6

Redefining Career Paths for the Talent Mobility Era

My friend Tana has a modern career. She graduated from college with an interior architecture degree and then started working at a well-known New York architecture firm. She then worked for a makeup company in New York doing visual merchandising, before moving to design retail stores for another beauty brand in Los Angeles. During these tours of duty, Tana “loaned” her design skills to large, multinational firms for given periods of time. Each of her stops was different—sometimes designing traditional office buildings, sometimes cosmetic packaging and counters, and sometimes sleek retail stores. With each job, Tana furthered her set of experiences, building out a résumé filled with projects and skills.

While working at these companies, Tana also built her own residential interior design business—as a member of the freelance economy. She designed high-end homes for clients she sourced at dinners, parties, and weddings she attended. She advertised through a website she created that showcased her work, through prior clients, and through interior design networks. She worked on her residential interior design projects “on demand”—as and when she sourced them and had time to balance them with her daily work at her companies. To complete these projects and augment her own skills, Tana built collaborations with other members of the freelance economy—independent contractors who are painters, plumbers, project managers, and builders—who collaborated with her on her residential projects. She worked on these projects at night or on weekends, alongside her jobs in architecture, visual merchandising, and retail design at companies.

With all of her work, Tana grew her skills, project portfolio, and network, creating a modern résumé that she could leverage into subsequent jobs. As her skills grew, she positioned herself for a multitude of subsequent “tours of duty”—whether at companies, in the freelance economy, or both—where she could continue to grow. Tana thought most about the skills she was developing, not about a title she might acquire or the promotions she might get in a traditional career ladder.

Careers today are increasingly nonlinear. Instead of a career ladder, today we increasingly see a career zigzag. People like Tana develop skills over a multitude of experiences across companies, departments, and the freelance economy. These skills are transferrable across many different jobs. As they grow in volume, these skills open doors to new opportunities across geographies, industries, companies, and clients. For many companies, it’s common to hire workers who have had numerous different careers, assessing relevant skills versus traditional titles, roles, and promotions.

This was the case for many of the people we hired at Topia. We had an engineer who had been a surgeon. We had a quality assurance (QA) leader who had been a pharmacist and taught himself QA at night. We had a customer support manager who had been a real estate investor. We had a sales leader who had owned a restaurant. And we had two Co-Founders of a technology company who had been a management consultant and an investment banker who taught yoga classes to fund the early company costs. Through the years, we learned that recruiting for skills almost always trumped hiring for titles on a traditional résumé.

Many workers today watched their parents lose “lifelong jobs” during the 2008 recession. Many lost faith in the promise—and value—of a traditional career at a traditional company, instead trading it for opportunities to develop their portfolio of experiences and skills. Today’s workers increasingly see their careers as fluid and nonlinear. They have periods where they work full-time as an employee at a company. They have periods where they freelance in the gig economy. They have periods where they go to a course to develop new skills. And they have periods where they do a combination of all of these. In each career segment, they match their skills with job opportunities, and often become a part of a dynamic team, like Tana’s architecture and interior design teams.

F3 Companies know that, in the talent mobility era, people work differently: They trade career ladders and regular promotions for experiences, skills development, and flexibility. They loan their skills to different projects across different companies, teams, and industries. At the same time, F3 Companies know that agility is key to succeeding amid the frequent disruptions and opportunities today. They rethink their roles, teams, management, and career paths to be dynamic, seamlessly and continuously matching workers with the skills they need to projects and teams.

Companies and business leaders who cling to a traditional view of careers will miss out on opportunities to attract and engage today’s top talent. Those that succeed will rethink how career paths, résumés and rewards evolve for agile work, getting the skills they need to respond to disruptions and opportunities as they strike. In this chapter, we look at the changing nature of careers amid the Talent Mobility Revolution.

Traditional Career Paths

In Chapter 4, we discussed my grandfather’s experience working at Mead Paper Company, a traditional manufacturing company founded in the late 1800s. Companies like Mead were designed with fixed roles, fixed teams, and hierarchical management structures. Employees like my grandfather joined to perform a specific job with a specific title, with an implicit promise of stable employment, salary, and benefits. Each year during the annual review cycle, his performance was evaluated by his manager, and if he did well, he might be eligible for a promotion or a salary increase. If he got a promotion, it was celebrated at home with the family—my grandmother loved to host family dinners, almost never following a recipe as she cooked—and recognized by a more senior title within the company.

Titles, Hierarchy, and Career Ladders

For many years, employees thought about career paths as a linear ladder to climb, where each rung was the next level or title to achieve. (This literally became known as the career ladder!) Companies were designed in a hierarchical way, supporting long-term, top-down planning and traditional, patriarchal management models. Countless children were told by parents to “go to school, study hard, get a good job, work hard, and then retire.” Workers put in a couple of decades at a company with the promise of progression in titles and salary during their tenure, and by their sixties, expected to enjoy retirement supported by a company pension. London Business School professors Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott call this the “three stage approach to working lives: education, followed by work, then retirement” in their 2016 book, The 100 Year Life.^* Through much of the twentieth century, this was the mindset of the workforce.

The traditional career path looked like this:

In many ways, my father’s career was like this as a community college teacher. He progressed through the ladder of academia over many years to eventually lead a department and be responsible for the management of staff and the achievement of its goals. When my father reached retirement age, he left his teaching position and received a pension and benefits in exchange for his years of service. (Unlike many traditional workers, however, my father was already embracing some of the parts of modern career paths. Alongside teaching, he wrote and produced plays, loaning his skills to community theaters as a freelance worker, a prelude to the career paths and gig workers of today.)

Academia, like traditional companies, operates on tenure, titles, and promotions, supporting hierarchy and linear career paths for employees—who often have to wait to get to a particular level to voice opinions or contribute to decision making. Wharton professor Peter Cappelli and NYU professor Anna Tavis discuss this evolution in their 2018 Harvard Business Review article “The New Rules of Talent Management”: “After World War II, when manufacturing dominated the industrial landscape, planning was at the heart of human resources: Companies recruited lifers . . . groomed them years in advance to take on bigger and bigger roles, and tied their raises directly to each incremental move up the ladder. The bureaucracy was the point: Organizations wanted their talent practices to be rules-based and internally consistent so that they could reliably meet five-year (and sometimes 15-year) plans.”^*

The Traditional Résumé

Traditional career paths were detailed on the traditional résumé, a document that evolved over more than 500 years to be the de facto standard for conveying career progression and success. It is believed that the traditional résumé originated with Leonardo da Vinci in the late 1400s, when he wrote a letter to the Duke of Milan where he detailed his skills and experience. Over the years however, the traditional résumé moved away from listing skills to a more standard log of the traditional career path and its promotions: Where did you attend school? Where did you start work? What levels have you progressed through? Future employers looked at the résumé to judge how “senior” someone was, measured by the titles he had achieved, and how quickly progression had been, measured by the promotions. For the most part, traditional résumés did not showcase skills or potential—rather, they were backward-looking documents detailing experience across business areas and titles. After all, in a world where careers were linear and workers largely stayed in a single business, diverse, transferrable skills were not important.

Banks, like Lehman Brothers, have long trafficked on the traditional résumé and linear career path. Each entry-level analyst, like myself, wanted to progress from first-year analyst to second-year analyst to third-year analyst to associate, vice president, and so on. Each year, we updated our résumé to show that we had made it through another year and gotten a small adjustment to our title. When people switched banks, they often did it to leapfrog a year of progression. Typically, the only way to accelerate a linear career path was to convince another bank to hire you at a more senior level, something I successfully did when I moved from Lehman Brothers to Standard Chartered Bank. Looking back, it seems so futile, but at the time, I thought it was very important to progress my title as quickly as possible!

When I founded Topia, I wanted us to recruit for skills and values, not what it said on a résumé, something I discussed a lot with both Rachael King, Topia’s first VP people, and Jacky Cohen, who today leads the function. In some cases, we did this well. In other cases, particularly when we needed to quickly fill headcount, we did not. But we all knew this was the future of recruiting and résumés.

“We need to turn the traditional résumé on its head,” says Rachael King. “It should not be about ‘I’ve done these jobs at this time.’ But it needs to be based on skills—to promote what you’ve done and your achievements instead of jobs. With this, however, we need a wholesale redesign of recruiting across companies, both when recruiting from internal and external talent pools. We need companies and recruiters to source skills not titles and for technologies to become much better at classifying and matching people to jobs based on the skills they have. This also really helps in building diverse teams. It’s not about where you’ve been in the past or the opportunities you’ve been given, it’s about the skills you’ve developed and how they apply to new opportunities. This skills and project based world really democratizes opportunities for workers.”

The Annual Performance Review

Traditional companies have long used an annual performance review to assess employees’ performance and evaluate opportunities for salary increases and promotion along the career ladder. The annual performance review emerged from the long-term, top-down planning approach of traditional companies. The idea was that each year, a manager knew what employees would do, and at the end of that year, he could assess whether his employees were successful or not in achieving the goals: whether financial targets, production output, or new sales. The unit of measurement was the year—and all feedback, reviews, and promotions operated alongside it.

During the year, employees often didn’t know how they were performing: they didn’t get regular, dynamic feedback. If they acquired new skills late in the year, they could get missed in the annual review. Conversely, if they performed well in the first part of the year and not as well in the final part, they could be penalized in the annual review due to recency biases. If the business environment changed, with new disruptions or opportunities emerging, the company often had to wait for the annual cycle to finish before updating plans. In this structure, it’s not hard to see how employees could become disengaged (“punching the clock” as it was colloquially known), and businesses could miss significant opportunities without agile operations.

The output of annual reviews was a grade that dictated performance during the year. Former GE CEO Jack Welch is well known for evolving this into a forced ranking performance structure—segmenting employees as “A,” “B,” or “C” players. By the early 2000s, as many as 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies had adopted forced ranking systems in their annual performance reviews.^*

Each year at Lehman Brothers, we went through the annual performance review and ranking ritual. Managers would enter performance reviews into a central system that would then crunch these reviews into a performance grade that dictated our bonus. On a set day each year, you would walk into a conference room and sit with an HR manager who would deliver your performance grade, bonus, and continued progression. I remember being shocked both that I had to wait a year to get feedback on my performance and that someone was delivering this information without any context on my performance; I had mistakenly expected that this conversation would happen with my manager, who planned my work, not with an HR manager that I had never met before. I remembered this experience acutely as we designed Topia’s talent management processes to be agile and manager-led (see Chapter 5 for details on the evolving role of a manager at an F3 Company).

Cappelli and Tavis discuss the history and future of the annual performance review in their 2016 Harvard Business Review article “The Performance Management Revolution”: “Appraisals can be traced back to the U.S. military’s ‘merit rating’ system, created during World War I to identify poor performers for discharge or transfer. After World War II, about 60% of U.S. companies were using them (by the 1960s, it was closer to 90%). Though seniority rules determined pay increases and promotions for unionized workers, strong merit scores meant good advancement prospects for managers. At least initially, improving performance was an afterthought.”

However, innovative companies now recognize that with dynamic project work and teams, nonlinear career paths and agile performance management will increasingly be the norm. Cappelli and Tavis note that “regular conversations about performance and development change the focus to building your workforce needs to be competitive both for today and years from now.”

“There must be a different focus on employee development than there has been. Development has historically all been around promotion and level, and how that corresponds to a career ladder,” says Rachael King, who brought this lens to designing Topia’s talent management processes. “People are still entering the workforce expecting quick recognition, promotion, and salary increases. But we need to look at experience exposure in breadth and depth, and the skills being developed versus traditional experience. We need to recognize and reward that in the right way for agile companies and modern employees.”

How Career Paths Are Changing

In Chapter 3, we met my friend Daniel, a consultant who works from many different locations—cafés, coworking spaces, and client offices—as he completed his work. Like many workers today he values flexibility and location movement as a part of his work (see Chapter 3 for more details on location movement). But before Daniel became a roaming consultant, he got a Harvard law degree and practiced at a prestigious law firm, worked as an investment banker, and wrote movie scripts. Today, he is starting a digital health technology company, writing a TV series, and continuing his work as a consultant. Like Tana, Daniel is a quintessential modern worker. Careers today look more like theirs than my grandfather’s at Mead Paper Company.

Nonlinear, Dynamic Careers

Today’s workers increasingly work across companies, sectors, and jobs during their careers. Gone are the days where an employee joined a specific company and department with a “job for life” and clear career ladder to climb. Driven both by the changing preferences of today’s workers and company transformations to agile work amid the Talent Mobility Revolution, careers are now nonlinear and dynamic. Business is changing faster than ever, and businesses must be agile to capitalize on opportunities and respond to disruptions as they happen. At the same time, shifting employee demographics mean that workers today increasingly value autonomy and flexibility above career ladders and paychecks. They work for both companies and themselves as a part of their careers—spending time as employees and freelancers and working across a series of tours of duty like Tana and Daniel do.

A 2018 article in Forbes cited research from edX that 29 percent of Americans ages 25 to 44 have completely changed fields since starting their first job post college, while research from Deloitte shows that 43 percent of millennial workers plan to quit their current job in the next two years.^* But nonlinear careers are not limited to millennials. According to JP Morgan, “The Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently reported that nonlinear job-hopping was no longer something reserved for entry-level working teenagers. Rather, across various fields and various shades of color, career flux has become an acceptable norm.”^†

In this world, there is no linear career path. Career ladders look more like career pretzels, moving in a circular continuum rather than to an end goal of retirement:

All of this means that traditional companies must expand their thinking about the right employee profile for a given job. They must look to skills and how they translate across jobs, rather than looking to experience within a given business area. All of this requires a fundamental redesign of recruiting processes to be based on skills, and assessing their transferability, rather than being based on experience, a transformation we lay out in the next section.

In Chapter 1, we met Peggy Smith, CEO of Worldwide ERC, an HR industry group that educates and connects more than 250,000 corporations, thought leaders, learners, stakeholders, and mobile people. In her role, she has watched the shift from traditional linear careers to dynamic nonlinear careers driven by shifting employee demographics and business needs.

“People coming into the workforce 10 years ago watched their parents work for traditional employment and career models, and they saw them lose a lot during the recession,” says Smith. “At the same time, the ACA came into law, and all of a sudden people could get health insurance independent of their employer. This gave them a sense of empowerment and leverage; ‘I am now going to drive my career and skills, and not let one company do it for me.’ It provided a newfound freedom to workers.

“The other thing is that, in this generation, no one is disillusioned that a company can be bought, disrupted, or go out of business,” continues Smith. “So instead workers are demanding flexibility in job content, remuneration, skills development, employment models, and the experiences they are getting. Workers are increasingly dictating their employment model—full-time work in one project, then volunteer time, or time in the gig economy or experiences abroad. Throughout all of this, what you’re seeing is people placing greater value on time due to the recognition that time and employment are not finite.”

From Recruiting for Titles to Recruiting for Skills

Titles and experience were the foundation of traditional careers. The currency of nonlinear careers is skills and outcomes—goals achieved and impact made as a part of the dynamic jobs that a worker does inside and outside of the company. In the talent mobility era, these skills—and project experiences—become the blueprint of the worker, dictating what she can offer her next project team.

Innovative companies categorize each worker’s skills in their talent marketplace. When they look to fill the next project team, they query their system for workers with the skills they need for the project team. Companies look at the breadth and depth of skills and the historical achievement of project objectives to set employee level, pay, and staffing paths. They move away from a hierarchical model of management and ladders to a standardized leveling system that ties pay to competencies and contribution.

After categorizing workers based on skills, companies should assign competency benchmarks to the skills developed and the projects completed, forming the basis for assessing seniority. This should all be logged in the talent marketplace system and aligned to job descriptions when recruiting for project teams—for example, what skills and competencies are needed for a team? Companies then need to transform their recruiting model to source candidates based on skill and competency keywords instead of title keywords. Traditional recruiting practices search for and filter candidates who have had particular job titles at particular companies to create candidate short lists. In a skills-based world, titles are irrelevant. Recruiting today should reflect that and, once skills and competencies are logged, search for these.

“Job benchmarking and recruiting needs to shift from levels to skills,” says Rachael King. “There will always still be some hierarchy in companies, but we are moving to a much flatter structure. As employees complete projects, I think about these projects like building blocks that get attached to their profile. Each of these building blocks has an impact from a development, level, and compensation perspective. The future of benchmarking employees and their compensation will be based on skills and competencies—in fact, quite a few of the salary reports, like PayScale, are already moving this way—and this translates to recruiting that needs to be much more based on this. In reality, we are just at the beginning of this transformation, however, because it requires a comprehensive redesign of systems and the way we classify workers, their skills and the competencies they’ve developed.”

Innovating on the Traditional Résumé

In 2018 Fast Company published an article entitled “Four Reasons Resumes No Longer Work.” The article posits that the traditional résumé’s focus on experience over skills, organization by job titles, disregard for gig work, and static format make the traditional résumé—the document used for more than 500 years—irrelevant for today.

As companies shift away from traditional career paths and titles to fostering careers based on skills and dynamic jobs, the structure of the traditional résumé no longer makes sense. Rather, many companies are pivoting to more skills, certification, or rating-driven models to measure workers’ fit for a job. LinkedIn’s skills endorsements are an example of this, as are the skills and reviews commonplace in freelancer systems like Upwork and TaskRabbit. Many companies also increasingly give tests as a part of their hiring process to assess candidates’ skills—valuing performance on these tests over any number of titles on a traditional résumé. At Topia, we followed this model, and had candidates not only tell us about what they had accomplished in prior roles, but also do mock presentations and complete engineering tests—which is why we often ended up with engineers with nontraditional backgrounds as some of our top performers.

“Many of the best people don’t even have a résumé today,” says Joanna Riley, Founder and CEO of Censia. “Companies know this, and need a solution to find and engage the right talent. Companies work with Censia because we have mapped a global workforce of hundreds of millions of professionals based on skills by aggregating publicly available data and applying algorithms to create a skills profile. They are saying to us, ‘help me find a worker with these particular hard and soft skills and competencies from the work they have done, and their career trajectory. We will teach them the rest.’ The traditional résumé can’t do this, and I 100 percent think the traditional résumé is dying.”

Agile Talent Management and Nonlinear Careers

When Rachael King and I sat down to design our agile management processes at Topia, we were emphatic: no annual performance reviews. I had vowed after experiencing these at Lehman Brothers that no company I ran would ever have this structure. Rachael, for her part, had developed a strong belief in dynamic projects, clear milestones, and regular feedback on performance. Instead, we decided, we would champion “continuous feedback” (I often called this “being human”: tell people how they were doing as and when they did something. But Rachael, very rightly, vetoed this nomenclature!).

We started by simply telling our small team that we wanted people to give regular, honest feedback to team members as work was completed. Over time, we implemented a formal objectives and key results (OKR) process that set annual, quarterly, and monthly objectives for project teams with a framework for regular performance feedback. We then set up an annual cross-calibration process where project leaders contributed feedback that formed a composite assessment of employee skills, competencies, and performance that managers shared with them.

Innovative companies know that static annual reviews done by static managers don’t work in a world of dynamic talent mobility, where employees move regularly between jobs and geographies. Rather, they rethink performance management structures to align to dynamic on-demand work across many jobs, teams, and leaders. The best practice is the OKR framework used by many companies, including Topia.

Setting Project Objectives and Measuring Success

As companies shift to be agile, they deconstruct the company’s work into projects with clear milestones and objectives that the team completes. These objectives form the basis of measuring the success and performance of teams. As we discussed in prior chapters, many technology companies have been operating like this for years, the result of their agile software development processes. As a part of the Talent Mobility Revolution and increasing movement between jobs, traditional companies are now restructuring their work into discrete projects and goals.

Project goals should be put into a comprehensive objectives and key results (OKR) framework across the company that becomes a core part of the company’s operating model. Popularized by Google, OKRs are measurable and regular goals set by leaders that are tracked as projects progress. The best practice is to set OKRs quarterly, with monthly OKRs aligned to each quarterly goal and regularly adjusted as needed as work progresses. (In fact, according to talent management company Reflektive, companies who manage goals quarterly see 30 percent higher returns than companies who manage goals annually.)^* Generally, project teams have project OKRs and clarity on how these align to company OKRs. Each worker—whether an employee or freelancer—has his or her own OKRs aligned to the project OKRs that can be easily measured. This framework should be adopted as employees move to new jobs or new geographies (whether through frequent travel, relocation, or assignments)—both types of movement should come with clear and measurable expectations on what success looks like.

Employees should update the status of OKRs as work happens, providing transparency and real-time status on project milestones. The best practice is for all OKRs to be logged in a talent management system (at Topia, we use BetterWorks, a competitor of Reflektive) for easy review and look back. At the end of each project, leaders review how successfully the project team was in completing the project OKRs—and how each individual contributed to the team’s outcome. With OKRs set and tracked, managers can then easily pay freelance workers based on performance and review employees for ongoing contribution and skills development. Overall, this iterative planning and assessment process helps companies respond quickly as business conditions or project statuses change.

With OKRs the currency of contribution, the traditional notion of tenure and career ladders goes away. Rather, companies recognize now that workers come from different backgrounds with nonlinear careers. It’s the skills they contribute, the competencies they develop, and their success completing OKRs that drives career progression.

Since leaving Topia, Rachael King has been implementing OKRs across traditional companies, helping them start the transformation to working with agility. She advocates that “this transition should first start with companies mapping their company goals and the work that goes into completing them. From there, work should be broken down into discrete projects with measurable OKRs.”

However, King cautions that companies “must be careful about the connection between OKRs and reward. If employees only include OKRs that they can easily achieve to maximize their compensation, then you miss the concept of work planning and setting ambitious goals for project teams to figure out through their ingenuity and initiative. OKRs must become a standard part of the company’s operating model, not only a talent tool.”

From Annual Reviews to Agile Feedback

With dynamic projects, teams, and careers, companies swap the annual performance review for regular, dynamic feedback. They train project leaders to provide continuous feedback during the course of projects and as OKRs progress. And they train managers to deliver composite reviews of project performance and provide career coaching. They log all of this feedback in their talent management system, where they can easily refer back to it when needed. For freelance workers, this structure drives payment for contribution to projects. Simply, if the worker did his job as expected, he will be paid for it. For employees, this contributes to an overall picture of skills development and contribution to the company, which is discussed annually in a cross-calibration process, which I detail in the next section.

In the Harvard Business Review article “HR Goes Agile,” Cappelli and Tavis discuss the evolution of the annual review, noting: “As individuals worked on shorter-term projects of various lengths, often run by different leaders and organized around teams, the notion that performance feedback would come once a year, from one boss, made little sense. They needed more of it, more often, from more people. Overall, the focus is on delivering more-immediate feedback throughout the year so that teams can become nimbler, ‘course-correct’ mistakes, improve performance, and learn through iteration—all key agile principles.”^*

Reflektive is one of the systems that enables agile performance management, and therefore an expert on helping companies shift to this model. “A coach coaches in real-time during a game, reacting to their team’s performance and providing in-the-moment guidance to help the players improve and the team win,” the company writes. “The coach doesn’t wait until the end of the season to start coaching. The same principle applies to performance reviews. The traditional method of performance management—waiting until the end of the year, or doing biannual reviews, simply doesn’t work.

“Agile performance management utilizes regular check-ins and 360-degree communication—managers provide constructive feedback to employees and vice versa, which strengthens the team as a whole,” they conclude.^*

Talent Reviews, Indicators, and Career Progression

As we discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, companies today have an expanded view of their workforce and create project teams with employees and freelancers. For freelancers, career progression doesn’t matter; they complete their project work, build their skills, and collect their payment. For employees, however, there is still a desire for career progression. Even in a world of nonlinear career paths and more frequent and fulfilling tours of duty across jobs and geographies, employees still want to grow their status and salaries. The question is how to provide and communicate progression in a work environment that is increasingly flat and defined by dynamic jobs and teams.

With dynamic projects, employees may work with a variety of project leaders over the course of a year. These leaders need to provide feedback on employee contribution to create the composite view of skills and competencies that a manager will communicate. In this complex mosaic, OKRs are the GPS. The OKRs completed across the different projects denote what an employee contributed and what competencies were developed or acquired. These are the basis of a talent review process that replaces the traditional annual review.

In the talent review, company leaders and sponsors come together for a series of meetings to review the contribution of each employee at the company. Using the OKRs from each project as the blueprint, they review each employee’s performance, impact, and competencies developed across their projects. Project leaders who have worked with the employee provide anecdotal evidence to support the conversations. For each employee, company leaders should look at the OKRs as well as how they were done, assessing whether the employee continues to work in line with the company’s values and culture.

The best practice is for talent reviews to happen quarterly as a part of management meetings. At the end of each year, the leaders should look at the prior three quarters of data and agree on a talent indicator for each employee, taking into consideration both project performance and potential for subsequent contribution. This rating should drive an upward or downward multiplier on any variable compensation and form the basis of a discussion for any forward progression for the employee. After the indicator is set, employees should be reviewed against a leveling framework that assesses skills, competencies, and development opportunities. Based on these competencies, leaders set each employee’s level and learning path, which drives the next dynamic project and the employee’s contribution to it. With this process, forward-thinking companies move from a world of vertical career ladders to nonlinear dynamic career paths.

Jacky Cohen, who leads Topia’s People and Culture team, thinks about employee levels and career progression as based on “scope and impact.” “It’s evolving to be similar to the leveling matrices that are found in compensation surveys which span industries. Like these, we need to increasingly look at competencies instead of titles to compare salaries. It’s more like: Can the employee tie a knot? Can the employee tie a knot and teach someone else to tie a knot? Can the employee tie a knot, teach someone else to tie a knot, and advocate to senior leadership about why it’s important to tie knots?” says Cohen. “Most companies are not near this place yet, though. To do this, you have to fundamentally break down all of the company’s work and map it out in a competency-based way with levels assigned. This is a necessary, but major transformation for traditional companies.”

When I founded Topia, I wanted to rethink our teams, project goals, and feedback structures to embrace nonlinear careers and dynamic feedback. And through my nine years leading the company, I saw our customers starting the same journey as they transformed for the talent mobility era. F3 Companies rethink career paths, résumés, and performance management to unlock seamless talent mobility across jobs, teams, and geographies. With dynamic goal setting and measurement, they can quickly spin up project teams. They dispense with the structures of a traditional company, instead thinking about career paths as a nonlinear mosaic where an employee will work across many projects, teams, and business areas.

Redefining career paths is the sixth step for success in the Talent Mobility Revolution. Leaders who do not start to adopt these practices and shift their mindset about career paths will struggle in the future of jobs. Today’s Talent Mobility Revolution brings growing disruptions and opportunities—only companies and teams built on agility and diverse skills will succeed.

In this section, we looked at how to redesign work at an F3 Company and covered the next three steps to talent mobility transformation: (1) rearchitecting roles to be dynamic jobs, (2) evolving teams and managers for dynamic jobs, and (3) redefining career paths. With an F3 Company set up and work redesigned to be agile, we now turn to look at how to make your F3 Company run smoothly. In Section 3, we look at the nuts and bolts of an F3 Company, covering policies, compensation and benefits, and operations and systems.

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^* Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, The 100 Year Life: Living and Working in the Age of Longevity (Bloomsbury, 2016).

^* Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis, “The New Rules of Talent Management: HR Goes Agile,” Harvard Business Review, March—April 2018.

^* Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis, “The Performance Management Revolution,” Harvard Business Review, October 2016.

^* Anant Agarwal, “Why Today’s Professionals Are Taking the Career Road Less Traveled,” Forbes, October 31, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/anantagarwal/2018/10/31/why-todays-professionals-are-taking-the-career-road-less-traveled/#7ab590e8466b.

^† JPMorgan Chase & Co., “The Next Episode,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/jpmc-2017/the-next-episode/1742/.

^* Reflektive, “Understanding the Difference: Traditional vs. Agile Performance Management,” March 6, 2018, https://www.reflektive.com/blog/agile-performance-management/.

^* Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis, “The New Rules of Talent Management: HR Goes Agile,” Harvard Business Review, March—April 2018.

^* Reflektive, “Understanding the Difference: Traditional vs. Agile Performance Management,” March 6, 2018, https://www.reflektive.com/blog/agile-performance-management/.