Footprints on the moon

There’s a well-known quote by Norman Vincent Peale: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” For our Sam’s Club field learning and development team, creating lifelong learners and leaders who want to grow their careers with the company has been our moonshot.

The past 18 months have heightened the need to shift the way we think about associate career development opportunities and reskilling. The field learning and development team was witnessing this evolution of thought happening in real time and identified the problem statement: If associates are confident in what they’re doing and they can see a clear path for their career, they’re more likely to stay with the company even through deeply challenging times, such as being an essential business during a worldwide pandemic. So, if we can provide support to associates in charting their careers through knowledge gain, on-the-job experiences, reskilling and goal setting, we may help increase tenure and reduce turnover.

We kicked off our initial research in 2020 to confirm our hypothesis that there’s a connection between career pathing and tenure by conducting focus groups with management and salaried associates across the U.S. Through these conversations, it was consistently revealed that associates were unclear about the career paths that exist outside their facilities or departments, which made them unsure of the skills they needed for the next step in their career journey. Confirming the hypothesis combined with our culture of growth and focus on promoting talent from within, we knew as a field learning and development team that we needed to evolve our approach to upskilling and career development.

Our team also felt it was important to go out into the field and conduct ethnographic research to confirm the focus group findings and refine the initial goals we had identified so we could better support associates in charting their careers through knowledge gain, on-the-job experiences, reskilling and goal setting. Ethnographic research differs from traditional focus groups in that in addition to asking questions, the researcher also observes the individual(s) as they complete their work. Through the ethnographic research model, the team observed, analyzed for insights and made recommendations. During the observation phase, the team listened and observed associate behavior and interactions in their natural environment, communication patterns, workflows or tasks, and how knowledge was transferred. During the insights phase, the team analyzed their field notes to describe the environment, associate behaviors, sensory impressions, themes from conversations, culture and learning context. Finally, the team made recommendations focused on insights, questions, processes and associate learning experiences. Halfway through these scheduled trips, all travel halted due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this, the team stayed true to the ethnographic research model by pivoting to a virtual approach to conducting observations and collecting associate feedback.

Several themes became apparent as the team observed, analyzed for insights and began to formulate recommendations:

• Some associates were uncertain of what they wanted to do from a career perspective, were unsure of what other areas of the club were like or felt they had reached the position they wanted.
• Associates had different needs when it came to plotting out their careers. Some needed stability and were satisfied with what they were currently doing. And some wanted to try out several different areas of the club. Meanwhile, some wanted to be challenged and move into roles that made them a little uncomfortable to help them grow and develop more quickly.
• A set path did not exist. No two associates interviewed had gotten to their current roles in the same way.
• Associates weren’t sure how to get the training they needed to help prepare them for future roles.

These findings were coupled with the reality that the retail industry is quickly and actively changing. Roles that exist today might look very different tomorrow. The team needed to prepare associates for roles as they exist now and provide upskilling for roles that will exist in the future — hence the name of the initiative that was introduced as a solution to the problem: Career Futuring: Finding your Future @Sam’s Club.

Based on our research and analysis, Career Futuring was created to be a digital experience on an associate’s mobile device where they would be able to IMAGINE the future they want to achieve, UNDERSTAND the possible career opportunities available to them within the club, and EMPOWER them with insights, resources and training on the skills needed to achieve their goals.

IMAGINE your future @Sam’s Club

The goal of Career Futuring is to provide tools that enable associates to chart their careers effectively over time and incorporate future projections of how jobs will evolve. It starts with a personalized landing page that welcomes associates and invites them to explore the site and its offerings. Additionally, to address uncertainty about career preferences and values, we provided an assessment to enable associates to identify where their strengths and preferences fall. The IMAGINE your future @Sam’s Club section helps associates focus on their strengths and what they are passionate about and how they can apply this in the workplace to make a difference in each role throughout their career.

UNDERSTAND the possibilities @Sam’s Club

The Career Futuring platform is also centered around the concept of helping associates understand that it is okay to have different career paths to reach their goal and that not one associate has the same path. Using what we had learned from associates during the research, we developed four “career themes” or “career personas”:

• Stable: A role that you are currently in, enjoy and don’t intend to leave any time soon.
• Stretch: A role, project or task given to you that is beyond your current knowledge or skills to “stretch” you developmentally.
• Gig: A temporary role where you will work in a specific area in a specific role to gain more hours, build your skills or engage your desire to learn many different things.
• Destination: A role that you aspire to reach in your career, which might include a role within the club or in your market, region, satellite offices, home office or international.

Within each of these themes or personas, we decided to move away from the traditional career pathing approach that shows general suggestions for moving through the organization. Reflecting on the pandemic environment and the need for associates to have peer-to-peer connections, we identified an opportunity to facilitate these connections through the power of storytelling. We can highlight the career journeys of associates who identified with each career theme or persona through associate-driven sketches. The career theme or persona sketches highlight not only the prior positions held by the associates to show the path each took but also the key skills that each associate felt had most helped them get to where they are and the skills that they thought would be most valuable in the future for their role. The personalized storytelling approach helped associates realize how achievable a promising career at Sam’s Club could be.

Another great aspect of this platform is the automated survey tool the team embedded into it that enables any associate to share their career story and have it turned into a sketch. The ability to connect associates across the company helped create and foster an inclusive environment, even in a virtual setting. These sketches show our 95,000 associates that you can start at any position and still achieve your career goals.

EMPOWER with insights, resources and skills training @Sam’s Club

As associate sketches continued to be entered into the platform, it became evident that providing the training content needed to upskill associates would be critical as they begin cross-training in new areas. Offering a world of available, curated learning content based on workgroups in the club where associates can easily cross-train and expand their knowledge became an additional component of the Career Futuring platform.

We also leveraged the information gathered in the associate sketches and used the crowdsourced data to determine what skills to focus on in the Future Skills section. It was an excellent way for the team to get end-user insights into what associates felt they most needed to be trained on across the business. Our top concerns from associates about upskilling in preparation for the changing retail industry were digital acumen, empathy and critical thinking/problem-solving skills.

Associate adoption and feedback

The soft launch of the Career Futuring platform occurred in August 2020. Even with limited formal communication about the program, we still had more than 500 visits and 49 associate sketches entered. The following year, a formal launch was conducted, which led to 220 new sketches created by associates. Since the initial launch, traffic has continued to increase quarter over quarter by an average of 45 percent.

Beyond these metrics, the Career Futuring platform enabled us to highlight the diversity of our associate base. Through the Associate Sketch collection, we gained new and direct insight into the skills front-line associates desired to obtain and better understood their career goals. And perhaps most important, the Associate Sketches helped spark a mindset in associates that “if they can do it, I can do it too,” expanding the possibilities of career futures for everyone.

Although we can’t draw a direct line between Career Futuring and retention, developing our associates and providing career paths is a crucial factor. During the 2021 holiday season, Sam’s Club was at full employment. This demonstrates we are on the right track with influencing turnover where learning and career development are concerned.

We continue to shoot for the moon to create lifelong learners and leaders, but our aim is to land among the stars.

The Career Futuring platform shows associates the limitless opportunities and ways to achieve their career dreams at Sam’s Club. Where our associates can achieve anything they want to, they too can shoot for the moon, and reach it.