I recently had the pleasure of speaking at REBA’s Future Forum, mulling over the challenges that 2025 has thrown at HR and offering thoughts and solutions, including Innecto’s exciting new HR tech platform Pathfinder, which we believe could revolutionise career pathways.
It is certainly true that 2025 has been far from easy. Low employer confidence, subdued hiring intentions and rising employment costs are combining to create a tough business environment, against a backdrop of geopolitical tension and economic uncertainty.
As a consequence, many organisations are taking steps to decrease spend on compensation to manage costs.
Looking beyond Pay
While pay increases may create a small ripple of appreciation, they are usually an expensive short-term fix to a problem that doesn’t go away. Increasingly, employees are willing to look at the bigger picture with companies who can show personal growth and career progression: according to CIPD, 84% of workers believe that learning adds purpose to their work.
This becomes even more pronounced among the younger generation: according to a Deloitte survey, almost half of Gen Z and millennials have left jobs they felt lacked purpose, often shifting roles or industries to find better alignment with their beliefs, greater flexibility and most powerful of all, a visible career pathway.
The business case for internal mobility
Replacing workers is not cheap, in fact it is 2.5 times more expensive to hire a new employee than to reskill one. Where internal mobility is a priority focus, employees are 60% more likely to stay for longer (Linkedin).
Many companies know the benefits of internal progression but lack the systems or frameworks to achieve it. The same Linkedin research found that only a third of organisations had internal mobility programmes, and only 20% of employees were confident an internal move was possible. In all, 63% of staff turnover in 2024 was deemed ‘preventable’, because of companies failing to leverage the potential of their existing skills and capabilities.
Facing up to the career path challenge: Job Architecture 2.0
One of the biggest challenges organisations face is creating clarity for employees about career opportunities. Even when job levelling is in place, many employees don’t understand the difference between levels, or which roles exist outside their own function. Remote working often exacerbates this lack of visibility, increasing worker isolation and reducing motivation.
Managers, for their part, are often too busy or lack the training to enhance that ‘career’ understanding and typically focus most on junior level roles or top talent, leaving a large cross-section of mid-level, mid-career professionals overlooked and untapped.
Redesigning work to be task-based, rather than job-based is one of the mindset shifts we are now seeing. That is also coinciding with an AI evolution that’s enrichening the quality of data available to employers looking to personalise the employee journey. Companies adopting a skills-based way of working include:
Unilever – when Unilever redesigned their job architecture five years ago, they moved from rigid job descriptions to more flexible 'skills clusters', allowing them to quickly resource or re-resource projects across functional areas and geographic spreads. For the business, the approach unlocked gains in productivity, and for employees it was transformative in helping them grow and learn new things.
Standard Chartered Bank - having implemented an AI tool that matches employees to project-specific roles, workers now have 'skills passports' allowing them to gain skills and unlock more opportunities and career options.
Traditionally, the building blocks of a robust job architecture have included defined career levels or grades, meaningful job families, role descriptors and an understanding of relevant skills and competencies. That view is starting to evolve - in the same way that Waze has replaced an atlas in finding the best route, AI and algorithms now allow us to identify and manage careers more dynamically by considering skills and capabilities rather than just hierarchical relationships
Pathfinder: The career Satnav that makes progress visible
Working with our clients, we have developed Pathfinder, a simple solution that brings career pathways to life. Pathfinder is like a career Satnav, helping employees to visualise potential career pathways that exist within their organisation. The benefits of Pathfinder are multiple:
- Illustrating potential career paths – the tool allows employees to explore lateral and vertical career options, view skill requirements, and understand how roles connect across departments
- Setting target roles – starting from an employee's current role or aspirational role, AI-powered tech lays out the ‘perfect’ career path
- Skill gap analysis – where new skills are needed to progress, these are highlighted and itemised
- Real-time HR insights – HR can identify where skills do and don't exist, track workers’ aspirations and progress, and adapt to strategic priorities
- Empowering managers - managers can use Pathfinder to have better conversations around careers and encourage employees to explore their interests and goals
Enduring Return on Investment
When employees can visualise internal career growth and take greater ownership of their own journey, the payback is multi-layered: improved retention rates mean lower turnover-related costs; more internal movement means roles are filled faster; higher employee engagement means better cultural buy-in and an overall boost in productivity.
Let’s stop believing that pay is the only answer to talent retention. Take stock of the people you already have and change the way you engage with them around the notion of ‘career’. If you present them with a visible, tangible career pathway, not only are you more likely to hold onto them, but you’ll also benefit your organisation in the long term.
