Corporate/Staff Career Development Strategies
Does your organisation have a clear staff career development strategy...if not why not?
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) and a strong concern for losing key talent. But organisations that have deliberately focused on career and career conversations have seen improvements beyond just survey scores and retention.
There are six steps to implementing a robust staff career development program irrespective of the size of the organisation:
- Develop your strategy by identifying the level and numbers of personnel involved, the program objectives and the support the participants will receive
- Evaluate your organisation and identify the types of roles available and your proposed human resource requirements over the next five years
- Provide an online resources program that makes it easy for participants to actively participate either at work or after hours at home. This is a critical component and "buy-in" from the involved personnel...so make it as easy, flexible and accessible as possible
- Measure each participant's progress with up to date tools and technologies (usually provided by any progressive career development practice)
- Engage your employees on the insights and knowledge gained from the career development program. Continue to leverage off this information for continuing career conversations to develop realistic career pathways for your employees
- Accept that some participants will not be of value to your organisation in the long term and assist them to find alternatives by providing a caring and supportive exit strategy
A well designed and managed corporate/staff career development program enables management to closely understand and monitor each employee's aspirations as well as performance. Plan more accurately for future staffing and training needs, plus work with dissatisfied or underperforming people to either improve their contribution or plan to develop their careers outside your organisation.
When organisations change their thinking about what career development is, and show their employees that anything they do to build new skills and add to their skill toolkit is development, they can start to shift how employees feel about an opportunity within the organisation. At the same time, employee commitment and engagement builds, which impacts business results.
The technologies available today now provide businesses with the opportunity to effectively engage with any or all levels of employees (whatever their location) in ways that were previously unattainable.
A recent report from Deloitte clearly states "focusing on career management will give your company endurance and agility."
Empowered employees are productive employees!
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.
All program services can be delivered via our interactive online cloud-based career management "Career Talk" system and/or "one-on-one" in our Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra, Melbourne, Cairns or Auckland offices.
