To make promotion on your farm follow a rule instead of your mood, write the rule on one sheet of paper and give a copy to each worker who could move up. On the sheet, list your jobs in order, from helper to manager, like the rungs of a ladder. Next to each job, write what a person must be able to do to get it, and the minimum time they must spend in the job below before they can ask for it. At the bottom, write the date you handed the sheet out. That is your career sheet: it holds the rule for moving up, not a promise that anyone will be promoted.
If you already have a written description of each job (a page listing what the person in that job is responsible for), the first version takes one afternoon. If you don’t, write the job descriptions first, because the requirements come from them. You still decide who is promoted and when. What changes is that everyone knows the rule before a job opens. On the day you hand out the sheet, read it through with each worker.
Without a career sheet, the rule lives in your head and can change from one day to the next. A helper can stay a helper for years. When the foreman’s job opens, you pick by trust or by years on the farm, and nobody knew in advance what it took. The good worker who wanted to grow sees no way up and hears “we’ll see” every year. One day they leave for the farm next door, which offered them a job with more responsibility. You lose a person you trained and start again with a new hire.
Why does promoting by tenure or mood cost you the people you trained?
Because workers with ambition stay partly for the chance to move up, and when promotion goes by years served or by your mood that day, they cannot see that chance. Teagasc, Ireland’s state agency for farm research and advice, makes the same point in its Farm Labour Manual, in a chapter written by Marion Beecher and three colleagues. It lists “an obvious career path” among the things that motivate an employee, next to fair pay and a say over their own work, and notes that motivation helps keep staff.
Where does the requirement to move up come from?
It comes from what the higher job involves, not from the ideal worker you picture and not from the person standing in front of you. In its manual, Teagasc writes that “the employee should have the basic skills and knowledge to carry out the task that is expected of him/her”, and that this also applies “where the employee’s responsibility changes”. A promotion is that kind of change: the person must be able to do the tasks of the new job, so you take the requirement from that job.
That is why you build the career sheet from your job descriptions. If you have none yet, a separate article covers the written description of what each job is responsible for, level by level. On the career sheet, you put the jobs in order and write, for each one, what a person must be able to do to get it. In the Teagasc manual, Beecher and colleagues give examples of “technical skills that would allow the employee to assume greater responsibility”, such as deciding when to move the cows to fresh grass or keeping the farm’s records. Write each requirement on your sheet as a skill like those, one a person can learn, not as years to wait.
The jobs on your ladder are the same ones as on your org chart, the drawing of who reports to whom; the career sheet adds how a person gets from one job to the next. If you have no org chart yet, a plain list of your jobs, from lowest to highest, is enough to start. A separate article covers how to draw an org chart and write job descriptions, if you want to do that first, and other articles on managing people on the farm cover hiring, training and keeping workers.
Why does the minimum time between rungs go on the sheet?
Because without it, “we’ll see” has no end, and the worker cannot tell an honest “not yet” from a “never”. With a minimum time on the sheet, the worker knows the earliest point at which they can ask to move up, and can aim at it instead of guessing. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, the university’s advisory service for farmers in the United States, has a guide to career paths for farm employees, written by Jim Versweyveld. In it, Versweyveld notes that “employees want to know what job opportunity is next”. With the minimum time, they also know when they can ask for it.
In the same guide, Versweyveld warns: “If you do not have a career path in place, you risk losing the employee to another employer who does”.
Not every move is straight up. Versweyveld also notes that “an employee with mechanical aptitude may be a great candidate for a lateral move into your equipment maintenance team”, instead of becoming foreman. Write on the sheet what that move takes too, so a worker whose next step is not up can still see a path.
| Job | What the person in the job is responsible for | What a person must already be able to do to get the job | Minimum time in the job below |
|---|---|---|---|
| Helper | The tasks they are given, done the way they were shown | Turns up on time and handles tools safely, checked when you hire | None: you hire into this job |
| Livestock hand | The animals in one section of the farm, day to day | Can mix and hand out feed, spot a sick animal early and keep the section’s records of births, treatments and deaths | X months as helper |
| Foreman | The work of one section and the people doing it | Can plan the section’s work for the day, check other people’s work and make small decisions without asking you | X months as livestock hand |
| Manager | The result of the whole livestock side of the farm | Can plan the livestock year, stay within a budget and be accountable for the result | X months as foreman |
On your own sheet, replace each X with a number of months you would be willing to stick to, and write the date at the bottom.
When does the career sheet get misread?
When a worker takes it as a promise that the promotion will come, or will come on a set date. The minimum time is only the earliest a person can ask to move up; by writing it down, you do not commit to promoting anyone by then, or at all. If you write the minimum time as a guarantee, workers will expect a promotion you never meant to promise.
Nor is the sheet a promise that anyone will stay. With the path written down, your conversation with each worker about moving up is more likely to go well; whether they stay afterwards is still up to them.
Pay does not go on this sheet. What you pay for each job, and your rule for raising pay within a job, belong on a separate sheet; another article covers how to set pay bands and a rule for raises. Whether the law in your country, a union agreement or, in Australia, an industry award ties pay or duties to a job title is a question for your lawyer or accountant.
On the sheet you write only what a promotion takes. Whether a particular worker has shown it yet is for you to judge, when you sit down together with the description of the job they want to move into.
Where to start
The first version takes one afternoon, on paper, with your written job descriptions in front of you; you need no software. If you have no job descriptions yet, write those first.
With the career sheet, you answer the question your best workers are asking: does staying on this farm lead anywhere? Writing that answer down before a job opens is one of the cheapest parts of farm management: it costs an afternoon and no money.
Keeping the path in your head feels like keeping the freedom to reward whoever earns it. In practice you decide from scratch every year; good workers take your silence as a sign that there is no way up, and the ones who leave take their training with them. Writing the rungs down does not take that freedom away: you still decide who moves up, and each worker knows what to aim for.