White Papers: Career Development of Employees

Abstract

While most employees are career conscious, organizations seldom consider employee career development a part of their HR vision. ‘ This is however important for organizations to drive performance, retain people and ensure employee contentment.

What is career development?

In simple terms it means ‘providing employees an opportunity to grow‘, and is especially important to employees who always deliver.

To an employee, growth means one or more of the following:

1. Climbing up the ladder in the organizational hierarchy.
2. Ongoing increase in remuneration.
3. Acquiring higher level skills and competencies.
4. Availing of some exclusive benefits (perks & privileges).

Career development is not a mere management responsibility. It is a composite organizational process which involves people, addresses their ambitions, assigns them roles and responsibilities commensurate with their potential, evaluates their performance, and creates positions to accommodate growth ambitions of employees. In the career development cycle, a number of actions have to take place at different levels as outlined below:

Employees

• » Determine what they want from their careers now and in the future.
• » Examine individually, or along with their supervisors, their interests and ambitions.
• » Create development plans by obtaining inputs from supervisors to meet existing job and cater to long term perspectives.
• » Work with supervisors to identify on the job learning, training opportunities and other avenues for professional development.

Managers/ Supervisors

• » Identify the job-related knowledge, skills, competencies and experience needed for an employee to be effective in that position.
• » Help subordinates to define their short and long term development needs that support both organizational objectives and employee’s career goals.
• » Support Employee Development Plans by indicating specific steps that need to be initiated to accomplish the learning goals.
• » Help the employee in understanding the type of positions that will be best suited for his/her career growth.

Organization/ Management

• » Provide a job and compensation structure that support both the organization’s as well as individual’s growth.
• » Enrich job-positions to create more challenges in the work environment.
• » Provide time and funds for employee development activities.
• » Create processes to utilize the knowledge, skills and abilities of each employee.
• » Undertake pro-active manpower planning to meet future staffing needs.
• » Evaluate employees and create succession pipe-lines for vital job positions in the organization.
• » Identify & nurture talent and reward performance in a transparent manner.

Systems Approach

Career development requires a systems approach.

• » This implies institutionalization of processes to automatically capture essential data about each employee at the time of recruitment or induction.
• » It also includes maintaining, over the service span history of employment, the following employee details:
  • › training details,
  • › performance statistics,
  • › awards & recognitions,
  • › special skills & competencies,
  • › promotions,
  • › pay increments and
  • › other fields which depict the capability profile of an individual.
• » If these details are available to the management on an ‘Employee Dashboard’, career planning can be managed as a part of the HR Vision.

Empxtrack Inc. facilitates meeting your HR vision.