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Enhance your company’s performance and corporate culture by implementing an effective career development program

Managing a company’s performance and productivity through a strong career development program can be complicated and time consuming, yet certainly worth the effort.

In order to achieve maximum results, all supervisors must be involved in managing your company’s career development plans with oversight provided by a competent human resources team.   If managed properly, many facets of your corporate culture will be improved.  For example, if your career development strategy is working properly, the company’s employee retention rates will be higher – ultimately improving the productivity in many areas of your business.  Better retention rates lead to a reduced need for external recruiting. This serves to improve productivity by lowering the overall recruitment costs within your company.

There are many steps a company must take in order to implement an effective career development strategy that is beneficial to the employees, managers and overall success of your business.

First, for any career development strategy to be successful, the company must have detailed job descriptions that are specific to your business. They should include not only the key parameters and requirements of a position, but also the skill sets and personality characteristics of people who are likely to be successful in the position.

Secondly, you should know the compensation range for the position.  Whether the company uses external compensation surveys or a formal analysis using a point factor method, you need to know the relative compensation range for the position for any location in the country and throughout the world (if the company has overseas locations). 

The third step is to identify other positions at a higher level in the organization that an employee may have interest in obtaining in the future.  This important step is critical in creating a strategic succession plan.  In reality, a company should establish succession plans for every employee in the company, but depending on the size and scope of your business, this could be an enormous task. The other option is to create a succession plan that covers particular subsets of a company -- such as all employees at a director level and above or all employees identified as high achievers.

Next, a supervisor or a member of the HR team should have a discussion with the employee about their wants and needs in reference to future job opportunities within the organization.  The employee may be able to describe the type of position he or she aspires to have in the future, but may or may not know if such a position exists within the organization. Therefore, the work your managers completed in step 3 now comes in handy during these discussions. The manager will be able to discuss actual opportunities with the employee because the company has already identified potential positions that may be a good “fit” for the employee.

It is important to recognize in this fourth step that the opportunity being discussed with an employee may be attainable in a few months or in three to five years.  At this point, the manager should outline the skills the employee would need to attain before being placed into this higher level opportunity.  Is there any particular training that would be advantageous for this employee to attend?  Or, perhaps a number of stretch assignments to enhance the employee’s skill set? These types of questions need to be answered before an employee can move further through the career development process.

Finally, an important part of this strategy is to continue discussing an employee’s career through regular, ongoing conversations and goal setting exercises.  Perhaps the manager should be the person responsible for helping the employee move into roles of higher responsibility.  But, in many corporate cultures, the responsibility for helping employees with career development lies with mentors (both formal and informal). 

Today, there are many tools designed to help companies with their career development programs.  These tools are often available online or through specialized software programs.  Each company needs to determine which tool may be best for their particular business culture. 

Unfortunately, the average company in the United States does a fairly poor job with career development.  Often career development is left to managers who are very forward thinking in their attempts to develop employees in their particular department or group within a company.  But this is merely career development strategy by CHANCE.  Companies need a well defined strategy if it is to succeed in the career development of its employees. 

Some employees are happy to stay in their current role indefinitely.  While some of these employees remain productive employees for many years, others become “dead wood”, fairly unproductive, disengaged employees who remain in their positions because they have no drive to improve themselves or the company.  In a large company, these employees can bring down an entire organization.  A lack of a formal career development program (likely with weak performance management practices as well) could be the culprit.

What to do now:

• Develop detailed formal job descriptions for every position in your organization.
• Develop succession planning objectives that include to what extent the succession planning and career development strategy will be utilized throughout the organization.
• Determine who will be accountable or responsible for implementing the strategy.
• Communicate the goals and specific objectives of the career development program company-wide by describing how it will benefit employees, the corporate culture and the company’s bottom line. It will be helpful to stress the importance of this initiative by asking the CEO to communicate (or at least sign off on the memo) that discusses the career development plans of the organization.
• Identify employees and managers to go through program.
• Identify managers and/or HR department employees to help these employees with their career development plans.
• Identify group training solutions that can be utilized to help multiple employees improve skill sets in particular areas.  
• Communicate any promotions within the organization through your company newsletter or other communications so that all employees recognize the company’s emphasis on career development and internal promotions.

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