Talking with employees about their career goals is a necessary part of maintaining healthy employee morale and retention. Employees need to see that there are paths forward for them within your organization—like opportunities to work with new people, gain new skills, and enjoy greater autonomy—or they will assume they need to look elsewhere to find them. Because these opportunities vary from employee to employee, identifying them requires ongoing conversations.
For some organizations, especially those within the medical, research, technical and manufacturing fields, well-defined career ladders still make sense, as career trajectories are often fairly straightforward. Though these steps may be clear to most employees in these cases, it can still be helpful to create visuals that state what is expected at each step in an employee’s upward progression to a senior position.
Nowadays, however, many organizations need a more agile approach to promotions. Because this method is highly customized, it requires continuous employee collaboration. This can be done by consistently communicating the options, support and commitment you have for your employees’ professional interests and goals.
This less-structured approach requires company leadership to express investment in developing internal talent, and both employees and supervisors need tools to prepare and equip employees for their next steps.
This sample process is full of tools to facilitate these discussions:
Step One: Employee Self-Assessment
First, the employee completes a questionnaire that asks them about their strengths and career aspirations. In addition to providing time and space for the employee to identify what they hope to achieve, this is also an opportunity for the employee and supervisor to maximize the employee’s strengths to meet current and potential future business needs.
Step Two: Gap Analysis
Then, the employee and supervisor work together to identify gaps in knowledge, skills, experience and abilities that the employee would need to fill before they can reach their desired role.
Step Three: Resource Planning
The employee then works with their supervisor to determine how they will acquire the knowledge, skills, experience and abilities identified in the Gap Analysis. To avoid researching from scratch, the employee and supervisor should reach out to their human resources team to identify effective tools for learning and development.
Step Four: Development Plan
Together, the employee and supervisor then craft a plan for developing specific competencies. Along with clear steps and action items, this plan should include a timeline for ongoing follow-up and evaluation.
While this exact model may not work for every organization, it’s important to remember that any visible career development process will help not just your employees themselves, but also your employee retention, recruitment and talent development, helping you meet current and future business needs.