Build Career Pathing from Zero Skills Data in Six Months — Alight Shows How

Starting from zero sounds daunting. For Alight Solutions, it was actually an advantage. When the Chicago-based benefits administration company set out to build career pathing for its roughly 10,000 employees, the team had no existing skills data to untangle, no legacy taxonomy to retrofit. Just 1,200 job titles and a clear directive: give colleagues a way to see where they could go.

Alight's work is fundamentally about people, managing the benefits, health, and well-being programs that large employers offer their workforces. That same care extends inward. "We wanted employees to see their future at Alight," said Julie Eagy, Talent Acquisition Operations Manager at Alight. "And we wanted to make sure that internal mobility was something that was real and accessible to them."

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What Challenges Come with Building Career Pathing from Scratch?

Before Phenom Talent Marketplace and Phenom Career Pathing, Alight had no formalized way for employees to explore internal paths. The data problem was straightforward: the team had job titles in their Workday Human Capital Management System (HCM), but no skills attached to any of them. Mapping 1,200 roles manually would have been a years-long project, and by the time it was finished, the data would have already started aging.

Another common challenge? Adoption. Even a well-built tool fails if people don't use it. Eagy's team knew they needed to meet employees where they were, inside the platforms they already visited, with language that felt useful rather than corporate.

There was also the integration question. Alight already had Phenom supporting internal mobility and mentoring. The new career pathing capability needed to feel like a natural extension of what employees already knew, not a separate tool to learn.

How Did Phenom's Skills Ontology Make a Six-Month Launch Possible?

Rather than building a skills taxonomy from scratch, Alight leaned on Phenom's built-in skills ontology to do the heavy lifting. The ontology mapped skills to each of Alight's 1,200 job titles automatically, giving the team a structured foundation without requiring months of manual data entry.

"We didn't have to start with a blank slate on the skills side," Eagy explained. "Phenom's ontology gave us a starting point that we could then refine. That's what made the six-month timeline realistic." The team began the implementation in January 2025 and went live that July, under the internal brand “Career Compass”.

Because Alight already had Phenom in place for internal mobility and mentoring, Career Pathing slotted naturally into their existing ecosystem. Employees logging into Career Compass to browse open roles or find a mentor now had a new opportunity layer: a clearer, skills-based picture of potential career moves — all without manual role-by-role mapping on the backend. Seamless integration with their Learning Management System (LMS) added yet another dimension, connecting recommended development content directly to the skills gaps employees wanted to close.

Related Resource: Demystifying Skill Ontologies 

What Did Alight's Early Career Pathing Results Actually Show?

Since launching eight months ago, Career Compass has shown encouraging early signals alongside some honest lessons. Traffic to career pathing pages picked up quickly, and colleagues began filling out skills, exploring paths, and updating profiles they'd previously left blank. Engagement scores have been trending upward since go-live, and looking ahead, Alight expects to see approximately 400 views of career pathing pages per month and a 97% increase in internal careers profile creation.

What do the current numbers also reveal? Many employees were browsing but not saving career paths. For Eagy's team, that pointed to an education gap. Colleagues unfamiliar with skills-based navigation needed more context on how the tool works and why keeping their profile current matters.

Leadership has remained fully supportive throughout. Their CHRO has been vocal about Career Compass as a centerpiece of Alight's internal mobility strategy, keeping the program visible and resourced. "Having that executive support made a real difference," Eagy said. "It signals to everyone in the organization that this matters."

Take a quick click-though tour of Phenom Career Pathing

What is Alight Focusing on Next?

Alight’s next phase will center on putting managers in the driver's seat of their team's development with Phenom People Manager. The goal is to give leaders visibility into their direct reports' skills profiles and career goals, creating a shared foundation for development conversations that currently happen without that data in the room.

Alight is also beginning a formal job architecture project in 2026 to build out the more granular role structure that will deepen the career pathing experience over time. Career Compass, as Eagy put it, is a foundation the team continues to build on. "We're not done. We're just getting started."

Learn more about skills-first career pathing. Start with a skills snapshot!