Without a clear career development strategy, organisations will lose employees
Talent is mobile and will gravitate to employers that provide ongoing meaningful career development programs.
To ignore training and career development is simply “bad business management”, leading to staff turnover, disconnect and lack of a team vision. In this time and age, mobility is hardly confined to being “upwards”. Career advancements could be sideways and mean cross-functional forays, or even across geographies. But what talent mobility does for organisations remains the same: it can do everything from fill skills gaps to develop future leaders.
Well-being based workplace practices and career interventions can improve mental health, sustainable employment, an organisation's productivity and profitability.
Training and career development are two separate components of workplace learning, and it is career development that is often neglected; however, one compliments the other in a dynamic and interdependent workplace strategy.
The Staff Career Development program is tailored to both the organisation’s objectives and the individual’s aspirations, marrying them into a satisfied and focused employee equipped with the knowledge and tools to actively contribute to the corporate and common good.
"Actively taking a close interest in employees career goals and interfacing this personal vision with an organisation's BIG PICTURE can be a magical gift to any organisation's productivity."
Internal career development of current employees can be a rich source of talent, and also provide an excellent opportunity to increase employee engagement.
Career development is vital for employees to understand their potential value to the organisation and/or industry sector. Building 3, 5 and 10-year career plans develop a vision that enables career pathways to be built and provide for better workforce resource planning. Individual employees and human resource managers can then plan for additional training or qualifications needed to fulfil these career plans, and therefore ensure an ongoing supply of skilled people ready to be utilised as needed.
It is not all about hard skills. The current team-based workplace thrives on employees with good soft skills, and this applies to all levels of personnel. In this 21st century, people, in general, are better educated, more complex and demand a sophisticated level of interaction with peers, managers and customers.
The Staff Career Development program addresses both hard and soft skills, with EI (Emotional Intelligence) being a critical component. A highly skilled employee (any level) with poor EI can be a disaster in a team environment, which is manifest in recent cases of bullying, stress and other ailments that afflict the current workplace.
The good news is that EI skills can be learned. Once identified as an area of concern in the initial assessment process (or perhaps noted by a concerned HR manager) strategies can be designed to address an employee’s emotional intelligence and general interaction within the workplace, often with overflow benefits into the person’s personal relationships.
The Staff Career Development program is holistic in assisting the total person, not simply improving a set of skills. This assists not only the individual but also the organisation can avoid workplace problems that can adversely affect productivity and at worst, result in litigation etc.
Providing career resources is not an employee perk. It is a deliberate strategy to guide individual aspirations and personal skill-building in a direction that is most beneficial to the enterprise. Many career initiatives arise from poor employee engagement scores (employees rate their company poorly on career opportunities) as a strong contributing reason for losing key talent. But organisations that have deliberately focused on career and career conversations have seen improvements beyond just survey scores and retention.
Using intensive career management techniques, people learn to understand themselves, their skills, personality and potential…more importantly, they develop an understanding of their value to the company, organisation and sector.
People actually want to contribute and perform well in their jobs. The confusion occurs when they lack an understanding of the prospects with their employer and have little or no concept of their career pathway in the foreseeable future.
If employers are able to address career management within their organisation, that's a strategy to show prospective employees, and current employees, that there's a future within the organisation; the individual wants to be able to grow and develop and contribute more, and by taking a career management approach, the employer can support that both through the career management structures that HR might put in place and then through the support of managers who are the ones having career conversations with their staff.
The Staff Career Development program will give employees the vision and competencies to grow professionally and personally. The ACMA career management consultant becomes a mentor to ensure that the corporate goals of the program are achieved within the context of facilitating both career and personal growth of all participating employees.
Empowered employees are productive employees!
A recent report from Deloitte clearly states "focusing on career management will give your company endurance and agility."
The introduction of a well-being career counselling, intervention and planning program as part of the annual review process can be a "low key" approach with "high buy-in" results. Organisations need healthy, productive and engaged employees.
ACMA creates successful career paths through detailed individual assessment, research and job market analysis, combined with expert, personalised coaching.
Note: A Career Development Association of Australia research paper found that when professional career guidance occurred that the participant was 2.67 times more likely to secure a job.
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