Design a Career Development Framework
Employee Experience · 4–6 weeks · Advanced
The job
Help employees see and plan their career path within the organisation.
What the sponsor gets
Each canvas and map from this playbook — Empathy Map, Culture Map, Stakeholder Map, Experiment Canvas, Journey map — exports as a PDF, or as PowerPoint on Pro, straight from the session, and the whole run exports as one PowerPoint for the sponsor. Nothing is redrawn.
The method
Gather employee and manager perspectives
Interview 10-15 people across levels and functions. Ask what career progression looks like today, what is unclear, what feels unfair, and what would make them stay. Include people who left — their exit interview data is gold.
Tip: Ask "how did you get your last promotion?" — the answer reveals whether progression is transparent or political.
Map the employee career experience
Create Empathy Maps for 2-3 employee archetypes: early career, mid-career plateau, and high performer. Capture what each group thinks, feels, and does when they consider their future at the organisation.
Tip: The mid-career plateau group is often the largest and most neglected — they are too senior for graduate schemes and too junior for leadership programmes.
Map career progression touchpoints
Create a lifecycle journey map focused specifically on development moments: goal-setting, feedback, training, stretch assignments, promotion decisions, and lateral moves. Identify where the organisation invests and where it neglects.
Tip: Map the informal development system (mentors, visibility, sponsorship) alongside the formal one — the informal system often matters more for actual progression.
Understand the cultural blockers
Create a Culture Map to surface the unwritten rules about career progression. Who gets promoted? What behaviours are rewarded? Where does bias enter the system? These cultural realities will make or break the framework.
Tip: If your culture rewards heroics and long hours, a competency-based framework will be ignored — fix the culture signals first.
Align stakeholders on the framework design
Create a Stakeholder Map covering HR, line managers, senior leadership, and employee representatives. Each group has different expectations of what a career framework should deliver.
Tip: Line managers will make or break adoption — if they cannot explain the framework to their team in five minutes, simplify it.
Design the framework structure
Define career levels, competency expectations, progression criteria, and development pathways. Include both vertical (promotion) and lateral (broadening) routes. Build in transparency — employees should be able to see exactly what is required at each level.
Tip: Keep it to 5-7 levels maximum and avoid overlapping competencies — complexity kills adoption.
Pilot with one function
Create an Experiment Canvas to test the framework with one department. Measure whether employees can articulate their development path, whether managers use the framework in career conversations, and whether the criteria feel fair.
Tip: The real test is whether someone who was not promoted can look at the framework and understand why — if they cannot, the criteria are not clear enough.
The canvases and maps
- Empathy Map
- The goal first, then what the person sees, says, does, hears, thinks and feels, so the room separates what it has observed from what it is guessing.
- Culture Map
- Outcomes across the top, the behaviours that produce them beside their enablers and blockers, and values and rituals underneath, so culture becomes something you can change, not just describe.
- Stakeholder Map
- Power against interest in four quadrants, so engagement effort goes where it matters and nobody important is handled by accident.
- Experiment Canvas
- Hypothesis, design, metrics and success criteria come before results and the decision, so the goalposts are written down before anyone sees the data.
- Journey map
- Stages run across and lanes run beneath them, so the experience reads in the order people live it and each low point lines up with what causes it.
What it doesn't do
It doesn't run the room for you or decide for the client. The steps, canvases and duration are a starting point you adapt; the judgement stays yours.