ID108 Creating Clear Career Pathways and Internal Talent Mobility for IDS Staff

The Idea

This proposal sets out a practical approach to improving career progression and internal mobility for IDS staff, with potential to scale across Professional Services. 

There is currently no clear, structured career pathway for Professional Services staff within Information and Digital Services (IDS), which can result in colleagues becoming “stuck” in roles without transparent or consistent routes for progression. This proposal is to develop a transparent, tiered career framework for all IDS Professional Services roles, clearly defining role levels, core competencies, learning and development expectations, and progression routes. 

The framework would operationalise the Technician Commitment Action Plan by providing equity and clarity of progression comparable to the well‑established academic “Golden Thread” (i.e., the structured academic progression and promotion pathways, with clear criteria and levels). It would align IDS roles with recognised sector frameworks and best practice, including the Keele Technician Commitment and relevant professional standards such as the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), ensuring the approach builds on established models rather than reinventing them.  

Alongside the framework, the proposal introduces a voluntary Talent Registry supported by Human Resources (HR), enabling staff to opt in to signal interest in progression opportunities (for example, acting-up arrangements, project roles, secondments, higher-level roles, or shadowing opportunities to improve perceived “experience gap”). Together, these elements would provide a coherent, transparent approach to career development and internal mobility for IDS staff. 

Why This Idea Should Be Considered

Clear and visible career pathways are strongly linked to improved retention, engagement, and organisational performance. Within Information and Digital Services (IDS), many Professional Services colleagues currently perceive limited opportunity for progression, which can lead to disengagement or staff leaving the University entirely. While this challenge is particularly visible in IDS due to the specialist and rapidly evolving nature of digital roles, similar patterns are likely to exist across other Professional Services areas. This proposal therefore uses IDS as a focused starting point, with the intention that a successful model could be adapted more widely across the University. 

There is also an evidence base that learning and development (L&D) is associated with retention outcomes, including reduced intention to leave, which supports the case for a framework that makes development expectations and progression routes explicit (see: GOV.UK – Rapid review on L&D, engagement, attraction and retention (Cabinet Office / Government Skills). 

Retention is also a financial and operational issue. Evidence frequently highlights that replacing an experienced employee can cost a significant proportion of their annual salary once recruitment, onboarding, lost productivity, and management time are considered, and costs can rise further for specialist or technical roles (see: HRMorning – Real cost of employee turnover – and Ballards LLP – Costs behind staff turnover & retention). 

Turnover benchmarks also vary depending on how they are measured; for example, CIPD analysis using ONS Annual Population Survey data reports annual UK “churn” (movement between employers or leaving work) of around one-third of workers over the measured period (Jan 2022–Dec 2023), underlining the importance of managing retention and internal mobility effectively (see: CIPD – Benchmarking employee turnover). 

By strengthening internal progression and mobility, Keele can make better use of existing capability, reduce reliance on external recruitment, improve succession planning, and protect institutional knowledge. This approach aligns with the University’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) principles by ensuring access to progression is transparent, merit‑based, and open to all eligible staff.

How We Would Implement This Idea

Keele could introduce a structured development process for internal staff that supports progression at every stage. This would be underpinned by clearly defined competencies for each role level, creating a shared understanding between staff, managers, and HR of what is required to progress. 

SFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age) is a widely used framework that defines professional skills and levels of responsibility, helping organisations describe roles, competencies, and career progression in a consistent and structured way. This could be used as a reference point for structuring levels, as it defines seven levels of responsibility and describes progression through increasing autonomy, influence, and complexity, alongside professional skills and behavioural factors (see SFIA: How SFIA works). This provides a recognised “common language” that can help ensure consistency and fairness in how roles, expectations, and readiness for progression are described across IDS.  

HR could support this by enhancing the internal recruitment experience, providing constructive follow-up after unsuccessful applications, including tailored feedback, recommended development activities, and guidance on strengthening future applications. Internal staff would also be supported through access to targeted continuing professional development (CPD), short secondments, and mentoring opportunities aligned to the career framework. 

To address known barriers to internal mobility, the framework should recognise and incentivise managers who actively develop and enable staff progression beyond their immediate teams. Success would therefore be measured not only by individual progression outcomes, but by departments’ contribution as effective “talent engines” for the wider University. 

While IDS would provide the initial structured pathway, progression would not be limited to IDS roles. The framework would explicitly recognise transferable skills, enabling staff to map their experience and development to Professional Services roles across the University and supporting a more agile internal labour market. 

In time, this approach could be scaled beyond IDS to provide a consistent career development and internal mobility model across all Professional Services. This would support movement between specialist and non-specialist areas by recognising transferable skills (for example, enabling colleagues to move from IDS into Student Services, Registry, Finance, HR, Research Support, or other service areas). By creating a shared language for skills, behaviours, and levels, the framework would help staff identify viable pathways across the institution, not only within their current functional area (supported by the consistent level definitions described in SFIA: How SFIA works). 

What Success Would Look Like

Success would be underpinned by an initial Skills Audit across IDS, establishing a clear baseline of existing capability against the defined career framework. Building on this baseline, a key indicator of success would be the proportion of IDS staff with an agreed Development Map embedded within their annual Staff Performance Review and Enhancement (SPRE), explicitly aligned to the competencies required at the next career level. 

Over time, success would be evidenced by increased internal readiness for progression, improved retention, reduced recruitment gaps, and a stronger internal pipeline of candidates for roles across the University. Managers would spend less time responding to turnover and mitigating knowledge loss, while staff would have clear, evidence based development plans that support progression.  

Culturally, success would be reflected in a shift towards proactive development and internal mobility, with staff moving more fluidly across teams and progression driven by skills, readiness, and aspiration rather than vacancy-led opportunity—including increased movement between Professional Services areas where skills are transferable (for example, IDS into Student Services, HR or other service areas and vice versa).