Career Development is Key to Your Organization's Success

Who is responsible for career development?

The employee, manager and the organization. Unfortunately two pieces of the puzzle are usually missing when it comes to career development. The employee and the manager rarely have discussions about future plans and or growth for the individual. Sometimes this comes down to the manager not wanting to lose their star employee, or the employee not knowing where they can go, or where they want to go.

Since implementing a Career Development Model (CDM) at the City of Richmond, we have discovered by implementing a process, providing curriculum, and one to one support that an organization can truly start to develop its true potential, while engaging and retaining its key talent.

What things should you do?

The main learning that we have had, is that you need to really know your employees. It is recommended that you take the time to interview them in detail about all aspects of their work history on a regular basis. A lot of employees working part-time in different jobs, volunteering in significant positions, going back to school and paying for it themselves etc. If you don't know this about your staff, you need to. By conducting career interviews, we have discovered that a lot of our employees are under utilized in their current positions. By working with the either in groups or individually we have started to help them plan their career plan and learn how to navigate the organization to get a job that is better suited to using their full capabilities.

Next Steps?

The key in this process being successful, is giving the managers the tools to understand that it is their responsibility to assist their employees in advancing thei career in the organization. A key stumbling block is that managers are not sure how to navigate the organization outside of their own business unit or how to assist the employee in creating their learning plans.

What are we doing?

At the City our next steps are to look at how to put some career resources on-line, and enable the employees to be more independent when planning their career. In addition, we will be hosting some more in-depth career planning workshops for managers to help them develop the skills that they need.