It's Called Career Chess

Developing and promoting career pathways in your business assists with talent acquisition, elevated employee engagement, and improved employee retention rates.  But what does a pathway look like. 

The career pathways of the early 1900’s usually reflected your sex, financial position, and family tradition but this changed in the 1970s as we moved from a largely industrial economy to a knowledge based one with flattening management levels and outsourced functions. 

So today we have an alternative to the traditional limiting, linear career ladder that was in play earlier last century and I refer to it as career chess. 

Like a game of chess, our career is made up of numerous moves that create a personal and unique career pathway and on average we make 12 moves in a 32-year work career period which is in stark contrast to careers of the early 1900s when we started working for a business intended to be our forever business and worked our way up the ladder (or not).

The goal of career chess is to achieve ‘checkmate’ the sense that you have finally found your calling and it starts with our opening moves.  There are hundreds of opening move variants and where you end up is probably not directly linked to where you started unless you are fortunate enough to have a very clear destiny mapped out making you able to win the game in just a couple of moves. 

Once we have made our ‘opening moves’ we make our ‘counter moves’ until we hopefully can call ‘checkmate’. 

It is important for employers to understand career chess when seeking new talent because it enables us to open our eyes to an applicant’s transferable skills and LQ (learning quotient) and it also makes the interview question “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” less relevant.  It also helps employers retain staff as they engage in regular conversations with their workers about where they want to go next in their careers and evaluating the possibility of nurturing a counter move and retaining top talent.   

Finally, a message to job seekers; be bold about your countermoves and understand the transferable skills you have acquired along the way and how they may benefit your current or next potential employer.