For Cayman’s millennials and Gen Zers, many of the obstacles to climbing the career ladder can feel insurmountable.
Recruiting veteran and founder and CEO of virtual coaching platform CareerPoint, Steve McIntosh, believes the answer to breaking through the glass ceiling and maximising wages lies in determining and leveraging a person’s value.
Now, partnering with Oxford University, he’s setting out to back up what experience tells him to be true.
The research
Working with organisations here in Cayman as well as in North America, including Butterfield, CUC, MUFG, Kalo Partners and Campbells, McIntosh is also seeking other local businesses to help him get the data to prove what he’s seen anecdotally over almost two decades running a recruitment firm.
“Right off the bat, there hasn’t been much academic research on career advancement mechanisms,” McIntosh told Elizabeth Charles and James Whittaker when he appeared on the Compass and Rooster 101’s weekly talk show ‘Beyond The Headlines’ earlier this month.
“It’s really bizarre because it’s so important,” he said, adding that 87% of millennials say career advancement is either ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ important to them.
The study will seek to analyse how optimistic employees are about their advancement prospects; how well they understand the drivers to advance; how well the company supports them and to what extent coaching enhances progress, performance and engagement.
Career advancement is a win-win
Stressing that there has to be incentive for both the employee and the employer, McIntosh said individuals’ professional success is a “win-win” because “companies recognise that
all of their value comes from their people”.
“I think a lot of that frustration about why people aren’t advancing in their careers really
comes from not understanding how career advancement works,” he said.
Listen: Steve McIntosh on ‘Beyond The Headlines’
The founder and CEO of Career Point joined Elizabeth Charles and James Whittaker on Rooster FM . Catch up with the show here:
Addressing the criticism that a dynamic exists in Cayman where the people in charge, responsible for identifying and developing talent, may resist promoting young Caymanians to preserve their own positions, McIntosh said this was more of a “conspiracy theory”.
“It’s not that it never happens,” he said, “but it’s not widespread”.
He pinpointed more of a block being a company’s inability, or reluctance, to have career advancement conversations.
“They’re not always good at explaining how the process works. Lots of companies don’t have tools like competency frameworks,” he explained, citing that only around 30% of people they have encountered through the project so far, have a good understanding of how to advance in their career.
So how can I get to the top?
McIntosh revealed the answer lies in how an employee can create value for their employer and how they can dial it up.
He asks us to consider the following equation.
“If I asked you to name two numbers, right? Let’s do this… The first number is your cost to your employer, right? You’re gonna have a rough idea. There’s gonna be some things in there: salary, training, there’s some things that are easy to come up with and some things that are not. But the second number that I want you to think of is the value that you create for your business. That’s actually a really difficult question, right? Very, very difficult. How do you even calculate it? It’s not clear,” he said.
He said if you want to be paid $100,000, you need to be generating double than in value for the business, to ensure you’re worth the salary plus other business overheads.
The study began in August 2021 and runs until summer 2022
About CareerPoint
CareerPoint.com was founded in 2020 by Steve McIntosh, Shawn McQueen Ruggeiro and Sipha Ndawonde, with the mission “to help a million young professionals advance in their careers and level the playing field for historically under-represented groups”.
To take part in the study, CareerPoint is seeking companies with at least 10 millennial and Gen Z employees, between ages 25 and 35, who will attend four weekly virtual coaching sessions with a certified CareerPoint coach.
For more information on the study and to find out how to become involved contact CEO Steve McIntosh on [email protected] or Head of Client Services Zena Tuitt on [email protected].
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