Career pathway maps
Role families, contribution levels and specialist, management or lateral routes supported by the organisation’s work.
04Talent Development
Career Planning and Career Paths Framework
Make specialist, management and lateral career options visible, with practical development steps and realistic requirements.
Visible routes beyond promotion
Clear transition requirements
Development with a practical next step
CPFCareer Planning and Career Paths Framework
Start with your situation
When this framework helps.
- Specialists believe they must become managers to progress.
- Career conversations produce aspirations but few concrete development opportunities.
- Employees cannot see how their skills transfer to other roles.
The decisions it supports
- Which credible routes exist within and between role families?
- What contribution and evidence would a transition require?
- Which experience could the employee build next?
The framework at a glance
Career Planning and Career Paths Framework
Make career options visible and turn aspirations into practical development steps.
Explore the complete model
The approach
A credible career conversation needs a usable map
Help people understand where their capabilities could take them and what they can do next. HR Delivery connects role families, contribution expectations and realistic development opportunities so that career conversations lead to informed choices and useful experience.
The Career Planning and Career Paths Framework, or CPF, combines organisational career architecture with individual planning. It draws on HR Delivery’s related CareerMap 100 catalogue and competency content, with a distinct process for designing pathways, supporting mobility and reviewing development.
Job titles alone rarely explain career options. Managers may encourage ambition while lacking a practical route to offer. Specialists can feel that progression means leaving their professional practice to become managers.
CPF maps related professional roles into career families and describes the contribution expected at different levels. Employees and managers can compare specialist, management and lateral routes, then choose experience that prepares for a realistic next step. Each route explains the available opportunities, requirements and selection process.
A career plan records an aspiration and a route to explore. It does not reserve a vacancy, guarantee a promotion or promise a particular salary. Progress can include deeper expertise, broader experience and more satisfying work within the current role.
What you can take forward
Useful work. Clear next steps.
Transition profiles
The capabilities, evidence and support needed to explore a move between roles or levels.
Career and Development Record
An individual’s direction, existing strengths, agreed experiences and review points, distinct from appointment decisions.
CPF · In practice
Four elements make pathways understandable
Career families
Group work by meaningful professional practice and transferable capability. Explain what each family contributes, the roles it contains and its connections to other parts of the organisation.
HR Delivery’s CareerMap 100 provides an adjacent reference catalogue of 100 career families across ten domains. It can help structure the discussion, but an organisation’s family map must reflect its own work. A catalogue entry is a starting point for design, not proof that a corresponding role or vacancy exists.
Contribution levels
Describe how responsibility, independence, complexity and impact change within a family. Make the differences observable through work examples rather than relying on seniority labels alone.
Technical maturity and organisational job level are related through the demands of a role, but they are not interchangeable. CareerMap’s five-level technical assessment architecture runs from Foundation to Mastery. Any connection to grades, titles or reward structures must be designed and reviewed separately.
Career pathways
Show several routes that fit the organisation: specialist progression, people-leadership progression, lateral mobility, and project or portfolio experience. Include opportunities to deepen capability within a current role.
Where dual specialist and leadership tracks are appropriate, describe the value and expectations of each. Do not imply automatic pay equivalence or identical opportunities at every level. A move between tracks should identify the additional capability required, including people-management responsibilities where relevant.
Transition requirements
Explain what a move would require: relevant capability, evidence, experience and any essential professional credentials. Distinguish prerequisites from development that can occur after a move with planned support.
Publish how opportunities are accessed and decisions made. For each transition, show the target work, essential entry requirements, relevant existing evidence, gaps to close and support available. Record constraints that depend on the organisation and distinguish a confirmed opportunity from an illustrative route. This allows employees to judge whether the route fits their interests and managers to offer a realistic next experience. Avoid adding unnecessary credentials or experience requirements simply because previous incumbents had them.
CPF · In practice
Six stages connect the map to individual action
Map the landscape
For the organisation, establish the families, levels and routes that are relevant to its strategy and workforce needs. For the individual, identify the current role, transferable experience and the options available to explore.
The shared starting point distinguishes established opportunities from future routes requiring further organisational design.
Explore aspirations
Discuss the work the individual wants to do, strengths they want to use and capabilities they want to develop. Ask about preferred direction and practical availability without assuming that everyone wants management responsibility or rapid upward movement.
People choose what personal information to share. Career conversations should avoid demanding sensitive explanations for a preference, working pattern or decision to remain in a role.
Compare requirements
Compare the target role or experience with current, job-relevant evidence. Identify transferable strengths, genuine gaps and areas where evidence is insufficient. Use relevant competency profiles and proportionate assessment rather than reputation alone.
Distinguish readiness to enter a role from complete mastery of it. Make support needs visible and consider credible alternative routes when the preferred option is unavailable.
Plan development
Agree a focused development plan with an outcome, practical activities, support, evidence and review points. Combine learning with opportunities to apply it through projects, supervised practice, mentoring, shadowing or temporary assignments.
OPM’s career-development guidance treats individual development planning as an ongoing partnership, using specific learning objectives and continuing feedback. OPM career development guidance
Build experience
Put the agreed activity into practice. Confirm the assignment’s purpose, responsibilities, supervision, workload and feedback arrangements before it begins. A stretch opportunity should develop capability without placing someone into unsupported work beyond their authority.
Capture work products, decisions and learning. The activity should provide relevant evidence, not merely another completed course or an impressive assignment title.
Review and choose
Review progress, aspirations and changing organisational needs. Decide whether to continue the plan, adjust the target, pursue an available opportunity or consolidate capability in the current role.
Any appointment follows the organisation’s approved process. If no suitable opening exists, the conversation should still produce a useful next step rather than an indefinite promise.
CPF · In practice
How the consulting work is delivered
An engagement diagnoses role architecture, workforce priorities and employees’ experience of career conversations. We examine unclear levels, gaps in specialist progression, mobility barriers and available development assignments.
Design workshops then test family groupings, pathway options and transition requirements with business leaders, professional specialists, managers and employees. A pilot in selected families checks whether people can understand the routes and whether managers can support the proposed experiences.
Implementation connects competency profiles, learning and internal vacancy processes. Manager guidance covers conversations, feedback, release arrangements and realistic expectations. Governance defines ownership and how the map stays current.
From insight to action
Practical outputs for organisations and employees
Agreed deliverables can include:
- A career-family and contribution-level architecture
- Pathway maps showing specialist, leadership and lateral options
- Transition profiles with requirements, evidence and support needs
- An individual career and development record
- A development-opportunity catalogue and manager conversation guide
- Mobility governance, pilot findings and a review dashboard
The Career and Development Record links a chosen direction to its rationale, capability requirements, existing evidence, development actions, support, opportunities and review decisions. It keeps the employee’s aspiration distinct from an organisational appointment commitment.
CPF · In practice
Governance that makes opportunity credible
Business leaders own the work and the opportunities available. HR maintains the architecture and fair access processes. Managers support development and timely release discussions. Employees help shape their plans and provide feedback on whether the pathways are usable. If workload prevents an agreed assignment, record the constraint, identify an alternative or escalate the resource decision. A plan cannot rely indefinitely on access that nobody has authority to provide.
Review who can access information, learning, assignments and internal opportunities. Examine barriers affecting different locations, work patterns or employee groups using appropriate, privacy-conscious evidence. Publish clear arrangements for raising concerns about access or decisions.
Useful measures include employee understanding of options, development-plan follow-through, access to assignments, internal applications and transitions, and the quality of post-move support. Interpret results alongside workforce needs and opportunity supply. Promotion volume alone is an incomplete measure of career development.
Your questions, answered
Questions organisations ask
Must everyone move upwards?
No. Specialist depth, lateral experience, project work and stronger contribution within the current role can all be worthwhile directions.
Can technical experts progress without managing people?
Where the work supports it, dual tracks can describe distinct specialist and leadership routes. Their levels and rewards require deliberate organisational design.
Does a completed development plan guarantee a move?
No. It can provide relevant evidence and preparation. A move also depends on available work, requirements and the applicable decision process.
Can we begin with one family?
Yes. A focused pilot can test the architecture and development experience before wider rollout.
An illustrative application
Create a route for a capable specialist
Illustrative scenario.
The situation
A finance specialist wants to deepen expertise and influence business decisions. Their manager assumes that the next step must be a team-leader role, although the employee is more interested in complex analysis than managing people.
Explore the evidence
Map relevant specialist, lateral and leadership routes. Compare the employee’s aspirations and current work evidence with the requirements of each credible option. A record of accurate analysis may be strong evidence of technical capability while leaving the ability to explain recommendations to business leaders less well demonstrated.
Agree the next step
Use the Career and Development Record to agree a supervised project that combines analysis with presenting recommendations. Name the sponsor, workload allowance, feedback and work products to review. Explain whether it prepares for an existing opportunity or simply builds useful capability; any appointment retains its approved process.
Review what changes
Review the evidence from the project and whether the work still fits the employee’s interests. Choose the next experience, consolidate capability or pursue an available role. If no vacancy exists, keep the plan useful through work and learning that the organisation can actually offer.
Put the framework to work
Turn career uncertainty into a practical next step
Start with a priority family, an unclear specialist route or a workforce transition. HR Delivery can help make options visible, define credible requirements and connect development with real opportunities.