Improving Promotion Decisions: Part 2

The first blog of this series addressed the use of inference when promoting people across job families—when critical components of the new, higher level job have little content overlap with the content of previous jobs. I identified the use of inference in this situation as problematic. However, since we cannot look into the future to develop explicit knowledge about performance in a job that exists in a different job family, we are dependent upon some level of inference-based decision-making process. Our challenge is to use one that results in inferential “hops” instead of “leaps.” Think about this as the “hop—leap” continuum.