It’s time for employers to embrace the sideways career

By Kate Neilson

If career progression is no longer headed in a straight line, neither should our learning and development. In order to grow robust and enthusiastic talent, we need to weave learning in at a cultural level and normalise the sideways career.

If you asked HR and leaders to name their top three concerns of the past year, they’d probably say something like: we’re worried about our best employees quitting; we don’t know how to make our hybrid experiences as engaging as in-person interactions; and we’re worried we don’t have the right skills in the business to excel in the future.

These are all valid concerns, but people often skip over a crucial factor that has the potential to remedy all three issues: embedding learning and development (L&D) into a company’s culture.

The groundswell of panic about the skills squeeze has led to greater investments in learning and development (L&D) programs. That’s great, especially considering Deloitte and DeakinCo’s finding that every $1 invested in L&D per employee delivers a $4.70 return in revenue.

But a company’s L&D approach shouldn’t start and end with siloed webinars or one-off courses. It needs to encompass the everyday aspects of people’s work.

“It’s about asking, ‘How do we create a culture of everyday, rather than ad-hoc, development?’ And being specific about the opportunities for learning,” says Sarah Ellis, author and co-founder of development company Amazing If. “For example, how do we create everyday development on feedback, on learning from mistakes, on repeating our successes?

“If you say to someone, ‘Have you spent any time learning this month?’ they will often say ‘no’ because traditional ladder-like approach of learning equals going on a training course. Instead, we need a new mindset and a much broader definition of what learning looks and feels like,” says Ellis, who has previously held leadership roles with Barclays and Sainsbury’s.

Embracing a squiggly career

While you might still pepper one-day workshops into your learning approach, if you want to use development as an opportunity to grow and retain your people, and safeguard your business, you need to think bigger.

Not only does this create a more compelling and stimulating environment for people to work in, it also helps business leaders to develop cross-functional employees who can task-hop with ease, adding value to different parts of the business.

A ladder isn’t a helpful frame of reference for our careers anymore; it doesn’t reflect our experiences or our aspirations. Instead, organisations need to embrace what Ellis and her Amazing If co-founder Helen Tupper call ‘squiggly careers’.

“A squiggly career is one where you never stop learning. Your squiggle is unique to you. We develop in different ways and directions.”

Get experimental with sideways careers

If employees want to embrace a sideways career (i.e. they want to become expert at something new without having to step into management), they shouldn’t have to look externally.

Businesses need to think about how they can create fresh career opportunities within the business (internal squiggles) to help scratch employees’ three-year itch.

“The challenge for organisations is that [many people] think that to do something to develop and progress, they have to leave the organisation. That isn’t true in the majority of cases.”

People often want to broaden their influence, work in a new department or diversify their skillset. These are all things they can do in their existing organisation.

“Experiments are a great way for organisations to quickly start supporting employees to squiggle and stay.

“We encourage businesses to set up ‘career safaris’ where you give people a ‘holiday’ to work in a different department for a couple of weeks. It’s not about a permanent move. It’s about giving permission and actively encouraging employees to be curious about where their careers could take them within the organisation.”

For example, you might move your marketer into corporate responsibility – which is what happened to Ellis – even though they’ve never worked in that space before.

“Moving between functions stretched my strengths and supported me to develop new skills. I worked for a director who could see that I could transfer my talents from one part of the organisation to another, and actively supported me to upskill.

“We need to think about what the organisation needs to gain and what employees have got to give. When you can bring the give and gain together, that’s where you land on a win-win solution.”

Coaching conversations

A huge part of embracing a learning culture is helping leaders get better at career development conversations, says Ellis.

“The frequency and quality of career conversations is an important unlocker of agile talent flow across your organisation,” she says.

Career conversations don’t have to take up hours, she adds. They might be 15 minutes every other week exploring something specific, like how to stretch someone’s strengths or mapping out the next move someone wants to make in their career – be that upwards or sideways.

Ellis says it’s important that HR, leaders and managers are giving people permission to explore opportunities.

“People don’t know what they don’t know. There is often fear associated with talking to someone senior about different career options, as employees worry that this will impact their opportunities or progression in the short term.

“Managers can also get territorial about their talent, but they should be asking: ‘What other areas of our business are you interested in exploring? And what are the strengths that you would like to use more frequently? And how can we find opportunities or projects for you to get involved in that?’

You’re nicely nudging your team to broaden their horizons.”

Not only do leaders need to encourage taking sideways steps, they also need to openly discuss the importance of weaving learning into people’s weeks.

“My questions are: ‘How could you start your week with some learning?’ and, even better, ‘What would ten minutes spent learning everyday look like for you?’”

Building a learning culture

If you want to shake up the way you approach learning in your organisation, you first need to collect and publicise people’s skills. This needn’t be a laborious task, says Ellis.

“Sometimes you can over-design these things. It’s much better to just get started. We often default to complicated technology as the answer, but many organisations can’t afford that technology. I have seen this work well in an Excel spreadsheet.”

You just need a centralised place where people can record their talents.

“If that was me, I’d be writing: ‘I love starting stuff from scratch. I love the opportunity to develop new ideas. I’m really good at building long-term strategic relationships.'”

Alternatively, she says, “You could also do this with a series of videos where people introduce themselves, outline what they do and then share their three main talents.’

When you’re starting a new project in the future and you need someone to ideate, someone to polish and someone to get external stakeholders excited about the idea, you can refer to this database and build a solid team to execute.

“As the L&D or HR function, your job isn’t to solve this for everyone. Your job is to create and champion career experiments, but this has to have shared ownership. HR needs to involve, not solve.”

More information

This article was originally published in October 2022 on HRMOnline, the member publication of the Australian HR Institute. You can view the original article at https://www.hrmonline.com.au.