrete capabilities that matter, with behavioral indicators at each level.
- Path maps: multiple routes per family, managerial, expert, and cross-functional, with clarity on entry criteria.
- Development infrastructure: capability academies, verified learning paths, mentorship, coaching, rotations, and internal gigs. Bersin's work on capability academies is instructive. Weave formal learning with on-the-job practice and expert communities so skills transfer into performance.
- Opportunity marketplace: a transparent system to post and staff projects, gigs, and roles, often a platform integrated with your HRIS, ideally with AI-driven matching to surface non-obvious fits.
- Career conversation cadence: a simple ritual with quarterly check-ins, backed by tools that help employees explore options and managers co-create plans.
- Governance and equity: decision councils or calibration processes, audit logs for movement decisions, and fairness monitoring by demographic segment.
- Success measures: define targets now to avoid vanity metrics later.
Communicate and implement. Career pathing fails as a memo. It succeeds as a movement. Treat launch like a product rollout:
- Narrative and naming: explain the shift from ladders to lattices and why it benefits employees and the business. Anchor the message in the Gartner evidence for retention lift and your own data.
- Employee experience: a single Career Hub where employees can explore paths, assess skills, find mentors, and browse gigs and roles. Add plain-language explainers to questions people actually ask. What is career pathing for my job family? What are my three viable next moves? What skills am I missing?
- Manager enablement: practical toolkits, how to run a 30-minute career conversation, how to use the skills rubric, and how to nominate someone for a stepping-stone rotation. Role-play labs beat slide decks.
- Phased rollout: pilot in one function with a high-need role cluster. Set explicit hypotheses, for example can we increase internal fill rate from 40 percent to 55 percent in six months, and measure.
- Change support: nudge campaigns to bring people back to the hub, spotlight stories of lateral moves that led to promotions, and recognize leaders who staff from within.
Continuously evaluate and improve. Treat your framework like a living system:
- Run a quarterly talent flow review. Track movement rates, who is getting access to stepping-stone roles, and whether movement is equitably distributed.
- Iterate designs. If a path has low uptake, is it because it is missing a key development asset or because the destination role is over-specified? If managers are gatekeeping, what incentives or governance fix the bottleneck?
- Tie to outcomes that matter. The Gartner research links career paths to retention. Set a target, for example reduce regrettable attrition by 3 to 5 points in cohorts participating in the program, and inspect variance by team and manager.
- Keep the skills graph fresh. As work changes, your rubrics and role definitions must keep pace. Schedule biannual updates with business and technical experts.
Metrics you can implement now:
- Internal mobility rate: internal moves and promotions divided by total filled roles per quarter.
- Promotion velocity: median months between level changes by function and demographic group.
- Internal time-to-fill: average days to staff a role internally versus externally.
- Career conversation coverage: percentage of employees with at least two documented career conversations per year.
- Development participation: percent of target populations completing capability academies and taking on a stretch assignment within six months.
- Retention delta: year-over-year change in regrettable attrition for program participants versus a matched control group.
Use these metrics as a management dashboard and share them with executives the way you share sales or customer metrics. That is how you keep what is career pathing positioned as a business lever, not an HR side project.
Empowering Employees Through Career Pathing
Employees also need a playbook. Start with a self-assessment: values, strengths, energizers, and what constraints you are solving for, such as location, schedule, and compensation. Translate that into a simple skills snapshot using your company’s rubrics. This is where what is career pathing becomes personal. Name three viable next roles you could credibly reach within 6 to 18 months, and list the two or three skills that are gating you.
Identify potential paths using the lattice. Ask your manager and two cross-functional leaders which stepping-stone roles or projects best bridge your gaps. Seek a rotation, a moonlight project, or a secondment that builds those skills in the context of real work. This echoes McKinsey’s evidence that most development happens on the job.
Set SMART goals tied to experiences, not only courses. "Ship a customer-facing analytics dashboard as project technical lead by Q3," not "take two data classes." Build a 90-day action plan: one skill to practice weekly on live work, one mentor conversation every two weeks, and one project application per month through the internal marketplace. Track progress with a lightweight template and adjust quarterly. In short, if you are wondering what is career pathing you can own, it is this rhythm of targeted experiences, feedback, and iteration.
A brief note on nuance: access matters. Employees from underrepresented groups often face fewer sponsorship opportunities. A fair system sets transparent criteria for gigs and rotations, audits who is selected, and requires managers to develop multiple candidates for each stepping-stone role.
A company that adopts these norms makes career growth normal, not exceptional.
A research-backed career pathing system blends Gartner's lattice mindset, McKinsey's on-the-job development insight, Deloitte's skills-first architecture, and Bersin's capability academies into one operating model. If your teams still ask what is career pathing, point to the clarity of visible paths, the fairness of skills-based decisions, the vitality of a marketplace with real opportunities, and the results on retention and internal mobility. Start with one high-need role family, measure what matters, and expand as you prove the impact.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a career path example?
Imagine an employee asking what is career pathing for a customer operations role. A credible route to product management could look like this:
customer support specialist → senior support specialist → program coordinator, stepping-stone managing cross-team initiatives → associate product manager.
The stepping-stone role builds stakeholder management and prioritization, which are critical PM skills, through real work. This aligns to research showing that most skills grow on the job.
What are the 4 types of career pathways?
- Traditional (linear): predictable progression within one function and discipline.
- Dual: parallel tracks for management and expert growth, enabling senior influence without people leadership.
- Non-linear (lattice): lateral and diagonal moves across functions and projects to build composite capabilities.
- Entrepreneurial: roles that emphasize creating and scaling new offerings, internally or externally. Each can coexist in one architecture so people choose the route that fits their strengths and goals.
What is the career pathing framework?
If you are clarifying what is career pathing as a system, it is a bundle of standards and tools. You need a role and level architecture, a clear skills taxonomy with proficiency rubrics, multiple mapped paths per job family, development assets such as academies, mentorship, rotations, and gigs, an internal opportunity marketplace, a routine for career conversations, governance for fairness, and a metrics dashboard tracking mobility, promotion velocity, time to fill, development participation, and retention deltas.
What are the 5 stages of career planning?
- Self-assess: values, strengths, skills, constraints, and motivators.
- Explore: identify three viable target roles and understand the gaps.
- Choose: prioritize one near-term target and one stepping-stone role or project.
- Build: pursue on-the-job experiences and learning to close gaps within 90 to 180 days.
- Review: check progress quarterly. Adjust goals and paths as your skills and the business evolve. This cadence turns what is career pathing into a continuous practice rather than a one-off conversation.
How can I create my own career path?
Answer your own what is career pathing with a simple plan. Draft a one-page map with three next-move options, the top three skills you must demonstrate, one stepping-stone project to secure in the next 60 days, two mentors or sponsors to engage, and a monthly check-in to review progress with your manager. Apply to at least one internal gig per month, and track outcomes. If your company offers a marketplace or capability academies, use them to turn goals into experiences that compound.