Setup Considerations: career paths

What this achieves

A career path is a route between roles that your company is prepared to state out loud. Deciding how many routes you publish, and how specific each one is, is harder to change later than the paths themselves, because employees start planning against what they read.

Decision 1: do you need paths at all yet

Paths are not the only way growth works in Humavera. An employee can declare an aspiration, be scored for readiness against any role, and work a development plan without a single path existing.

Option	Description
No paths yet	Employees name a target role directly and are scored against it. Fastest to start, and it costs nothing.
Published paths	You state the routes. Employees see recommended next steps from their current role and can search for a route between two roles.

Publish paths when you can answer “what comes after this job” the same way twice. If two people in your People team would answer differently, the path is not ready to be published.

Example: HC Corp UK Ltd’s Engineering department has a settled progression from engineer to senior engineer. Its Operations department does not yet. Publishing one path is a reasonable first step; inventing the second to be even is not.

Decision 2: a path is built on job profiles, not job titles

Every step in a path points at a job profile. That has two consequences worth understanding before you start.

A role with no job profile cannot be a step.
What a step requires comes from that profile’s mapped skills and competencies, not from anything you type on the path.

The Transition Requirements field on a step is free text for a human to read. It does not affect readiness scoring or gap analysis.

Example: writing “three years in role and a mentoring record” as a transition requirement at HC Corp tells the reader what is expected. It does not make readiness scoring measure either of those things.

Decision 3: how granular to make a step

A step is a role, not a grade band and not a task. Modelling every grade as its own step produces a path nobody can finish; modelling three levels as one step produces a path that says nothing.

Option	Description
One step per job profile	The intended shape. Each step is a role somebody can actually hold.
One step per grade	Produces long paths with steps that are not distinct jobs, and each step still needs its own job profile.

Steps carry a Typical Duration (months), which drives the time estimates an employee sees when they explore the path. An honest estimate is worth more than a flattering one — it is the number people quote back at you.

Decision 4: one path per family, or branching paths

Steps chain through Previous Steps and Next Steps, so a path is not obliged to be a straight line. One step can lead to more than one next step.

Option	Description
A linear path	Simple to read. Right where progression genuinely is a ladder.
A branching path	One path holds a fork, such as a split into a technical track and a management track. Keeps the shared early steps in one place.
Separate paths	Two independent routes with no shared steps. Right when the early roles genuinely differ.

Each path has one Entry Point and one Terminal step, and setting a second replaces the first rather than adding one. Decide which role is the entrance before you build, because changing it later moves the start of the route everyone has been reading.

Example: an engineering path at HC Corp UK Ltd that branches at senior engineer, into a staff-engineer step and a management step, keeps one entry point and states both destinations. Two separate paths would duplicate the first two steps and drift apart the first time either is edited.

Decision 5: draft or active

A path is not visible in employee career exploration until it is active. That makes draft the right place to build, and activation a deliberate publication.

Archiving retires a path without deleting it. Deleting is permanent and the interface says so. Prefer archiving, for the same reason you prefer it anywhere else: someone will ask next year why a person was told a particular route existed.

Where automatically generated paths fit

A path can be marked with an AI badge, meaning Humavera generated it rather than a person drawing it. Treat one as a proposal, not a decision. Read its steps, correct the ones that do not match how your company actually promotes people, and activate it yourself.

What is expensive to change later

Decision	Cost of changing later
The job profile behind a step	High. It is what readiness and gap analysis compare against, so changing it changes every score read against that step.
The entry point	Medium. It moves where the route starts for everyone reading it.
Step order and chaining	Medium. Employees exploring the path see a different route than the one they planned against.
Typical duration	Low to change, high in credibility. People remember the estimate they were given.
Path name, code, job family	Low. Codes are generated if you leave them blank.

What happens next

Once a path is active, it appears in career exploration, and employees can set one of its steps as their target and be scored against it. Everything downstream of that — readiness, gap analysis, recommended courses — depends on the job profiles behind the steps rather than on the path itself, so a well-shaped path over thin profiles still produces thin advice.