Career Management Toolkit Overview
1. Learn About Yourself: Clarify and understand your interests, skills, and values
2. Explore Careers: Seek career or job opportunities that interest you
3. Plan Your Next Steps: Set goals and develop knowledge and skills to enhance performance orn advance your career
4. Take Action: Make the most of opportunities to promote your achievements and abilities
5. Evaluate Your Progress: Assess and reflect on your experiences
Strategies To Promote Employee Growth
Career development isnt always an easy journey. Not everyone knows where they want to end up or how to reach that desired destination. However, you can make this process easier for employees by providing them with the tools they need to grow and be successful.
Lets look at a couple of ways you can do this.
What Is A Career Development Plan
Career development is the process of advancing along a career path. A career development plan is the strategic process of continually honing current skills or gaining new ones. It promotes ongoing learning throughout a persons lifetime, equipping them to transition to new roles and prepare for future positions in line with personal and professional goals.
The primary definition of career development applies to employees, making it a personal undertaking. In other words, a person can pursue a career development plan whether or not they receive aid from an employer. It should encourage employees to nurture their talents and come up with ways to reach set objectives.
However, career development can be approached from a company standpoint as well. In this case, the focus is on facilitating the growth and development of employees. There are several ways to accomplish this using software to deliver training and helping employees create a plan are two of the most effective.
Don’t Miss: How To Start An Actress Career
Employee Engagement Tools That Companies Can Use
The Indeed Editorial Team comprises a diverse and talented team of writers, researchers and subject matter experts equipped with Indeed’s data and insights to deliver useful tips to help guide your career journey.
Gauging the level at which employees enjoy and value their work can offer human resources and executive personnel valuable insights into how they can improve their work environment and retain talent. Employee engagement tools are a useful way to analyze the opinions of people who work at a particular organization. Understanding why employee engagement tools are important and the available programs you can use may help you find one that works for you. In this article, we explore 16 different employee engagement tools that you can use to monitor employees’ satisfaction.
Employee Wellbeing Is The New Workplace Imperative
Wellbeing and engagement interact with each other in powerful ways. When employees are engaged and thriving, they experience significantly less stress, anger and health problems. Unfortunately, most employees remain disengaged at work. In fact, low engagement alone costs the global economy $7.8 trillion. The relationship between wellbeing and engagement is vital because how people experience work influences their lives outside work, and overall wellbeing influences life at work.
Organizations need to think about the whole person, not just the worker. Leaders should:
add wellbeing measurements to their executive dashboards
prioritize employee wellbeing as part of their employer brand promise
Check out more advice for leaders.
Read Also: Career Technical Institute Washington Dc
Create A List Of Important Resources
After youve determined both the company and employees goals, it can be useful to come up with a list of resources that will move the employee toward their professional and personal goals.
For example, you might implement a new training program if you have multiple employees who want to learn a new skill. Coaching and mentorship programs can also be useful in cross-training and introducing employees to new departments within the business, allowing them to develop new skills or to find new professional interests. Even compiling a database of educational videos, podcasts, webinars and classes can offer employees the resources they need to meet their goals.
Some organizations will also cover the cost of college courses with tuition reimbursement programs or cover travel expenses to professional conferences where employees can continue to develop important business and networking skills.
Other ways to encourage professional development might involve giving employees special projects related to their desired skills and responsibilities or encouraging them to volunteer in their community. You can even offer paid days off for employees to participate in community service projects.
Spanning The Employee Lifecycle
Whether the employee in question is a younger millennial, a high potential, or an employee who wishes to deepen subject matter expertise, career development opportunities are valuable. So what should employee development plans look like across the employee lifecycle? Here are some examples:
Onboarding buddy program
Jonathan Jones is a new sales employee with limited knowledge of the product. His companys onboarding program provides him with a unique training plan and a buddy to help him develop nuanced industry knowledge faster.
Career mentoring
Kim Chen aspires to be a controller one day. Her manager helps her develop a solid plan that puts her on track to gain needed skills by meeting the right people through a mentoring program.
Leadership development/high potential
Sarah Arcangell is a promising employee who has just been promoted to manage a team. Shes still learning how to best manage herself while engaging others, so shes matched up with other leaders in the company to learn soft skills and ensure she excels.
Diversity
Christine Lawson works in a male-dominated environment where she feels her quiet demeanor might hold her back. Her manager encourages her to join a diversity mentoring program. Christines matched with a female executive who passes on advice to help her feel comfortable and succeed.
Succession planning & knowledge transfer
You May Like: Career Diploma Vs Career Certificate
Building The The Career Lattice
An alternative concept to the traditional career ladder, the career lattice is also known as the rock wall. This new terminology captures the idea that careers arent just upward, linear climbs. Instead, there are sideways moves in addition to upwards movement, and success should be rewarded even if those moves arent in ascending directions.
Providing your employees with more ways to move laterally and rewarding them for it encourages them to:
- Learn and grow without feeling stymied
- Advance their own knowledge and careers
- Assume greater ownership for their own career growth
Its a mutually beneficial situation: your company will benefit from employees with broad organizational knowledge and those employees will gain opportunities to explore other paths that increase their skillsets.
However, career lattices dont often happen spontaneously. Both employees and managers need to understand that gaining additional skills, expanding cross-functional knowledge and participating in lateral moves are all important building blocks for the future and they need a little help implementing it as part of an employee development plan.
The Job Market Made A Recovery In The Us And Canada Region But Not Elsewhere
Only 45% of workers globally said now is a good time to find a job in their country . The U.S. and Canada were the regional outlier for this item, leading the world at 71%, up 44 percentage points from the previous year.
The next closest regions are Australia and New Zealand at 59% and South Asia at 50%. The regions with the least promising job opportunities are the Commonwealth of Independent States , MENA , and East Asia .
Discover more about these regions.
Also Check: Virginia Beach Technical And Career Education Center
Consider Your Employees Personal And Professional Goals
The best employee development plans are collaborative. Consider each employees personal and professional goals when creating an employee development plan. This allows employees to work on the skills and goals that will also assist them with their personal and professional goals.
Meet with employees individually to discuss their career development. Ask to review their plan in advance so you can create a list of questions and helpful advice. A scheduled meeting also allows your employees to prepare. During the meeting, ask employees questions about their career goals, their anticipated future with the company or skills they feel would be useful in their current and future roles. Be sure to listen to the employees answers and look for ways to align your employees goals with your companys current needs or growth.
Help Employees Create A Plan
Ideally, employees shouldnt have to navigate the process alone. They need to take ownership, yes, but managers can play a critically important role too. One of the top ways to aid an employees goals is by helping them craft a career development plan.
Process
Lets go over the process:
Step 1: Plan your meeting
Before jumping headfirst into creating a plan of attack, let your employee know the general idea of your meeting. This gives them time to wrap their minds around what they want. Doing so also saves you a few awkward silence moments while they pause to think about big questions like, What do you want to do for the rest of your life?
If they can provide you with some feedback, use that information to start gathering useful resources for their objectives.
Step 2: Have a conversation
You cant help employees build a career development plan template without first knowing what they want. The best way to find out is to have a meeting to discuss their aspirations, goals and interests.
Its important to know what makes them tick and where they want their career to go. Digging deeper into that could involve learning what theyre passionate about, whom they look up to and where theyre naturally gifted.
You can then suggest opportunities and make recommendations based on that information.
Step 3: Create the plan
Step 4: Point them toward resources
This step can take many forms. Here are a few things you can do to help:
Planning Pitfalls
Recommended Reading: Mappingyourfuture.org Plan Your Career
Why Is Employee Development Important
Todays hybrid workplace is a fast-paced, competitive environment, and people are seeking a new kind of employee development to meet their personal and professional needs. In light of the Great Resignation/Reshuffle and trends of quiet quitting companies cant remain passive about employee development programs. The cost of losing talent is too high. On average, every lost employee costs about six to nine months of that employees salary to replace. And that doesnt count the indirect costs of lost productivity.
Leverage The Power Of Data In Your Reviews
Use your review data to track performance changes over time and compare teams, departments or individuals across specific skills. Identify high potentials, facilitate succession planning and target training investments more effectively to help employees with their career development. Achieve balanced, unbiased, and fair reviews with in-tool calibration via our live heatmaps.
Don’t Miss: Greater Altoona Career And Technology Center
Key Career Advancement Tools To Support Employee Retention
Cultivating Disruptive Agri-FoodTech Talent | In-Field to Post-Harvest & Beyond | Managing Partner at Siegel and Benjamin
The talent market is increasingly competitive, giving top talent the advantage of choice making hiring and keeping employees long-term virtually an ongoing challenge. Workers in this day and age are looking at the benefits of working with a company more holistically than their predecessors and as such are likely to rate such things as corporate culture and growth opportunities as highly as they do the pay and benefits structure. Here are 4 key career advancement options that can be utilized as a part of your employee management toolkit to hire and retain top talent:
Measure Improvements In Knowledge
Are my employees actually benefitting from the carefully curated content? Youâll know! Build short quizzes to ensure that your employees are understanding the learning material and developing new skills. Use multiple-choice questions to automatically test their newly acquired knowledge or add open-ended questions for additional insights.
Read Also: What Are The Career Options
Employee Performance Appraisals From Past And Present Employers
What common strengths and noted abilities have been identified in your past appraisals on more than one occasion?
When a number of past performance appraisals are gone over, some important information about you can be gleaned and used to help you analyze where your strengths and weaknesses are. And this is helpful in mapping out your career advancement as you try to build on your strengths and mitigate your weaknesses.
But performance appraisals are only as good as the people who create them. If the appraisal was written by someone for whom you had respect and treated you fairly and honestly, then the information they provide about your career strengths and weaknesses can be quite valuable.
And if a number of appraisals through the years have said similar things about your strengths and weaknesses, chances are theyll be accurate.
Although a lot of employee performance appraisals are angled toward identifying areas for improvement, the real gems are when strengths are identified.
I also recommend completing the inborn job skills assessment to enhance your knowledge of your innate giftedness.
Other topics related to this career development article include:
Employee Potential And Performance
If workers dont have opportunities to learn and grow, its harder for them to reach their full potential. In fact, 74 percent of employees say that they arent able to reach their full potential due to a lack of professional development, according to research from ClearCompany.
This is a missed opportunity for both employees and employers. For workers, a lack of development often results in boredom and a feeling of stasis, which can lead to them searching for greener pastures. On the company side, having employees who arent reaching their potential can also mean they arent performing up to par. Employees who are learning and growing are also going to be offering higher levels of performance.
Don’t Miss: How Do I Start An Acting Career
Provide Career Development Information
Providing support materials and information related to career development can help employees recognize what career paths are available to them, understand position qualification requirements, and access resources that will help them gain new opportunities. This information can include:
- Career guides and checklists
- Career path matrices, maps, and visuals
- Career management websites or systems
- Position summaries or descriptions
When information, tools, and resources are lacking regarding careers, however, employees tend to not perceive career development options.
Employee Development Plan Template
Each employee development plan will look different. However, you can use the following template to draft your own employee development plan:
These career development plan examples can help you and your employees draft one together.
Short-term goals: Develop leadership abilities, gain experience and build relationships
Long-term goal: Become finance manager
You May Like: Womens Plus Size Career Tops
Take A Personal Interest In Employee Career Goals
If youre managing a remote team, you know how important it is to communicate frequently with your workers. That interaction should include meeting regularly with team members one-on-one so you can stay attuned to their career aspirations and expectations. This kind of manager support can help your staff feel valued and lead to greater productivity and loyalty.
Help your employees outline a potential career path within the organization, so they can better visualize their future at the company. Identify specific milestones for achievement and the supporting resources employees will likely need to tap along their journey. Clear, direct and consistent communication from the boss about career advancement steps can help workers feel more engaged.
Powerful Insights On Progress And Completion Rates
Continuous people development is a strategic priority for you and you need to be able to keep track of the success of your programs. Get a clear overview of employee learning with learning path dashboards. See enrollment numbers, progress status and completion rates both as an aggregate and for each individual employee. See who is already benefiting from your program and who might need an extra hand.
You May Like: Best Degree For Insurance Career
Career Tools And Services
Because each person has a unique situation, skill set, and career objectives, career paths vary widely and theres no set formula for professional development. Typically, employees who take responsibility for planning their own development and actively seek growth opportunities are the most successful in achieving their goals.
Career development tools
- This step-by-step Career Planning Resource provides a framework for your career planning and development, with worksheets to complete at every step.
- Access PODs Competency Guide to find courses related to competencies that you wish to develop for on-the-job success or career advancement.
- Use PODs Training Action Plan to identify goals for taking specific courses and solicit support from your supervisor.
- Through a video and toolkit, learn how mentoring can help you plan for your future, develop strategies for achieving your goals and overcome obstacles.
Services and offerings
Additional resources
- Start your job search close to home, using the complete listings of open positions at the UW.
- You have access to hundreds of journals through UW Libraries. This resource can provide you with both scholarly publications and trade publications regarding career development, business, higher education and professional development.
Related Documents
How Recruiting Tools Improve The Hiring Process
Recruiting tools are devices, websites, platforms or software programs that aid in areas relating to gathering qualified candidates, screening applicants or hiring talent. Recruiters, human resource staff members and hiring managers often seek to fill multiple job roles and they may receive hundreds or even thousands of applications for a single role. Using recruiting tools helps people to save time, remain unbiased and identify the most qualified candidates.
Related:Recruitment Skills: Definition and Examples
Read Also: Accelerated Programs For Career Changers
Consider Your Business Goals
First, consider what individual skills are desired from each employee to help you meet your business goals, while also taking into account a realistic timeline for developing these goals. It can be useful to list the current strengths of each individual so you have an idea of which skills you can build upon. Consider both short- and long-term goals when creating an employee development plan.
