Skill-Based Career Progression Lattices

Navigating Your Way to Success

Workforce Solutions Rural Capital Area (WSRCA) is committed to empowering employers and job seekers by identifying best practices in workforce development and delivering programs and tools to leverage the existing knowledge and skills of workforce customers to set them on a pathway to career success. 

The WSRCA Skill-Based Career Progression Lattices are designed to address this objective by visibly highlighting the dynamics of strategic career mobility and the importance of a skilled workforce.

It can be difficult for workers searching for career enhancement to identify personalized pathways to reach their professional goals. But rather than a fixed stair-step career ladder, career progression more often takes place along a lattice model that incorporates lateral or even downward movement, depending on life circumstances, but reinforces upward mobility through upskilling, and is much more representative of today’s work life experience.

The Rural Capital Area career progression lattices flow from an anchor or entry-level occupation and encompass all 39 of the approved Target Occupations identified as most in demand in the region, that also pay a self-sufficient wage of at least $18.00 per hour. 

The upward movement on a lattice is a function of a worker’s employment experience, plus any additional skills they can acquire through either formal or informal means. While there is no such thing as a skill that has no value, some skills have much higher remunerative value than others. More importantly, many of them are just as easily acquired at an affordable central Texas community college or technical college training program, as at a four-year university.

Navigating your way to career success requires a roadmap and guidance that starts with a career objective or earnings goal, and offers a strategy for where time, effort and financial resources are to be invested to achieve those higher professional aspirations. Useful labor market information, including a career progression lattice, and good career decision-making, can make the journey easier.

Regional economic health rises as workers increase their skill portfolios, and earnings capacity. Career progression lattices reinforce upward mobility possibility and jump start that journey to higher skill, higher wage jobs.

A career lattice helps you visualize a path for occupational mobility and focus attention on personal development. When combined with guidance and support from our WSRCA Talent Development Team, career lattices can be utilized to layout career goals, identify action steps, measure progress, and keep you heading in the right direction.

Download "The Future Is Ahead of You" report on Career Progressions in the Rural Capital Area.