How one Fortune 100 employer is building an inclusive and agile workforce through skills-first career development
Author:
Kristina Alessi
Why Skills-First Pathways?
As economic and technological changes reshape workforce needs, enterprises can harness business resilience by outlining internal pathways for employees to grow and thrive. To achieve this goal, many companies are turning to skills-first career pathing: a talent management strategy that clearly and transparently defines competency-based advancement routes to support workforce agility and inclusive talent development. By mapping opportunities for advancement based on skills rather than degrees or tenure, organizations can promote internal mobility, strengthen retention, and remain responsive to evolving role requirements.
The impacts of career pathing are increasingly evident across organizations implementing this approach:
- Nearly 60% of employers expect to prioritize internal mobility and reskilling by 2027.
- Strategic workforce planning depends on aligning job roles to evolving capabilities and offering transparent advancement paths.
- Companies with clearly defined pathways see higher retention, stronger performance, and better engagement.
- Organizations that enable lateral and upward movement retain diverse talent at twice the rate of their peers.
The message is clear: companies that adopt a skills-first approach —that extends beyond hiring to employee retention and advancement—gain a competitive edge across performance and inclusion metrics.
From Aspirations to Action
For one Fortune 100 employer, the shift to skills-first career pathing marked a pivotal evolution in their workforce support efforts. While they had already made strong headway towards advancing their skills-first hiring strategy, they recognized that employee pathway to internal growth remained ambiguous. Degree requirements and tenure-based promotions persisted, even when they did not reflect on-the-job success and there were no clear blueprints for how entry-level talent could progress into higher-skilled roles. The company needed a solution that would consolidate existing resources, identify gaps, and offer user-friendly tools to help managers support their teams in building skills, navigating career paths, and understanding transferable capabilities across the business.
Tasked with designing a roadmap to ensure that their internal mobility strategy was aligned with their vision and values, Grads of Life partnered with this organization to take the next step: clarifying career pathways and designing people manager tools to activate skills-first internal mobility across their organization.
Building the Blueprint
Our team began by listening. Through stakeholder interviews and data reviews across business units, Human Resources, and Learning & Development teams, we surfaced several critical pain points:
- Current company talent strategy was not well-defined for employees.
- Internal career progression processes often lacked clarity and transparency.
- Leadership development efforts were inconsistent and unstructured.
- Many existing resources were being underutilized and/or inconsistently distributed across platforms and teams.
- Upskilling and development opportunities were not always readily accessible to frontline workers.
Armed with these insights, Grads of Life worked with the organization to develop a comprehensive suite of solutions. We began by crafting a clear strategic roadmap for HR managers and business leaders to activate skills-first talent development. Leveraging existing materials and stakeholder insights, we also developed a practical, user-friendly toolkit of concrete resources to guide managers in setting development goals, exploring career pathways, and identifying growth opportunities. These tools and resources were delivered alongside our change management framework to support sustainable practice adoption across the organization. Stakeholder feedback was woven into each iteration to ensure that every tool and resource was relevant and aligned with key business priorities and challenges.
A New Model for Mobility
By timing rollouts to coincide with performance review cycles, the company embedded their new tools into existing workflows rather than creating additional administrative burden. Early pilot results validated the approach: managers expressed newfound confidence in career conversations, while employees—particularly those historically excluded from advancement discussions—reported seeing clear growth opportunities for the first time.
Career growth should not be a mystery. As organizations race to future-proof their workforce by building agile, resilient teams, skills-first career pathing offers a talent management approach that is grounded in equity, transparency, and business value. To implement this approach successfully, organizations should focus on these execution fundamentals:
- Align your talent management strategy with your organization’s vision and workforce goals.
- Start with piloting change in a few roles—prioritize roles with high turnover or mobility needs.
- Engage cross-functional teams to ensure buy-in and relevance.
- Equip managers with the right tools and training.
- Track metrics: mobility, retention, employee feedback, equity outcomes.
- Build in feedback loops and continuously iterate.
As the workforce landscape continues to shift, the organizations that thrive will be those that recognize talent development as a strategic capability, not just an HR function. The time to reimagine how growth happens from within is now.
Grads of Life works with leading employers to help transform the way they hire, retain, and advance their workforce. Together with our clients and partners, we build skills-first solutions that enable businesses to improve talent outcomes and promote economic opportunity and mobility for all. By investing in Grads of Life, you are investing in the future of work — a future that is skills-first.
References
- World Economic Forum. (2025). Future of Jobs Report.
- McKinsey & Company. (2025). The Upskilling Imperative.
- (2025). Delivering on the Jobs of the Future.
- The Burning Glass Institute. The American Opportunity Index
