How do you build a career strategy that lasts?

Establishing a North Star.

Charles River began its career strategy work in 2022, with a focused review of employees’ career experiences. Working with The Career Innovation Company, it drew on surveys, focus groups with employees and leaders and discussions with executives, alongside an audit of existing career resources. This early work explored employee needs, the career experience across the business and the priorities the strategy would need to support.

The findings exposed familiar challenges. Career experiences varied across the organisation. Employees knew opportunities existed, but could not always see how to access jobs, learning or mentors. Leaders, too, lacked the information to guide them. Career growth was often understood and seen as a promotion, leaving people feeling stuck if they could not see a step upwards.

Before choosing new tools or technology to tackle these challenges, Charles River established a career vision and a set of guiding principles. Its vision states: “Charles River succeeds when we empower all employees to learn and provide access to career development.” And the principles recognise that careers are unique, that people should play an active role in their growth, and that opportunities must take account of both employee aspirations and organisational needs. The principles also commit the organisation to supporting people to develop their skills and careers, encouraging different types of career journey, and providing access to development opportunities based on organisational needs and employee aspirations.

These became a “North Star” for Charles River in subsequent decisions about resources, programmes and technology, helping it assess whether new initiatives support career ownership and access to opportunities. The vision and principles provided a way to make those choices as the business changed, rather than treating each new initiative as a fresh starting point.

An ecosystem that evolves.

The resulting career ecosystem has developed over time. Today, it includes career stories, dedicated career months, webinars, toolkits, an intranet resource and a commitment to work to improve clarity about roles. Each initiative addresses a different need, but all are anchored to the same strategy. The career stories have proved particularly useful in helping the strategy to come alive. By showing the varied routes colleagues have taken, career stories help employees at Charles River see possibilities beyond promotion and make connections with people whose experiences interest them.

Charles River has also brought its career development resources together on a dedicated intranet page and revisited them as needs have evolved. This gives employees a clearer place to find support, while the continuing work on role clarity helps them understand possible directions for growth. These resources are expressions of the career strategy, rather than separate strategies in themselves.

The latest addition is Career Hub, an AI-powered, skills-based platform designed to make opportunities, career pathways and learning more visible. It also helps employees make connections and gives the organisation greater insight into skills and talent. Charles River sees this latest development as an evolution of its strategy, which had long recognised the need for better technology-enabled career navigation.

Technology can connect resources and provide more personalised guidance at scale. However, employees still need meaningful career conversations. And because of this, leaders and employees need the skills and confidence to take the next step.

Same challenges. Evolving solutions.

Charles River has experienced changes in market conditions, workforce expectations and leadership. The tools available to support careers have changed as well. Yet the underlying needs it identified have remained clear: employees want visibility, guidance, development support – and the confidence to act. As Charles River puts it: “Same challenges. Evolving solutions.”

The lesson is to build a strategy around those enduring challenges, while allowing the solutions to develop. A strong strategy does not eliminate change; it helps Charles River navigate it without losing sight of where it is trying to go. Charles River is looking for greater visibility and career ownership among employees; better career conversations and support from leaders; and stronger skills visibility, internal mobility and workforce agility for the organisation. And these ambitions can be summed up in three words: visibility, confidence and action.

Our view: the anchor needs to outlast the initiative.

Here at The Career Innovation Company, we see the Charles River experience as an example of how clear career principles help an organisation respond to change. Talent marketplaces, skills-based working and AI each bring new possibilities and pressures. And yet, having a career vision and principles aligned with organisational values provides an anchor through each wave.

Reaching clarity around vision and principles that are built to last need not require a lengthy strategy programme. What it requires is a focused effort to understand the business, bring the right people together and agree just a handful of explicit principles that can have a lasting return. In a complex organisation, leaving those principles unstated can prove costly, because it allows different functions and locations to make their own assumptions about what career development means.

Programmes and platforms continue to evolve – and they always will. It is the principles that lie beneath that help to keep the employee experience of careers an overwhelmingly positive one.