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Career development examples

Career path across stages

  • Tom is a Coordinator 1 for Academic Programs within the Student Services job family. During his performance review, he and his manager agreed on his career development goal to seek a certification in student leadership and apply for a committee chair position associated with a national organization. During the year, he enrolled in the program and received the certification. During the annual performance review process, his manager took this into consideration and Tom earned a 3% increase acknowledging his Promotion-Career Development from proficient to accomplished.

Career path upward between job levels

  • Mary is a Specialist 2 for within the Technology Services job family. She is interested in learning as much as possible within her career field and included her interests in career development plan to attend several specific trainings and on-the-job projects that would utilize these new skills. Her manager reviewed the plan, had a conversation with Mary regarding her career plans and then approved the plan. Throughout the year, Mary participated in various training, received recognition for leading a successful project and obtained a new technology certification. In the next performance review process, she received a Promotion-Career Development, from Specialist 2 to  Specialist 3.

Planning for a career move to a related job (different family)

  • Wendy is an Administrative Coordinator 3 within the General Administration job family. Her daily responsibilities consist of a combination of HR, fiscal and administrative tasks; however, she is more interested in the HR responsibilities. Therefore, she has been researching HR as the next step in her career. Recently, she learned that Matthew, the Senior Coordinator 2 of HR, in the HR job family, of her department will be retiring within the next year. Wendy is very interested in the role and has worked with Matthew on several projects and shadowed him on various occasions. She decides to talk to her manager about progressing into the Senior Coordinator role. Her manager discusses this with the local HR Professional, who confirms that there are no others interested in this opportunity.
  • Collaboratively, Wendy and her manager determined the necessary transferable skills she currently has as well as what is needed for the intended role. They create a development plan to guide her in meeting the necessary competencies and skills for the role, which includes continued job shadowing with Matthew and taking on additional career development opportunities, internal and external to the university. Opportunities include the following:
    • continue to be actively engaged in the HR career community, communicate with professionals in the same role outside of the department to learn best practices

    • enroll in workshops offered by Human Resources and external agencies such as

    • Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM)
    • Association for Talent Development (ATD)
    • College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR).   
  • During the next year, Wendy worked with Matthew and various HR leaders on campus, and took advantage of the online resources offered through the various professional organizations. When Matthew retired, she had demonstrated her competence and transitioned laterally into a new job family. She moved to the HR job family into the Senior Coordinator 2 role at the emerging level.

Career path to different job title within same job family

  • Josh is an Instructional Design Specialist 3 within the Academic and Faculty Affairs job family. Josh worked collaboratively with his manager to identify the next steps of his career. He enjoyed the work he was doing but was interested in taking on more responsibilities. Josh and his manager developed a plan to include additional projects and training to learn best practices in the instructional design field. The manager recently learned that another employee would be soon leaving the department, which allowed him the opportunity to give Josh additional projects to gain more experience. Josh received recognition from several professors for his work on developing presentations and aids for two courses and a national conference presentation. His work was so exceptional that he was often requested to develop creative components for various courses. Because of his creativity and commitment to learning new instructional design software and staying abreast of the latest trends in the field, Josh was promoted from an Instructional Design Specialist 3 to a Senior Instructional Design Specialist 1.