Entry-level career paths to success: A survey and analysis of best practices in transit

Overview

We wanted to learn best practices in transit agencies for creating successful career paths for those who enter the organization via an entry-level job, an apprenticeship, or an internship. How can agencies support the people in those roles and give them clearly marked steps to take to become senior leaders? What types of programs and systems work best?

To get a broad sampling of input, we conducted informal phone, video, and email interviews with titles including: Transit Consultant; CEO; Retired CEO; General Manager; Founder and Human Relations Consultant; Manager of Training and Development; Principal, Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Director of Operations; and Head of Transit.

In addition to sharing their practices, interview subjects made three fundamental points: 

1) Historic precedent is being overcome as senior leadership becomes more diverse and drawn from the ranks but there is still much work to do.

2) Transit organizations in which leadership represents both ridership and rank-and-file demographics in terms of race and gender validate that anyone in the organization can succeed. 

3) Programmatic support and clear feedback are essential in career advancement.

Editorial note: This report refers to entry-level employees, interns, and apprentices. Interns and apprentices are collectively referred to as “early-engagers.”

The questions 

This inquiry started with the question around how transit agencies can help support entry- and lower-level employees and early-engagers for lifelong career advancement, potentially to positions in senior management. Among the details we sought to learn:

-how to cast a broad net for the most candidates (including unlikely prospects)?

-what kind of programming and review processes are required when an organization is really committed to moving its most early-stage employees into lifelong careers? 

-how can mentorships be structured to clear paths forward?

Inherent in these topics are issues of race and class, and the challenges of overcoming long-standing structural systems that serve as barriers to career advancement, most especially for people of color. While the transit industry has grown toward more equitable systems in recent years, all respondents agreed that much work still needs to be done.

It is worthwhile to note that the transit industry’s success is bound up in its willingness to make all levels of the workforce more diverse. To quote one interview subject speaking of transit management in the United States in the 1960s, “Transit was male, very, very white, and very much in decline.” It was both the experience and the belief of all interview subjects that increasing diversity and more equitable organizational structures will be a part of transit’s success in coming years. Successful agencies have diversity and inclusion programs that govern all policies and programs from the executive suite to the earliest stages of employment.

Filling the funnel How do we cast a broad net for the most candidates (including unlikely prospects)?

One consistent obstacle many interview subjects returned to when discussing best practices was the challenge of attracting as wide a variety as possible of candidates for entry-level positions, internships, and apprenticeships. Respondents discussed two basic inflection points in the engagement process:

-before candidates themselves are ready to engage or jobs need to be filled;

-when candidates are looking for positions and positions need to be filled.

The first inflection point focuses on both considering the wider community as a pool of potential, eventual candidates, and making them aware of transit careers even when they themselves are not thinking about engagement. This process can start very early. Specifically, one interview subject’s small agency sponsors more than 15 summer school-group visits to the agency which are coordinated with the municipal summer camps. Other respondents spoke to sending transit employees to elementary schools to both talk about how to ride transit and emphasize transit as an exciting and rewarding career choice.  

This “background engaging” is an ongoing process that can run as a thread through many moments of community interaction and include communications elements like selecting taglines about the benefits of agency employment to be used in agency collateral or promotions unrelated to hiring. Priming the candidate pool with a long view should also include celebrating the diversity of upper management and recounting individual career tracks in moments of public engagement.

When candidates are actively looking for jobs or positions and the agency seeks to fill jobs, interview subjects spoke to alterations in job descriptions and interview questions that might historically have excluded certain candidates. One specific example mentioned by several respondents was either eliminating experience requirements or offering equivalences for experience. “The requirement of five years of experience will shut down a lot of perfectly good candidates,” said one interview subject whose background includes several years in human resources departments. Instead of or alongside a years’-defined requirement, job descriptions can also be phrased in terms of the personal qualities which will help the candidate achieve the goals of the position. For example, instead of demanding a traditional work history, consider asking candidates to articulate how they have overcome a difficulty or achieved an unlikely goal through their personal skills or commitment.  

“Lots of good candidates will have no experience, but possess the right acumen, it’s just not apparent yet,” said one transit CEO. Another said, “Passion and willingness are the greatest job skills.”

Other pragmatic ideas that emerged included:

-Making interview times and locations convenient for a wide variety of candidates, including those who have other employment or family duties. Interviews and career fairs that are scheduled on weekends or after typical work hours can be supportive of many candidates who would otherwise not have the time to meet with potential employers. 

-Offering childcare during interview times can also be helpful in widening the potential talent pool.   

-Extending job and intern announcements to social programs that serve transitional-aged youth, including those who have been in the foster care system or whose parents have been in the criminal justice system.

The output of structural support What kind of programming and review processes are required when an organization is really committed to moving its most early-stage employees into lifelong careers? What does meaningful structural support look like?  

Succession plans 

The most important element in creating an organization in which everyone feels like there is a place for them to advance is to build a strong succession plan. Succession planning involves looking at each job function and asking what steps anyone would need to take to fill that role. It also involves looking at each role and considering what next steps are necessary for the person in that role to advance to the next job function. This rigorous internal process can take more than a year and is often conducted with an outside consultant. The succession plan itself provides a meaningful roadmap for advancement; the process of succession planning and the plan’s existence create an environment in which genuine career advancement is credible. To quote one interview subject, “A succession plan creates a transparent system that allows everyone to know who is interested in advancing to another position and what it takes to get there.”

Programming best practices

With the assumption that a succession plan exists, or that the organization is committed to building one, many programs and processes can demonstrate and facilitate internal career growth.

From the early-engagement perspective, consider: 

-Offering paid internships and apprenticeships. If the agency budget cannot support this, are there unions, community foundations, or private employers that can?

-Offering college credit for early-engagement activities.

All but one agency interviewed had formal internship programs. The agency that did not have a formal program regularly reached out to community colleges and worked with administrators and instructors to co-create projects that met both agency needs and academic requirements.  

-Building in activities related to the internship or apprenticeship which can be conducted asynchronistically or on the intern’s own time, and setting deadlines for the submission of work accordingly. For example, an intern who is collecting social media data analytics does not need to be on-site at a certain hour to do so. This can allow participants to keep other jobs necessary to their stability while still getting the credit for and benefit of engagement with your organization (and getting your organization’s needs met).

For early-engagement roles or full employment, consider:

-When a role would benefit from being filled by someone with a high school diploma or GED, might it be possible to support the completion of those milestones within the job or program itself, rather than excluding candidates who have not completed that work? For example, can the transit program fulfill high school credits or can GED study time or topics be built into the role?

-Offering on-the-job accommodations for learning disabilities. 

-Working with social service agencies that offer supported-employment programs. These programs use their own employees or volunteers or sometimes pay internal partners to provide on-the-job support to workers with a wide range of disabilities.  

Mentoring

Mentorship and mentoring can take many forms, structured and spontaneous, but all interview subjects agreed mentoring is essential to career advancement and that organizational support for mentoring creates an “advancement-friendly” workplace.

As one training and development lead expressed it, “The path to the C-suite at a transit agency could become more reachable with mentorship from executive management.” But not all mentoring needs to be from the executive level. Peer mentoring is often more effective because employees are less anxious about performing well for peers than for management. Some respondents also spoke to cross- and reverse-mentoring, in which higher-level employees spend time with rank-and-file workers to more clearly learn their roles and experiences.

By far the most common organizational mentoring programs centered around shadowing and job-switching. One agency ran “spend a day” events in which employees are partnered so they could get a quick view of what each other’s job was like. The same agency’s “walk in my shoes” experiences could last a week or up to a month. Some job-switching programs lasted six months. At this agency, quarterly mentoring/shadow days in which entry-level employees shadow management were common. 

However brief or lengthy the experience, job switching doesn’t just broaden the experience of all employees. It also creates connections between management who will have internal roles to fill and the candidates they know can fill those roles. One interview subject said, “That has yielded all kinds of results. People get interested and develop a bond so when it's time to promote someone and they apply for a position, it's not the first time they’ve met.”

Training

All interview subjects agreed that training is essential to a healthy, growing organization. To quote one interview subject, “Our values are in our budget! So, we must invest, heavily, in the development of our existing, diverse talent and staff.”

What distinguishes the training programs of organizations with equitable, promising internal growth?  

-They are strategic, needs-based, and continuously data-driven. Understanding what training is needed, and whether the training was useful and provided a return on investment, is vital to organizational success.  

-They are promoted agency-wide; potential candidates do not have to search for information. In some cases, the training is open to candidates for whom it is not designed, in order to widen the organizational knowledge base and the pool of potential cross-promotional candidates.   

-Training is offered in a variety of formats. For example, materials are available via mobile app and in different media, including in-person, video, and in written format.

-Periodic assessment is included in training materials. This creates pauses in content delivery that can allow learners to return to topics they have not completely absorbed.

-Community partners are engaged whenever possible and credits are provided. A transit CEO interviewed said, “Many promising employees have the deep understanding and love of the transit industry but might not yet have the skillset for supervision, including writing and basic computer skills.” This executive’s agency partnered with local colleges to create supervisory skill training specific to the agency’s needs, and paid tuition for these courses.

Evaluation and feedback

The problem with most employee evaluations, said one interviewee, is that they address “…what is on the document in order to be competent in your current role, but it doesn't always show what you need to advance.”

Instead of thinking in terms of performance reviews, which suggest a backward glance, consider evaluations as opportunities to clear a path for forward advancement. This can start by designing evaluations in collaboration with your employees. Their input is critical to creating evaluations that help get the best from the team. Don’t assume you know what they want in terms of achievement. And don’t tie all advancement goals to their day-to-day responsibilities. 

Shape the evaluation discussion around employee progress, what kind of work they like doing, and where they see their career headed. Create short- and long-term measurable goals that help them work towards these outcomes. Have regular check-ins and adapt goals where necessary to reflect progress. Discuss advancement obstacles and work out how to access resources to make sure employees meet their goals. 

Employees can feel empowered by your organization when self-reviews are incorporated into the evaluation process. “Once your team sees that their input is valued and used, they'll feel much closer to the organization and will naturally be more motivated,” said one director of operations.

Your organization will need its own evaluation processes to understand how healthy your employment environment is and where improvement is needed. Some of that data can come from truly anonymous employee surveys at all levels, with a specific focus on the quality of the workplace and the level of happiness employees experience. Consider asking questions like, “Would you share a job opportunity with a family member?”  

How do you know if your internal processes are supporting advancement? Check out your hire rate and aim for at least half of your employees to be internal hires. Regularly assess the last five new hires and what they have in common as well as the last five people to leave your organization. Pattern-match to find shared characteristics.

Takeaways

Transit agencies that are sincere about creating vertical career paths for entry-level employees and early-engagers have three distinguishing characteristics:

-They view all programs and processes through a diversity and inclusion lens;

-They expand their thinking to include previously unconsidered approaches;

-They set genuine goals for career advancement and rigorously assess their progress.

The most successful agencies consider very early community engagement elemental to bringing in the broadest base of candidates, reaching out to local youth to demonstrate the benefits of working with the agency long before they have jobs to fill. They consistently tell the stories of their employees and leadership, especially when there are opportunities to showcase individuals who reflect the demographics of their constituency and those who have achieved vertical career growth. When it comes time for candidates to apply for positions, the agency takes steps to facilitate that process for the broadest candidate pool, such as offering interview and testing times outside regular office hours and modifying education and experience requirements.

Transit organizations that are building paths to career success for their workforces have clear succession plans so all stakeholders understand what advancement opportunities are available and how they can be achieved. They create programming that supports a variety of learning styles and consistently offer training and career enrichment opportunities. Organizational support for mentoring is critical. Active mentoring programs work best but whether they exist or not, creating an atmosphere of mentoring is necessary to validate that the organization is serious about a growth environment.   

The evaluation process is ongoing in transit organizations that are truly committed to career advancement. Feedback is provided in the context of what is necessary for the employee to grow.