T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

This week on T3 I got the thrill to talk to the good folks over at Fuel 50. Fuel 50 is career path software that delivers a clear line of sight to your opportunities and a tool to help your employees create great career paths with you. What the solution delivers, to their enterprise level clients, is higher employee engagement and higher retention.  It’s really the first comprehensive solution I’ve seen that truly allows your employees to drive their own career path within your organization.

I’ll tell you, of all the T3 posts I’ve done to date, Fuel 50 had me taking the most notes!  There is a ton of stuff they provide and can deliver, customized career paths based on employees strengthens and desires, ability to show employees what other roles are truly like within your organization, individual competency gaps, career assessment desires, succession management, leadership enablement (basically helping make your managers better leaders with guided discussions and tips), etc. Fuel 50 is an OD departments wet dream in one easy to use software solution. (I’m sure they’re really happy I just called them that! They’re from Australia, I know they have a better sense of humor than most HR vendors!)

5 Things I really like about Fuel 50:

1. Completely employee focused. We’ve really gotten to a point in employee development where employees want and need to own their development.  Yes, your boss can help you with this, but it’s up to you to drive your development.  The next generations will own their career path, not wait for some manager to show it to them.

2. But, Let’s help you be a great leader to your employee’s path. Yes, your employees need to own this, but great leaders want to be a part and help them along the way. It’s like my friend Kris Dunn says, great leaders are career agents to their employees.  Fuel 50 was designed around this concept.

3. Fuel 50 allows your employees to share their position story. Yeah, I think I want to get into marketing at my company, because I have some crazy notion of what that might be. Fuel 50 allows your organization to share this with each other in a way that gives your employees an aspect of what is that role really like.

 4. The number one driver for employee engagement is career development. Fuel 50 is seeing upwards of 30% increases in employee engagement, in the first six months, when implementing their solution with their clients.  It’s metrics driven, with proven results. That is a given with most career pathing solutions.  As you can imagine, retention, is another driver positively impacted by Fuel 50.

5. Comprehensive succession management with excellent reporting tools. Every executive wants HR to deliver succession, and most fail miserably.  It’s because it’s more than delivering a list of those ‘next-up’. It’s a process that takes time to build, to deliver great succession.  Fuel 50s solution delivers succession the way it should be done.

Fuel 50 isn’t this simple, one step, silver bullet out of the box solution.  It is simple to use, but it’s comprehensive.  This is career pathing, career development and succession for companies that are serious about this stuff.

Check them out, well worth the demo. Plan on a solid hour, and get ready to take notes.  The demo was an education in itself, with a ton of great ideas and conversation that you could put to work right away, even without using Fuel 50. That is another thing I really liked, the folks who are running Fuel 50 love and live this stuff, and they’re willing to share!