Career program development

Employees want development, and they want it through their workplace. Providing a great career development program is a gateway for improving employee engagement, increasing employee retention, and creating good company culture. This makes a formal program crucial to the employee experience. However, not all career development programs are created equal. There are different approaches and ways to implement them. So, how do you decide? The key is to adhere to some best practices to create the optimal program for your organization.

For more information about best practices for your career development program, request a demo today. Through innovative web-based SaaS technology, Insala partners with organizations to accelerate performance and drive evidence-based decisions for organizations and their people. All rights reserved. Accessibility Privacy Policy. Request Demo. July 10, Share:. Here are 6 best practices for career development programs.

This information can guide you in program creation. The open channel of communication will let your employees feel heard. This builds workplace trust and employee satisfaction, which benefits the whole organization.

Make a Career Development Plan Creating a specific and comprehensive career development plan should be done after you know what your employees want. Take their feedback into consideration by building a program that fits their needs. Improve the likelihood that this program will succeed by taking the time to plan it out before implementation. When planning this program, you should be sure to physically write your plan down. Once your career development plan is written, you have the blueprints for a great career development program.

Mix and Match Career Development Strategies Like we said, career development programs take many different forms. This means you can leverage various career development strategies under your overall career development package.

Setting specific, measurable career development goals can help you get to the next level in your career. While developing a career plan can entail a significant amount of work, it will pay off in helping you to understand where you want to go with your career next and what you need to do to get there.

Here, we define a career development plan template and outline five steps to easily and efficiently make an individual development plan for yourself. A career development plan is a personal action plan that you can use to create a roadmap for your career.

The typical career development plan example outlines:. The starting point: Where you are now in your career. The destination: Where you want to go in your career. The gap: The obstacles you must overcome to reach the destination. The route: How to close the gap to reach your intended destination.

Your personalized development plan will help you to identify specific, achievable career goals and then design and implement strategies to reach your goals.

Follow these steps to create a career development plan for yourself:. Measure your progress and be ready to re-evaluate. The first step in any career development plan is to identify where you are now in your career. This step also allows you to reflect on your current skillset and strengths.

At this stage, you should consider questions like:. What are my past experiences? What do I enjoy doing? What kinds of natural skills and talents do I have?

What am I doing when I feel most excited or motivated at work? Do I prefer leading a group, working with peers or working alone? What energizes me? What drains my energy? Do I have a specific calling in life? What about my career motivates me to get up and go to work in the morning?

Take some time to write down the answers to these questions. Note your current position in your field, including whether you have finished your education or would like to pursue additional graduate education and where you fall on the career ladder. Next, identify where you want to go with your career by doing the following:. Set aside any obstacles or inhibitions that might be holding you back. Job rotation is often used by employers who place employees on a certain career path or track, usually for a management position, where they are expected to perform a variety of duties, and have a variety of skills and competencies.

Job rotation is often confused with crosstraining. While both interventions perform essentially the same service of providing employees with a varied set of skills, job rotation goes beyond this.

Besides being used as a means of management training, job rotation can also be used as a form of job enrichment, by adding increased responsibilities, increasing challenge, and reducing boredom or burnout. Be careful not to confuse job enlargement with job enrichment, which will be discussed later. Job enlargement and job enrichment can both be used with plateaued workers or workers who are experiencing burnout, and with especially high achievers.

These two interventions may be used in conjunction with each other, or with other career development interventions such as job rotation and temporary assignments.

Both interventions provide the employee with increased skills, making him or her more valuable to the company, or more marketable in the job search. Job enrichment allows you to expand your responsibilities or change your role to develop new competencies without leaving your current position or the organization altogether. Job enrichment is also used as an effective motivational technique. According to this perspective, if a job provides a sense of responsibility, a sense of significance and information concerning performance, the employees will be internally motivated to high levels of performance.

The key to creating this situation is to enrich jobs so they provide five core characteristics: task variety, task significance, task identity, autonomy and feedback. Job Sharing With job sharing, a full-time job is split between two employees. The two employees share the duties and responsibilities, as well as the salary and benefits of the job. These two employees must also work closely together, and with management, to co-ordinate hours, duties, and communication among themselves and other departments in the organization.

Most often, job sharing is used by parents or adults caring for their parents, and affords employees a better balance between their work and personal lives.

Employees pursuing further education or a second career may also use job sharing. Job sharing offers advantages over part-time work in that employees are able to maintain their professional status as well as some of their job benefits.

One example of the advantage over flexitime situations is that with flexitime, parents may still require extended day care hours. Phased Retirement Organizations typically devote far more energy to recruiting and retraining than to phasing out workers. Phased retirement is one intervention that workers and employers can use at the latter end of the career cycle.

During phased retirement, workers gradually taper their work schedules until they reach full retirement. Other career development interventions such as flextime and job sharing are typically incorporated into phased retirement arrangements. Retirees may work part time and serve as mentors or trainers to their successors.