Many workers today won’t climb to the top; instead, they’ll move through a career lattice. Why? The rapid change of employee skills, the move to alternative forms of employment, and the use of new methods of professional communication all require a different hierarchical structure and a revised process of advancement. This is why the career lattice is becoming more essential. But the fundamental demand for L&D will remain the same.  

What Is a Career Lattice?

A career lattice is a non-linear career pathway. Career lattices are easily understood when compared with career ladders. A career ladder is when an employee moves straight up through levels of their organization’s hierarchy. In contrast, a career lattice is based on the idea that, in the modern workplace, an employee might move horizontally at numerous points in their career. In fact, they might spend much of their time in several roles along the same hierarchical level, and may even move to lower levels. 

It’s interesting to note that the first mention of a career lattice initiative came from the W.L. Gore & Associates company–the same company that introduced Gore-Tex.   

Ladder vs. Lattice

Career ladders made sense when most businesses produced physical goods and required different levels of management to get those products to market. In terms of hierarchy, many companies resembled a pyramid, with only a few people at the top. Those at the bottom levels could gain experience, and, if they were talented, get promoted to production managers and other higher levels.

But major changes in the world of work have disrupted this paradigm. 

The Dominance of External Recruitment

Companies have stopped recruiting mainly from their pool of existing employees, going from a 90% internal mobility rate in the mid-70s to about 25% today. The initial trend towards hiring from outside the company resulted from the restructuring of the 1980s. But it has continued, despite the clear disadvantages that come with it:

• The tendency to lure candidates who are happy in their current jobs instead of those looking to move, resulting in higher labor prices and the “poaching” of talent
• A longer recruiting process due to complex testing involving, for example, handwriting style or facial expressions
• Larger overall hiring costs, with companies taking an average of half a year to recoup their recruiting expenses for new employees 
• Lower rates of employee engagement and retention (compared to internal recruiting, which can boost employee retention by 70%)

The consequences of these trends is that, to get promoted and receive a higher salary, most employees can no longer move up the ladder in their current place of work. 

Changes in Organizational Structure

Similarly, large companies have moved towards flatter hierarchies. This is particularly true in the technology industry, where career growth is closely related to technical skill instead of managerial ability. 

Google’s famous Project Oxygen showed that the role of managers should be more about listening and supporting than about telling people what to do. But when even this function does not improve productivity, managers are seen as an unnecessary expense. The advantages of a company where there is close communication between production-level workers and senior managers include:

• Faster decision-making
• Clear information exchange
• Greater independence
• Lower costs

Of course, there are downsides to a flat hierarchy. In terms of professional development, there is less of a clear path for gradually moving up, gaining experience, and learning the skills needed for advancement. Instead, professional growth requires more initiative. It’s up to the employee to seek the development opportunities that will make them more valuable at their current organizational level because the chance for promotion is lower.  

A Skills-Based Economy

The economy became more skills-based, and people just kept on learning. In modern economies, there has been a steady move towards knowledge work. For this to happen, people need higher levels of education. And due to the rapid change in workplace skills, employees must constantly upgrade their abilities. 

All of this means that workers now have a large range of skills that can be applied to numerous positions, all within the same organization. But the lack of upward movement results in them applying these skills without getting “promoted” in the traditional sense, for example, by becoming a C-level manager. Instead, they move to different roles based on their skills without necessarily getting an official title that suggests seniority.  

Low Employee Engagement Rates

Despite all of the publicity that this topic has generated among HR professionals, and all kinds of efforts to improve the situation, employee engagement is actually at a 10-year low. After hitting an all-time high around 2020, engagement rates fell dramatically during the pandemic and have not recovered. Gallup explains that poorly engaged workers, particularly those under age 35, feel that their companies and managers don’t care about them, encourage them to grow professionally, or clarify their roles. 

However, when it comes to career development, poor engagement rates can mean additional opportunities for workers who are more motivated. One of the consequences of poor engagement is that the employee does not look for a way up, and instead “treads water” in their current job. In other words, they won’t be interested in the career lattice concept, which provides more room for ambitious employees to attend upskilling and other HR initiatives. 

How Career Lattice Development Opportunities Differ

The transition to career lattices affects more than just routes to advancement. Horizontal moves within organizations are leading to diverse developments when it comes to locations, communications, and new skills.

Locations

Visually, a career lattice looks exactly like that – a grid structure where the career path goes in several directions upwards, sideways, and even down. In application, this means that an employee will work in multiple physical locations during their career, according to where they are needed. 

Similarly, in a career lattice setting, workers look for employee development programs that go beyond course-based material so that they have an edge. In view of this, HR should increase the number of on-the-job learning opportunities to give ambitious workers the experience and social connections that will be useful as they move around the lattice. A classic example is job rotation, where employees try out different roles on a temporary basis. But there are many other options, such as:

• Cross-functional teams
• Informal roles
• Job shadowing
• Cross-training
• Workshops

The online world is also changing. The work-from-home arrangements that became common during the pandemic are only one dimension of this setup. WFH got us accustomed to virtual offices. But, with career lattices, the digital workplace also means switching between time zones and online meetings across different geographical locations. This is because not every position on the grid is available in the employee’s regular physical location. 

Such a new definition of the workplace implies a new set of skills as well. Expect time management, organizational abilities, and even cultural sensitivity training to move up the L&D priorities list. 

Communications

If traditional organizational structures are being transformed, then communication within organizations is changing as well. Information flows are adapting as employees moving between roles become part of teams created for specific projects and around certain functions. Flatter hierarchies require breaking down the social barriers that once existed between employees at different levels. Similarly, HR departments are exploring employee growth strategies as workers need to fit in according to whatever skills their teams need. These moves lead to an even greater emphasis on leadership and followership skills. 

Skill Development 

A major consequence of career lattices is the need to constantly focus on skill development and build employee experiences. During the days of career ladders, a worker’s career development path was more or less set. But with a lattice system, skills depend on where the employee wants to go, and where the organization needs to plug the latest skill gap. In this environment, organizations must have a way of rapidly developing the exact skill that an employee requires for their next step up or across the company. 

To this end, Capability Academies enable agile L&D programming that involves multiple learning experiences and a marketplace of experts for providing any number and type of courses. In addition, many companies implement continuous learning programs (CLPs) when constant upskilling is required. Although they are resource-intensive, CLPs are a more efficient choice for businesses where:

• There is significant employee turnover
• The company faces risks from being uncompetitive due to a lack of skills
• New products are being introduced and/or rapid expansion is taking place 

Implementing a Career Lattice Program

To get this process going, HR needs to do many of the things that it usually does to organize and run a learning and development initiative – but with one important exception. 

As mentioned, a number of factors have made it more difficult to build a career around the ladder concept, leaving workers to find their own way to success. So, in organizations that switch to a lattice development structure, independence on the part of the worker becomes essential. The responsibility for finding opportunities is only partially the role of HR. 

Stakeholder Awareness

The first step in creating a career lattice initiative is to let all of those concerned know about it. Beyond interested employees, this means communicating with: 

• Managers who will be involved in training and evaluating employee progress 
• Employees who will work alongside those involved in the program
• Technical and HR staff who will be responsible for promoting the initiative through company communications channels

Another important issue to consider is mindset. Many people associate professional success with their title. Even in the era of flatter hierarchies, the ultimate goal of many workers is to reach the C-level. It’s the job of HR to work with senior management to change this perception by concentrating more on skills than on position in the hierarchy when it comes to salary and benefits. You might even consider the notion of reducing or eliminating the use of job titles in general. 

But the most important change will be towards participants. The career lattice means a new sort of career management that depends on the goals and energy of the employee. Workers will need to be a lot more active when it comes to choosing their next upskilling move and making sure they attend the courses they sign up for. 

This step in itself can help with HR targets. With the right communication, a new career lattice program might generate interest among unengaged workers if they see that there is a different way of building their career.  

Skills Gap Analysis and Recommendations

Most learning and development programs involve a compromise. On the one hand, the organization needs people with certain skills. The type of skills required depend on many things, such as strategic plans, gaps due to turnover, and weaknesses in certain areas. 

On the other hand, you’ve got employees. They are the ones putting in the effort to gain greater skills. But they also want their investment to pay off in terms of opportunities. 

The tool for achieving both goals is the skills gap analysis. First, it requires talking to managers at various levels of the company to determine where they see that skills are totally missing or could stand improvement. Then, it looks at the existing career development plans of individual employees to see where there is some crossover. 

Once you know what your company needs, then you can explain the associated opportunities to workers. But this will be different from the straightforward course of a career ladder, which moves only in one direction. In contrast, a career lattice provides many more options, which can also be confusing. 

At this point, the work you did regarding stakeholder awareness will be an advantage. Hopefully, it resulted in connections with the different departments and managers who will tell you what kinds of programs they can support, and when. This information will allow you and the employee to figure out a training schedule that covers the skills that both the employee and the organization are interested in. 

It’s important to note that this activity will be made much simpler if you have access to a talent development platform. It should be able to clearly map out L&D courses according to the kind of skills that you have identified during the skills gap analysis. 

Priorities

In addition to the schedules that you create in cooperation with managers, you and the employee can decide on the first move through testing. A vital aspect of any L&D program is personalization, where an employee takes courses based on their specific weaknesses. 

It is usually easy to assess hard skills through testing. But soft skills are tougher to gauge because there are a very wide range of them, and determining an employee’s abilities in a particular skill is usually done subjectively.

To solve this problem, you can use a number of evaluation methods for soft skills, such as: 

• Interviews and simulations 
• Investigating actual instances of skill use 
• Talking with the employee’s managers
• Standardized personality tests

A Real-Life Lattice

Many companies have adopted the career lattice concept. One well-known early adopter is Spotify, which began to look for alternative employee development routes in 2016. It offers a great example of how to define a career lattice initiative and the need for a variety of supporting programs. 

After extensive research that included employee feedback, Spotify created the Steps Framework, which it describes as “a journey — sometimes sideways, sometimes forwards, and always flexible.” It involves job rotation, cross-functional teams, and work across specialties. Spotify has its own terminology for these programs, such as “gigs” and “swaps”. The actual training moves that an employee picks depend on what they and their manager decide. 

Additionally, Spotify backs up its career lattice program with a number of other initiatives, including mentors who help workers choose a certain path, dedicated software programs for skills gap analyses, as well as internal job boards and a career week to publicize opportunities. 

Growthspace Supports Any Route You Take

Growthspace is the right tool for the times. As a flexible, scalable platform for customized talent development, Growthspace allows HR teams to easily and consistently plan, manage, and assess a variety of L&D programs. Handling the complex requirements of a dynamic lattice-based workplace is tough enough; but with its precision skill development program, Growthspace is your pathway to making L&D management effective and easy.