Career development

From ArticleWorld

Career development is the formal process by which employees extend their worth to the organization – their contribution linking individual performance and satisfaction levels, to the goals and challenges of the enterprise. When an employee spends his or her entire working years with the same employer, an extensive employee career planning process is triggered. On offer is a wide range of external or in-house career development programs to prepare employees for promotion or up-skilling. These may include succession planning processes which ensure the right people are available for meeting changing staff requirements due to increased work-force diversity and providing employees with more realistic future job expectations.

Career

A career path is the range of sequential positions held by a person during the course of a lifetime. Four steps people encounter throughout their careers are: exploration, establishment, mid-career and late-career. Well-planned career development and training programs should be in place, to be available as support to an employee’s development and emotional needs at each stage, and thus build the employee into a fully productive unit whole-term.

Career planning

If an organization desires to retain its employees, with resulting low staff turn-over, it must satisfy their natural aspirations for growth and development, providing prospects for advancement in their chosen career. A career plan should be developed as a blueprint in which entire careers of employees are mapped-out, from their entry point until the time of their retirement from the organization.

Steps

Steps in career development are as follows:

1. Preparation of a manpower plan outlining future replacement needs and long-term up-skill needs of all categories of employees in the various organizational groups.
2. Building career paths and skill-set requirements for each category of employees.
3. Identifying employees who have the potential ability and willingness for advancement.
4. Formulation and implementation of training and development plans, appraisal interviews and counseling to prepare employees for higher responsibility.
5. Periodical review of career development processes.