15Five’s Career Hub, a 2022 Fast Company World Changing Ideas honoree, is a simple, powerful way for managers and their team members to co-create a strengths-driven career vision that keeps employees motivated and energized. This article walks through the basics of Career Hub and provides best practices and resources to get started.
In this article, you will learn…
- What is Career Hub?
- How it works
- How Career Hub impacts HR outcomes
- Key components
- Roles and visibility
- Use cases and Best practices
- Additional resources
Access and availability
⛔️ Required access to Career Hub.
👥 This article is relevant to all roles.
📦 This feature is available in the Perform and Total Platform pricing packages.
What is Career Hub?
Career Hub is an easy-to-use, customizable tool that empowers employees to co-create strengths-based careers with their managers. Career Hub enables managers and employees to have productive career growth conversations through exercises in role clarity, strengths discovery, and career visioning. With Career Hub, employees are equipped to connect the dots between their strengths, competencies, and company roles.
Incorporating Career Hub into your employee growth initiatives not only promotes a culture of ambition and learning but also encourages individual empowerment, drive, and a forward-thinking work environment. It takes just a few easy steps to complete Career Hub, but the long-term impact on individual growth and organizational success is immeasurable.
How it works
- Admins or managers upload job information to 15Five. To begin the career development journey, admins or managers should upload their teams' job information, including job titles, descriptions, and responsibilities. Account admins should also upload competencies and career paths. This information sets the stage for employees to fill out their Career Hub.
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Employees fill out their Career Hub. After the foundational data is set, it's time for employees to fill out their Career Hub in 15Five and take ownership of their career trajectory! Career Hub consists of four sections:
- Role clarity: Clarify your current role and identify the type of work that’s most energizing to you. This will help you find and define what you want in a career.
- Strengths: Do more of what you do best by discovering your top strengths, values, interests, and passions so you can leverage them in your role.
- Career vision: Ideate your dream career by aligning your top strengths, values, and passions with your role.
- Growth plan: Create career goals and break them down into trackable actions to help you work towards your ideal career.
- Managers review results and meet 1-on-1 with their direct reports. Once employees have filled out their Career Hub, managers play a pivotal role in the next steps. They review the information provided by their direct reports, gaining insights into their team members' career ambitions and areas of desired growth. With this information in hand, managers then schedule 1-on-1 meetings to discuss these aspirations, provide feedback, and collaboratively chart out potential development plans. These discussions ensure alignment between employee aspirations and organizational goals, fostering a supportive environment for growth.
- Continue using 15Five to make career development top-of-mind. Career development isn't just a one-time event! Organizations should strive to make growth and professional development an ongoing process. Using 15Five's features, managers and employees can continually revisit and update their career goals, track progress, and ensure that professional development remains a focal point in day-to-day activities. This creates a culture where employees feel supported and motivated, knowing that their growth is a priority for the organization.
How Career Hub impacts HR outcomes
Career Hub gives employees the opportunity to directly impact their own career development by creating a clear vision of where they want to go and the steps they need to take to achieve their goals. Implementing Career Hub in your organization can have a major impact on 15Five's HR Outcomes: maximizing employee performance, increasing employee engagement, and decreasing regrettable turnover.
- 67% of employees report working harder for a manager who cares about their growth as a professional.
- Job crafting is significantly and positively related to employee performance, meaning, and engagement.
- Employees who are aware of and apply their top strengths are 18x more likely to succeed.
- Goal setting is one of the most powerful and evidence-based interventions for enhancing performance.
- In a study conducted by Right Management, 76% of respondents said that having a career conversation with their manager made them feel more engaged in their work.
- Career Hub's focus on role clarity, one of the 17 drivers of employee engagement, can have a direct impact on how engaged your employees are.
- A study by Quantum Workplace found when employees and managers frequently talk about the employee career path, opportunities to advance, and ways to learn and grow their careers, engagement increases significantly.
- Strengths-based development can lead to a 9-15% increase in employee engagement.
- Employees who are given ample growth and flexibility are 4x less likely to become a retention risk. However, less than 4 in 10 employees strongly agree that they have opportunities to learn and grow in their current roles.
- Since the pandemic, workers are more prone to leave their organizations if they don't see avenues for professional development.
- According to the Design Career Index Annual Report, the top three reasons people left their last role were poor leadership/management, lack of career path, and lack of meaning/purpose. If people don’t see a future at your company, they’re going to look for it somewhere else.
- 75% of employees would be more likely to stay with their current employer if career conversations occurred more frequently. However, only 16% of employees report that they have ongoing career conversations with their managers.
- Top organizational psychologist, Adam Grant, provided insight on how to retain top performers: "If you want to keep your people—especially your stars—it’s time to pay more attention to how you design their work. Most companies design jobs and then slot people into them. Our best managers sometimes do the opposite: When they find talented people, they’re open to creating jobs around them."
Other benefits
- Show your people that you’re putting them first
- Help your people find and define what they want in a career
- Enhance your career ladders initiative by starting with self-discovery
- Provide a strategic onboarding experience
- Set the foundation for effective performance management
- Equip managers to better leverage their employees’ strengths
- Allow employees to take ownership of their careers and growth path
- Attract, develop, and retain top talent by motivating and empowering employees
Key components
The 'Role Clarity' tab of Career Hub gives employees the clarity they need to succeed in their current roles and an opportunity to communicate what drives them. With job descriptions and responsibilities visible alongside individual responsibilities, projects, and tasks, completing this tab ensures that employees are clear on what's expected of them. Employees can also rate their responsibilities based on how energizing they find them: setting the stage so that managers can help them do more of what they find energizing— helping managers and employees have a productive 2-way conversation on how to be successful and get ahead of obstacles.
Employees can view career paths and the required competencies, making it easy for them to discover roles that inspire productivity and performance.
The 'Strengths' tab is where employees uncover and reflect on their top strengths, values, and passions. Self-discovery is an important precursor to self-development, but most companies miss this critical first step.
The 'Career vision' tab empowers employees to reflect on their top strengths, passions, and energizing work, then create a vision of the career they aspire to. Allow employees to envision their dream careers and work with their managers to make it a reality.
Once employees complete the other sections of Career Hub, they can use the 'Growth plan' tab to create and track targeted career growth goals to help them move closer to their aspirations. Growth plans enable employees to drive their own career growth, increasing meaning and purpose on an individual level and employee retention at an organizational level.
Roles and visibility
Roles
| Role | Permissions |
|---|---|
| Employee | Can fill out their own Career Hub. |
| Manager | Can fill out their own Career Hub and review their direct reports' Career Hubs. |
| Account admin | Can manage feature settings for Career Hub. |
Visibility
As employees fill out their Career Hub, they can refer to the "Psych Safety Approved" box in the top, right-hand corner of the page screen to see who has visibility into their answers and when.
Rules for section-specific visibility are outlined below:
| Section | Visibility |
|---|---|
| Role Clarity tab | Until an employee shares their answers with their manager, their energizing levels are only visible to themselves. The other sections— responsibilities, projects, and tasks— are available in real-time for both themselves and their manager to collaborate on. After the employee shares their energizing levels, they will be visible to themselves and their manager. |
| Strengths tab | Any answers typed in the 'Strengths' tab are immediately visible to the employee and their manager. |
| Career Vision tab | All sections of the 'Career Vision' tab remain private to the employee until they share their answers with their manager, at which point the manager can view them. Employees can still edit their responses post-share, and their manager will be informed that there’s been an update. |
| Growth Plan tab | The 'Growth Plan' tab of Career Hub is visible to the employee and their manager. While account admins can't view your 'Growth Plan' page, they do have the ability to run a report containing all company goals and progress. |
Use cases and best practices
When employees fill out the Career Hub, they develop 1) role clarity, 2) an understanding of their strengths, and 3) an understanding of their career vision and what they like and don’t like doing. Managers can use the information included in their direct reports' Career Hub section to facilitate conversations about career growth.
Having employees who are new to their role fill out the Career Hub section of 15Five is a powerful addition to their onboarding process. It not only allows employees to get on the same page as their manager regarding role expectations but also gives them the opportunity to envision where they want to go in the future.
Tip
Use Career Hub alongside our Best-Self Kickoff feature during onboarding for maximum impact.
As role clarity is one of the 17 drivers of employee engagement, our Career Hub feature's focus on role clarity can have a direct impact on how engaged your employees are. Although role clarity is often overlooked or undervalued, when an employee has role clarity, they understand specifically what is expected of them in their job. They know what tasks they’re supposed to accomplish, what their specific goals are, how their work impacts the larger goals of the business, and how their work will be evaluated and measured. When this clarity is lacking, it can have a major impact on engagement and productivity.
Laying out performance expectations and measuring employee interest in role responsibilities is to focus on the basic building blocks of employee performance.
Tip
Having employees fill out Career Hub is a great precursor to having them participate in a Best-Self Review® cycle! Use the information gained in your direct reports' Career Hubs to advise your review conversation.
Additional resources
- Career Hub Setup (9 min): In this video, you will learn how to enable Career Hub in your account. Then you'll be taken on a walkthrough of using Career Hub from the lens of an employee. Recommendations and best practices will be shared along the way.
- Career Hub Webinar (40 min): In this product training webinar, our Product Trainer walks through 15Five's approach to career development, Career Hub settings and functionality, and how to launch Career Hub in your organization.
- Retaining Employees by Boosting Manager Effectiveness (60 min): People leave managers, not companies. Employee retention starts by setting expectations around the employee-manager relationship and training those managers to be effective. In this webinar, we will cover best practices for one-on-one meetings, performance management, and career growth conversations to empower employees as individuals.
- Starting the New Year Strong: Employee Training & Career Growth (60 min): Why do employees leave? There are personal reasons like schooling, relocation, and childcare, but oftentimes it’s due to limited growth opportunities at your organization. In this webinar, our panelists will help you identify how to support the professional needs of your employees from an HR and manager perspective. And because career growth means reskilling employees, we will also cover what your training program needs to succeed.
- 15Five’s Career Hub Empowers Employees to Design a Strengths-Based Development Path (9 min)
- Empower Employees To Design Their Careers and Own Their Growth and Development (7 min)
- Boosting Employee Engagement Through Career Conversations (7 min)
- What Can HR Leaders Do To Drive Employee Career Development? (7 min)
- Managers: Are You Talking to Your Team About Career Planning? (5 min)
- The Missing Part of Your Employee Learning and Development Strategy: Strengths Discovery (10 min)
- 15Five’s 2022 Workplace Report: Did you know that career growth is essential to employee retention? In this report, learn about the insights 15Five gathered from surveying 1,000 U.S. adults employed full-time to understand how people feel about their potential for career advancement within their workplace, their access to professional development resources, and the significant role managers play in employee retention.
- 15Five’s 2023 Manager Effectiveness Report: In this report, learn how to solve the manager <> employee disconnect to fuel organizational productivity. Topics covered include: tracking productivity, manager effectiveness and training, career growth and professional development, and tools that drive employee engagement and manager success.
- Making a Data-Driven Case for Employee Development with David Pearson (30 min): In this conversation, David Pearson, SVP of People and Culture at Extensis HR, shares how to make a data-driven case for employee development. He shares how his organization develops its employees to ensure they are equipped to succeed at their current jobs and beyond. David also discusses the calm and steady presence an HR leader needs to bring to stabilize a team, how to balance composure with authenticity, and how to offboard with care to maintain long-lasting relationships.