Ten years ago, career pathways in the Australian Public Service lacked visibility and consistency, making career development challenging for both employees and HR leaders. In response, it developed a new virtual tool to enable personalised, skills-based career development pathways.

APS Career Pathfinder’s story begins nearly ten years ago. In 2016, the federal government set up a program called Building Digital Capability. This program aimed to uplift the digital capability of the APS to improve Australian government services. 

A key element of that program was the development of career pathways for digital professionals. However, initial iterations of these pathways lacked visibility and consistency, which created two challenges. 

Firstly, employees found it difficult to navigate career options and to understand how to build digital skills for career progression, says Jo Cantle, Director of APS Professions.             

In addition to this, the APS’s agencies struggled to identify and develop workforce capabilities in alignment with rapidly evolving needs. 

“Without a common language, we couldn’t really understand or compare where there were real shortages and if those shortages were a result of volume requirements or rarity of skill,” says Cantle.     

“Historically, career pathways were very linear and static,” she says. “Say you wanted to become a Chief Information Officer, you’d see the path you’d have to take. But that wasn’t appealing to us because everybody’s journey is different. Everybody wants different things and has different skills. We wanted to take more of a practical and personalised approach.”  

Developing the solution

To that end, the team decided they needed a contemporary, future-fit solution – and where they landed has put them in the running for AHRI’s Best Use of Technology Award, which will be announced on 5 December at the Award and Scholarship ceremony in Melbourne.

The team began with developing a capability model for the APS and investigating appropriate skills frameworks, settling on the SFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age), largely for its levels of responsibility. Next, they started mapping skills to roles from scratch by collecting data directly from practitioners.  

“I ran about 30 workshops with specialists in different disciplines,” says Nicholson.

Nicholson, lead capability architect at the APS. “For example, I got a room full of business analysts and a room of system analysts, and asked them, ‘What are the roles you have? What skills do you need for these roles?’” 

He transformed the resulting data sets into handcrafted skills maps, which allowed users to see the skills required for various roles across the APS and compare them with their own skill set. However, the static diagrams’ limitations soon became clear. 

“Drawing diagrams is very labour intensive – it’s a lot of effort to put them together,” says Nicholson. “I thought, there must be a better way of doing this, and it would be wonderful if we could make maps customised to each person.” 

Nicholson asked audiences how they’d like to experience the data. Overwhelmingly, the users asked for an interactive solution. So, in 2019, Grant asked the market how that could be built. Several software developers responded with ideas.

“That’s what led to the development of Career Pathfinder,” says Nicholson. “We took this concept from what were static pages, and turned it into an online tool.”

Find out who will take home an award at the 2025 AHRI Awards and Scholarships program in Melbourne on 5 December. Join your peers to celebrate the very best in Australian HR. Book your spot today.

How does Career Pathfinder benefit the user? 

Employees enter their skills – those required in their current role, plus any others they have, into Career Pathfinder either manually or by uploading their CV and allowing AI to extract their skillset then refining the results. 

In response, the platform shows the user which roles in the APS are a good match for their skillset. If there’s a strong match, users can click through to advertised jobs for more details.

This is of particular benefit to users who may not be familiar with government language. Also, if there’s not a strong match, but a user is interested in the role, they can see which skills they need to develop and be shown training that will help them gain those skills over time. All of this can be saved to a plan. 

“Before we came along with Pathfinder, to know what skills are required by different roles in the APS, you’d have to wait for a job to be advertised,” says Nicholson.  

“Pathfinder makes them all available all the time. So even if there’s no job currently advertised for an enterprise architect, for example, you could find out what skills are required and start your learning journey to get there.” 

“As we see the rapid evolution of AI, and, in the future, quantum technologies, we’ll have the ability to add to those skills and roles. We won’t be trying to put those things in two, three or five years after the roles are here, and it’s ancient history.” –  Jo Cantle, Director of APS Professions.       

Consequently, Career Pathfinder empowers users to see their career paths as skills-based, fluid and accessible, rather than a linear, promotion-based and often opaque model. 

“People can explore their full career potential based on their set of skills, which might not directly relate to any role, but might relate indirectly to lots of them,” says Nicholson. 

“You may be a practitioner in one area but then discover you have most of the skills required to be a practitioner in another area entirely.”

For example, were a technology architect to enter their skills, they’d learn that they have the same skills required to become a security architect, bar one: a much higher level of knowledge of information security. That person could then undertake study in this area to qualify for the new role. 

“We’ve had a lot of feedback from people who’ve put their skills in and have been like, ‘I didn’t even know I was only missing these few skills and then I could go into another role.’”

Now that digital tools are ubiquitous in most workplaces, Career Pathfinder can help people uncover and articulate the specific digital skills that they might not have recognised.

A powerful tool for workforce planning      

Just as Career Pathfinder enables the user to explore and plan career pathways flexibly, it enables HR to conduct workforce planning with evidence.

“There’s a whole side of [the platform] you can’t see from the public view,” says Nicholson. “You can conduct talent searches and export data about staff – though there are privacy controls, so that people can, for example, opt not to be discovered as having certain skills.” 

HR practitioners from other public service organisations(Federal, state and local) can enter their own capability frameworks and explore possibilities, while keeping their data entirely private. 

This is an extremely powerful tool for HR managers, says Cantle.

“Whether it’s strategy and workforce planning, or learning and development, it helps inform HR of the skills needed, and of what different roles look like at different levels.

“We can see where there are significant gaps, and determine how to attract, develop and retain practitioners now and into the future.”

On top of that, the platform’s precision, in terms of skill mapping, enables HR to strategise learning and development in a highly targeted way. 

“While you could write up a series of learning based on someone’s role, that may be making the assumption that the individual either has [no foundational skills in this area] or has a particular starting point,” says Nicholson.  

“Whereas, if we start with their actual skills, when we give a recommendation, we can say, ‘We know what skills you already have, so we can offer you the learning for each gap that you’ve got, depending on the roles you aspire to,’” says Nicholson. 

This is particularly important, given the potential for AI to change jobs at lightning speed over the coming years. Plus, the platform can be updated as soon as an old role changes or a new one develops. 

“As we see the rapid evolution of AI, and, in the future, quantum technologies, we’ll have the ability to add to those skills and roles,” says Cantle. “We won’t be trying to put those things in two, three or five years after the roles are here, and it’s ancient history.” 

In addition, Career Pathfinder ensures HR has a consistent taxonomy and language in its understanding of roles. 

This is particularly important in an organisation as large and complex as the APS, with nearly 200,000 employees. If one agency wants to advertise a role, it can look up how other agencies speak about it. 

“One of the great things with Career Pathfinder is the real futurist and systems-thinking approach that was taken to the way it was built; it’s completely agnostic.” –  Jo Cantle, Director of APS Professions.             

An iterative model 

APS Career Pathfinder began with a focus on digital professionals. However, it continues to expand to support capability uplift and has the capacity to accept capability frameworks from a range of disciplines. This means it can be iterated endlessly in response to changing roles and evolving needs. 

“One of the great things with Career Pathfinder is the real futurist and systems-thinking approach that was taken to the way it was built; it’s completely agnostic,” says Cantle. 

“The data doesn’t sit within the platform; it sits separately, so it can consume any framework. This means it’s expandable, and can adapt to roles across any profession, and be as big as it needs to be for any enterprise or industry.” 

This benefit extends well beyond the APS because Career Pathfinder is available to the public. 

“Everybody in the world can use Career Pathfinder to see how the APS’s roles are defined. It’s free and you don’t even have to register, so you can use it anonymously,” says Nicholson. 

Any HR practitioner can export the role skill requirement information in Career Pathfinder to assist in the writing of job advertisements and duty statements. HR practitioners will also soon be able to use an even better AI-guided tool to read existing job descriptions and get assistance in identifying the skills required. This can speed up the process of mapping roles to skills frameworks.  

“We’re getting more connections from HR practitioners, and others. There’s a lot of talk about the future direction of recruitment, and that is skills-based recruitment,” says Cantle.      

“Career Pathfinder can give them the information and tools they need to understand how it’s done, without having to try and reinvent the wheel.”

Attracting users from all over the world 

In the past 12 months, Career Pathfinder has attracted more than 31,000 users. 

Ninety per cent  of users have agreed that the platform helped them identify relevant roles and skill gaps, while 80 per cent of users stated it helped them feel more confident in planning their next career move.      

Several APS agencies are in the planning phase of adopting a Pathfinder partition. 

HR teams have reported that the platform has improved consistency in career guidance and talent discussions.

Beyond the APS, Career Pathfinder is also attracting interest from state and territory agencies, and from national governments all over the world. 

The team is proud that APS Career Pathfinder has been named a finalist for an AHRI Award. 

“It validates the hard work and commitment the team has put into it,” says Cantle. 

“A lot of the things that happen within the public sector stay internally focused. But, with this, we’ve had a lot of engagement in state and territory jurisdictions, and internationally. So, [there’s also that] recognition more broadly of the benefits of the platform to the Australian economy.

“If I had this tool a few years ago, it would have made my life and my team’s lives so much easier in all aspects.”

All HR practitioners are invited to contact the team to find out more about how Career Pathfinder works, and how they can use it in their organisation. Email careerpathfinder@apsc.gov.au.