Mapping the Next Step: What makes a meaningful career pathway?

By Molly Ingram

Why Understanding Career Pathways Matters

Labor market information is well suited for answering questions such as where jobs are, what they pay, which industries and occupations are growing and what education or training is typically required for different occupations.  However, workers, students, counselors and educators often have a different question: "How do I get from where I am now to one of those opportunities?"

Choosing an occupation is only one part of career planning. Students and workers also need to understand where an entry-level job might lead, what opportunities could build on their experience and what additional skills or training could open the next door. That information can be difficult to piece together from resources organized around individual occupations.

Career maps are one way to make those connections visible. By showing multiple occupations and the potential pathways between them in one place, they can help students and workers imagine not just a first job, but how a career might develop over time. Online maps can also make that information available more broadly, supplementing individualized guidance from counselors, educators and workforce professionals.

Recently, the Minnesota Governor's Workforce Development Board had the opportunity to work with Julius Education and the Workers and Families Fund to develop a Minnesota Electrical Construction and Advanced Manufacturing Career Map. The interactive map allows users to explore individual jobs, identify potential next jobs that build on their existing skills, and compare information about wages, skills, experience and other job requirements

Making career pathways visible

Career pathways aren't a new idea. In some sectors, such as Health Care, licensing, credentials and educational requirements make progression between occupations relatively clear. Apprenticeship programs provide another structured pathway, combining education and on-the-job training as workers advance toward an occupation or higher levels of competency. These types of structured upward progressions are often described as career ladders.

But career pathways are not always linear or contained within a single industry. Workers may have skills that connect them to multiple occupations, industries or sectors, creating something that looks more like a network or career lattice than a ladder, with multiple entry points and possible moves. These connections can be particularly important in emerging or changing sectors, such as clean energy, where employers may need to draw on workers with relevant skills from elsewhere in the economy. They can also help workers see where their skills might lead as labor market conditions change or individual projects come to an end. The Minnesota map, for example, shows a potential pathway from Solar Installer to Commercial Electrician.

Career maps can help make these less-obvious connections visible. Demand for this type of information is already evident in Minnesota, where colleges and high school partners are developing career pathways to help students understand how education and training connect to career opportunities. Many of these efforts occur at the institution or partnership level, raising the question of whether some pathway information and resources could be developed jointly by institutions, industry and workforce development partners and shared across the state. Similar maps have been developed nationally for advanced manufacturing, critical materials, buildings and energy efficiency, and other fields.

What makes a pathway meaningful?

The Minnesota map is an interactive tool for exploring jobs and possible progression pathways within and across five electrical construction and manufacturing industry sectors from entry to senior positions.  For example, selecting Solar Installer, an entry-level position in the Clean Energy Systems and Grid Modernization column, and the up arrow, displays potential next steps, including Commercial Electrician. Looking in the other direction, selecting Commercial Electrician, a mid-level position in the Construction & Retrofitting column, and the down arrow, identifies Solar Installer as one of many potential steppingstone positions.

But what evidence tells us that these two occupations form a meaningful pathway?

One place to start is with what the occupations have in common. Labor market information provides well-established, comparable data on occupations, employment and wages. The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) adds standardized information about skills, knowledge, abilities, work activities and tasks, education, training and experience. Other public resources provide information about certifications, licenses and training programs. Together, this data can identify occupations that share important characteristics and suggest possible pathways between jobs. Although it's important to note that information about skills, credentials and training can come from multiple sources that use different definitions and classification systems, which can make it challenging to combine consistently across occupations.

Online job postings can add another layer of evidence. For example, postings can help show whether employers hiring solar installers and commercial electricians require overlapping skills, credentials or experience. In developing the Minnesota map, Julius analyzed job posting data for overlapping or adjacent skills, experience and credentials. However, postings also have limitations. Many sources and analyses are proprietary, online postings do not represent all employers or occupations equally, and skills and job titles can be described differently across employers and sources.           

Similarities in occupational data or job postings, however, do not necessarily mean that workers can realistically make the transition. A Solar Installer moving into commercial electrical work may need additional training, experience, licensing or other qualifications. Employers, educators, workers and industry experts can help identify those requirements, determine whether a proposed connection makes sense in practice and rule out pathways that appear similar in the data but are not realistic career moves. Julius incorporated this information into the Minnesota map by reviewing potential pathways with subject matter experts and employers. This type of validation can move us from possible pathways suggested by the data toward expected pathways that workers could reasonably pursue.

A third type of evidence that could further support identification of meaningful career pathways is observed pathways: the transitions workers actually make.  Information about occupational transitions could show which occupations commonly serve as stepping stones to other jobs, how frequently workers make transitions, and how those transitions are associated with changes in earnings. For example, rather than only identifying Solar Installer and Commercial Electrician as a plausible and expected connection, researchers could examine whether — and under what circumstances — workers actually make that transition.

Compared with information used to identify possible and expected pathways, however, information about observed occupational transitions is more difficult to access at scale. Existing information about occupational transitions is available from a few sources such as surveys that follow workers over time, resumes and online career profiles. Each has limitations. Surveys such as the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth collect detailed information about workers' occupations over time but cover much smaller groups of workers than administrative employment records. Databases of resumes and online career profiles can provide information for larger groups of workers, but participation varies across occupations and industries, job histories and titles may be incomplete or inconsistent, and many of these data sources are proprietary.

Possible, expected and observed pathways (see Figure 2) provide complementary types of evidence. A pathway does not need to be commonly observed to be meaningful, but information about observed transitions can provide a richer picture of how careers develop in practice. Observed transitions could help confirm that possible or expected pathways are already occurring, identify connections that occupational similarities or expert input alone may miss, and show where seemingly viable pathways do not commonly translate into worker mobility. A lack of observed movement may mean a pathway is unrealistic, but it could also point to barriers that make a transition difficult or to opportunities that workers and employers have not yet recognized. Bringing these perspectives together can provide a more complete understanding of where workers could move, which transitions are realistic and how workers actually move over the course of their careers — and how education and workforce systems can support them.

Where do we go from here?

As the previous sections illustrate, developing meaningful career pathway resources involves both data and coordination challenges. Even with an established methodology, building a map for a new sector is more complicated than substituting a new set of occupations and reproducing the visualization. Researchers and stakeholders must define the scope, bring together and interpret information from multiple sources, validate potential connections and decide which pathways are most useful to show. This work can require substantial time and expertise.

But there are opportunities to make that work easier to repeat, update and share. Improvements in the information and infrastructure supporting each of the three types of pathway evidence — possible, expected and observed — could provide a stronger foundation for developing career pathway resources.

Make possible pathways easier to identify

Substantial information about occupations, skills, credentials, education and training already exists. Making these sources easier to combine could reduce some of the work required to identify potential connections between occupations. That could include greater consistency across definitions and classification systems, better connections between workforce and education data, and improved public access to information from job postings about employer skills and credential needs as well as licensing requirements.  

Make expected pathways easier to develop and validate

This work will always require judgment from employers, educators, workers, workforce professionals and other people with knowledge of how jobs and industries operate in practice. But that does not mean the work must happen separately. Coordinating demand for pathway resources and validating them collaboratively across institutions, industry and workforce development partners could reduce duplication and create resources that can be used and refined more broadly.

Make observed pathways easier to see

The largest information opportunity may be around observed pathways. States already use administrative wage records to follow employment and earnings over time and study how workers move between employers and industries. However, wage records in most states do not identify the occupations workers hold. Some states have begun expanding the information collected through these records, including job titles or occupational information. If collected and classified consistently, this would provide high-quality information making it possible to study occupational transitions across much larger groups of workers, providing another source of evidence for identifying and refining career pathways.

None of these improvements would eliminate the need for researchers and stakeholders to interpret the evidence and make decisions about what belongs in a career map. But they could make pathway information easier to develop, update and share — and provide a stronger evidence base for understanding career mobility beyond any individual map.

Labor market information already provides a strong foundation for understanding where jobs are, what they pay and which opportunities are growing. Better connections among information about skills, credentials, career pathways and worker transitions could build on that foundation to help workers, educators, employers and workforce professionals understand not only where opportunities exist, but how workers can and do move between them over the course of their careers.

Acknowledgements: The author thanks Michael Berndt, president of Inver Hills Community College and Dakota County Technical College, for insights that helped inform this article.