Talent pipeline? I'm not familiar with the history of how Walmart provided internal growth opportunities in the past, but it does seem for a majority of companies these days, internal growth isn't focused on as much as it should. I guess Walmart is coming to realize it's better to invest in your own workforce than hire externally.
back
2 comments
I worked at walmart for a few years when I sort of lost my way in my mid 20s and I have to say it was an eye opening experience. Everyone knows a lot of the bad stuff about walmart so I wont dwell on that but the good stuff I saw were things I had no idea about and was pretty impressed with.
At the time I was a college dropout with a pretty bad attitude but I needed a job and I wasnt afraid to work long boring hours and so I got a job stocking shelves at a walmart near my parents house. It was a mind numbing job but it actually paid ok at the time (12$ hour, I was in orlando, this was 2008ish).
After simply showing up on time and doing my job properly for just a few months I was told that if I wanted I could take on more responsibilities. I met with our store manager who showed me stats about how walmart really likes to promote from within and that if I stuck with it I could get to be an assistant manager in a store in just a few years. The store manager telling me this had a GED and had worked at walmart for 15 years. He told me his salary was "close to 200k." I couldn't believe it.
In my few years working at that store I saw several people get promoted from shelf stocker to department supervisor to assistant manager. One of those people is a store manager at a store in Georgia now. I left my job at walmart with a pretty evolved opinion of the place. For a long time I told people who were directionless and worried about what their future would look like to seriously consider working at walmart and to make it clear to their bosses they wanted to move up.
There were other benefits back then that were pretty solid. I worked with a couple of women who got a lot of their tuition reimbursed. Both of whom are nurses now. I really did feel like if you could put up with some of the BS you get working at walmart you could actually get something good out of the experience for yourself.
Anyway this was a long rambley way of saying that at least in 2008-2010 when I worked at walmart they really valued promoting from within.
Oh final note: there were lots of programs like the tuition reimbursement one tha I was told about when I was hired but assumed there was some catch or some way that it wouldn't work out. The HR manager at my store told me once that some of these things just required you do sign up and that she was shocked how low the participation rates were.
I worked at Staples around the same time period, 2008-2009, and while it was mind-numbing work, I learned a good portion of the skills I needed for the corporate world. Things like: showing up on time even when you don't want to, knowing how and when to escalate to management, how to communicate with customers, executing business processes like opening, closing, stocking shelves, etc. The pay was only $8/hr. but the experience was easily worth 10 times that. At the time I was in college and living with my parents with free tuition from the Pell Grant; a few hundred bucks every two weeks was actually a decent amount of money for food, gas for the car, whatever. I feel for people who have to make a living in that environment but it's not meant for that, it's meant to be a learning and growth environment.
This was one of the things I've heard many senior people at Target talk about. They constantly have a pipeline of people they're pushing into leadership roles. If you come in and show some promise managing projects and people, they essentially start grooming you immediately and focus on pushing you up in the leadership ranks.
AFAIK they've never had any issues with having enough people in their org either on the retail or corporate side who want to be in leadership roles.
I really feel like this is the correct way to operate. Create real career paths for people, get employees to buy into what they're doing. It results in happier employees, happier customers, and ultimately everybody wins if the entire company isn't turning over constantly. Costco can drive much more productivity from each person because they work to retain these people. Turnover is bad for morale, and training a new person takes time and money.
Relative worked at Target retail at a very junior role ... the group responsible for restocking. It was a very unusual management structure at the local store; just a nebulous "team" with no real point person like at a grocery store which has specific managers, assistant managers, and department managers. It seemed a little loose at times (and abusable from a staff perspective), but I could also see it was flexible and the store did very well.