Career elevators or stairs? How to create a development system where talent is not lost
Elevators and stairs are classic metaphors for development.
An elevator is about speed. Press the button and you’re already on the right floor.
Stairs are about time and sequence. Step by step, sometimes long, but reliable.
But there is one important point: an elevator cannot work without infrastructure. It needs a shaft, a mechanism, electricity. Without these things, pressing the button will do nothing.
The same applies to personnel development. Technology does not replace the path, but it makes it many times faster. When a company has a competency base, transparent job profiles, regular assessments, and personal development plans, it is no longer just a set of tools. It is an infrastructure on which you can “start the elevator.”
We explain how to do this in this article.
Competency base: the foundation of the development system
For the development system to work, a unified competency base is required. This is the foundation on which job profiles, assessments, and individual development plans are built. Without it, the process becomes chaotic: everyone interprets competencies in their own way, and employees do not understand what is expected of them.
How to structure competencies?
The easiest way is to divide them into three levels:
- Corporate competencies (soft skills) are values and behavioral patterns that unite all employees regardless of their role. Examples include customer focus, teamwork, responsibility, and the ability to adapt to change.
- Hard skills are the knowledge and abilities that define an employee’s expertise within their field of specialization. They show how well a person has mastered the tools of their trade. For example, for a marketer, these are “analytics” and “working with digital,” and for HR, these are “recruiting,” “onboarding,” and “communications.”
- Leadership competencies are skills that determine the ability to manage people, processes, and goals. They are necessary for those who already manage teams or are preparing to do so. Examples include delegation, mentoring, strategic thinking, change management, and management decision-making.
In LMS Collaborator, you can easily create a competency library where each competency has clear behavioral indicators. They can be easily grouped and tagged for convenient sorting. The library can be gradually expanded and adapted to the needs of different teams.
Competency library created in LMS Collaborator
➡️Practical insight: Start with a few competencies that affect your business performance. This will allow you to quickly launch the system, test it, and adapt it to your context. Then expand the list – add new competencies and update existing ones.
Position profiles: from abstraction to specifics
The competency base is just the foundation. But for an employee to see where they can grow, they need a specific job profile: a list of competencies and levels of proficiency.
For example:
- Junior marketer → “content strategy” at level 3/5.
- Senior marketer → level 5/5.
- Junior HR → “recruiting” at level 2/5.
- HRBP → “working with stakeholders” at level 5/5, etc.
The profile creates a transparent “development map” – employees can see where they are now and what they need to improve for the next step.
In LMS Collaborator, you can combine this structure into a single working tool: create a competency library, add behavioral indicators, and combine them into job profiles. The platform allows you to quickly update profiles, add new competencies, and specify the expected level of proficiency.
Creating a position profile in LMS Collaborator
➡️Practical insight: Start with key roles and the most critical competencies for them. Don’t try to describe all positions and all competencies at once. First, create profiles for 3–5 key roles, test them in practice, and then expand to other positions.
Assessment: understanding the current situation and potential
After creating profiles, a key question arises: “Where is each employee now and where can they go?”
Competency assessment helps to see the real picture: strengths, gaps, potential.
There are several assessment formats. Each is useful in its own context:
- 90° – assessed by the manager. Well suited for regular short performance reviews.
- 180° – manager + self-assessment. Allows you to compare how much the manager’s vision coincides with the employee’s own perception.
- 270° – self-assessment, colleagues, manager. Provides an objective view of teamwork and interaction with various parties.
- 360° – subordinates, colleagues, manager, and self-assessment. The most comprehensive format, which allows you to understand not only your strengths but also areas for development in teamwork and leadership skills.
Conducting competency assessments in LMS Collaborator
➡️Practical insight: Don’t make evaluation a “once a year” event. Small, regular snapshots foster a culture of open feedback.
Manual processes are not just inconvenient. They lead to data loss, errors, and delays. Automation through LMS Collaborator allows you to launch assessments with just a few clicks, automatically send out forms, and collect results in real time.
Personal development plans: from assessment to action
Assessment provides answers, but development only begins when a concrete action plan is in place. The manager and employee select two to three key areas for development and formulate an annual or quarterly plan.
In LMS Collaborator, you can create multiple development plans for a single user, for example, for their current role and for their desired career growth. Each plan includes:
- learning activities,
- personal tasks,
- one-to-one for recording meeting results directly in the system.
Example of a development plan created in LMS Collaborator
➡️Practical insight: Personal development plans only work when there is regular feedback. One-to-one meetings help to adjust goals and maintain focus.
How to strike a balance between monitoring the implementation of development plans and employee autonomy?
Myroslav Botsula, CEO of LMS Collaborator, Founder & Mentor of El`Lab
This is a rather individual question, and there is no universal recipe for it. But there are some best practices: divide the development plan into two parts:
1. mandatory “here and now” – hard skills,
2. personal development, long-term – soft skills.“Hard skills” are those that an employee needs to develop in order to effectively perform their current functions and duties; without them, they will not be able to work in the company in their current position. “Soft skills” are those that are desirable to develop for professional and career growth. The mandatory part usually requires strict control with time frames, while soft skills are more autonomous.
The approaches and tools for monitoring the development of hard and soft skills depend on the management style, culture, and stage of development of the company.
If we refer to the theory of management evolution, or Frederick Laloux’s colorful organizations (“Reinventing Organizations”), then ‘red’ organizations (culture of power) and “yellow” organizations (culture of hierarchy and rules) will prefer more rigid control methods. For “hard” organizations, there will be daily reports, testing, and process monitoring, while for “soft” organizations, there will be assessment and adherence to standards of behavior.
In the “orange” culture (culture of success), the development of hard skills is monitored through KPIs and performance reviews, while the development of soft skills is monitored through teamwork and feedback, using 360° surveys.
The “green” (culture of values) will focus on engagement. Self-control and mutual evaluation are used for hard skills, while support, mentoring, and coaching are used for soft skills.
Finally, the “turquoise” (culture of evolution) will have maximum autonomy. Employees themselves form training plans, exchange experiences in professional communities, and are accountable to the team rather than a supervisor.
Therefore, the balance between control and autonomy will be determined by the conditions in which the organization operates and the required management style.
If you are just building a systematic business, start with straightforward “orange” tools (360° assessment, KPI). If you have a self-managed team, give people “turquoise” freedom, where control is replaced by transparency of results.
Career advancement requests: clear rules instead of assumptions
To ensure that development does not stop, employees must have a clear mechanism for transitioning to new roles.
Using the Career Development Requests tool in LMS Collaborator:
Managers can create job lists with a list of requirements for candidates,
and employees can apply for professional development and promotion to a new position.
After submitting the request, the system automatically sends a notification to the manager according to the organizational structure. The manager can:
– accept the request;
– assign appropriate training if the employee lacks sufficient competencies;
– reject the request or send it back for revision.
In case of further development, the employee receives an automatic notification indicating which competencies need to be improved. This makes the process transparent and helps employees understand which skills they need to develop for further growth.
Career development requests
➡️Practical insight: A transparent career request system reduces staff turnover. It allows employees to plan their development and maintains trust in HR processes.
Conclusion
Career elevators do not appear suddenly. First, you need to build a staircase—a development system where each step is clear, achievable, and visible. Only then can technology transform this staircase into a fast and comfortable elevator.
- A unified competency database,
- transparent job profiles,
- regular assessments,
- individual development plans,
- career development requests.
These are not separate HR tools, but a comprehensive system that shapes a culture of growth.
LMS Collaborator helps bring this system together in one place: automating routine processes, making development transparent, and ensuring that people don’t get lost in large structures.
When a company has a clear growth trajectory, everyone knows exactly where they are now and how to climb higher.
Leave a request – we will help make team development simple and fair for everyone.
