Career Paths – The Ultimate Employee Engagement Aid

The hiring atmosphere in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is as competitive as ever. At the same time, there is more work than ever, and many AEC professionals have been pushed to the limit by their firms. This is a recipe for disaster. Overloading your professionals, in a market where they can easily go and get another job is dangerous. This atmosphere makes it very hard to grow your firm sustainably unless your employees have good reasons to stay.

Salary and benefits are no longer reasons people will stay with AEC firms, as they can likely get a competitive (if not better) salary from one of your competitors. They stay if they can see a bright and exciting road ahead for them in your firm.

Enter career paths.

Imagine this. You’re part of a team that has to row a canoe. The team leader says, “We have a lot of work to do over the coming months. We need you to row around this lake every day for 10 hours.”  What would you be thinking when you heard that? I know what I would be thinking to myself, “Where are we going, or, where will we end up?”

Then to make matters worse, you get in the canoe, and there is a dense fog on the lake, so now, not only do you not know where you are going, but you can’t see two feet in front of you. You are working hard, but not sure for why or for what.

This example is an analogy of an AEC firm in today’s markets with no or poorly defined career paths. They are asking their employees to work, or row hard, but not showing them the goal that their hard work will help them achieve.

By creating clear career paths for ALL employees in your firm, you can have really productive conversations about all of the different opportunities available to them as they grow, whether they be technical, people leadership, project management, business development, etc.

The excitement and engagement levels of your employees will increase with increased clarity around the career growth opportunities available to them, and career paths will help you clearly define those.

As an added bonus, clear career paths will also help you to hire more effectively, as you can share the career paths while interviewing candidates. Think about the edge that will give you over other firms who are hiring. Again, would you want to work for a firm where you will be rowing in a fog, or where you will be striving towards clear goals?

Investing in building clear career paths will be the best investment your firm can make because it will increase engagement at every level of the organization.

Anthony Fasano is a licensed professional engineer and President of the Engineering Management Institute. EMI helps AEC firms build clear career paths and transformational people leadership and project management programs to support their employees’ progression on those paths. Anthony will be conducting a pre-summit workshop on building career paths at this year’s AEC HR Summit. You can connect with Anthony on LinkedIn here or contact EMI at 800.920.4007.