by A career development plan is future-focused and details what you as an employee would like to learn and contribute. A word of caution here, career development plans are not created in a vacuum. It is essential for employees to take into account departmental and organizational needs, objectives and goals when creating their career plans.
Personal and professional growth are important factors for keeping your career moving in a direction with which you are satisfied. Prior to setting up a meeting to discuss your plan with your manager or supervisor you will want to engage in self-assessment so that you will be able to clearly define and articulate your goals and developmental needs.
As you begin your self-assessment, keep in mind , The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want.? Take some time to reflect on the following factors:
What could you do to increase your satisfaction, and decrease factors that are not sources of satisfaction? Steps to increase your satisfaction could be as simple as rearranging your office to get out of the draft caused by the heating and air conditioning system, or as complex as researching, crafting and presenting a job sharing proposal. What would make you a happier, more productive employee?
What ideas do you have for enhancing your current efficiency and effectiveness? This might include learning how to perform functions that other team members perform in case they are out of the office. Also take into account, ways you could train other team members to enhance their effectiveness and/or knowledge base.
When creating your plan, consider:
- Results from a 360? assessment instrument which gives you feedback from not only your manager, but also from your peers, subordinates and customers
- Your previous performance appraisals
- Future trends which will be impacting the payroll profession and skills/knowledge needed to adapt to and thrive in the forthcoming environment
- Customer feedback and letters of appreciation
- What one thing more than anything else is holding you back? Work out a strategy for overcoming that roadblock/obstacle.
Develop both a short-term and a long-term career development plan. The timeframes for such plans vary from individual to individual. For some, short-term means the steps they will take over the next three to six months while for others short-term might mean completing a degree or certification that takes much longer than six months so they could reach their long-term goal of obtaining a promotion.
Your development plan is a road map for plotting your career future. Don?t leave your future to happenstance. The magic begins when you set goals. A switch is turned on, the current begins to flow, and the power to accomplish becomes yours. Career development planning is for individuals as well as the organization
Career development planning procedures are always based on what the organization needs. But they have to recognize that organizational needs will not be satisfied if individual needs are neglected. Career development planning has to be concerned with the management of diversity.
Career development plans must therefore recognize that:
- Members of the organization should receive recognition as individuals with unique needs, wants, and abilities;
- Individuals are more motivated by an organization that responds to their aspirations and needs;
- Individuals can grow, change and seek new directions if they are given the right opportunities, encouragement and guidance.
Career development planning techniques
Career planning uses all the information generated by the succession plans, performance, and potential assessments and self-assessments to develop programs and procedures which are designed to implement career management policies, achieve succession planning objectives and generally improve motivation, commitment and performance. The procedures used are those concerned with:
- Personal development planning .
- Training and management development.
- Mentoring
- Career counseling
In addition, career development planning procedures may cater for the rising stars by ‘fast tracking’ them, that is, deliberately accelerating promotion and giving them opportunities to display and enlarge their talents. But these procedures should pay just as much, if not more, attention to those managers who are following the middle route of steady, albeit unspectacular, progression.
Personal development planning
Personal development planning is carried out by individuals with guidance, encouragement and help from their managers/HRM as required. A personal development plan sets out the actions people propose to take to learn and to develop themselves. They take responsibility for formulating and implementing the plan, but they receive support from the organization and their managers in doing so. The purpose is to provide a ‘self-organized learning framework’.
Career Counseling
Performance management processes, should provide for counseling sessions between individuals and their managers. These sessions should give the former the opportunity to discuss their aspirations and the latter the chance to comment on them helpfully and, at a later stage, to put forward specific career development proposals to be fed into the overall career management programs.
Management Development
The formal approaches to management development include:
Development on the job through coaching, counseling, monitoring and feedback by managers on a continuous basis associated with the use of performance management processes to identify and satisfy development needs, and with mentoring;
Development through work experience, which includes job rotation, job enlargement, taking part in project teams or task groups, ‘action learning’, and secondment outside the organization;
Formal training by means of internal or external courses;
Structured self-development by following self-managed learning programs agreed as a personal development plan or learning contract with the manager or a management development adviser these may include guidance reading or the deliberate extension of knowledge or acquisition of new skills on the job.
Mentoring
Mentoring is the process of using specially selected and trained individuals to provide guidance and advice which will help to develop the careers of the ‘proteges’ Allocated to them.
Mentoring is aimed at complementing learning on the job, which must always be the best way of acquiring the particular skills and knowledge the job holder needs. Mentoring also complements formal training by providing those who benefit from it with individual guidance from experienced managers who are ‘wise in the ways of the organization’.
Mentors provide for the person or persons allocated to them:
Advice in drawing up self-development programs or learning contracts; general help with learning programs; guidance on how to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to do a new job; advice on dealing with any administrative, technical or people problems individuals meet.
Examples of Career Initiatives:
1) Managers as Career Counselors
- These initiatives bring several unique advantages to the career counseling role. Managers:
- Can make realistic appraisals of organizational opportunities
- Can use information from past performance evaluation to make realistic suggestions concerning career planning
- Have experienced similar career decisions and can be empathetic toward the employee
2) A Job Posting System
- Job posting is an organized process that allows employees to apply for open positions within the organization.
- They can respond to announcements and postings of positions and then be considered along with external candidates.
Job Posting System is the arrangement wherein a company privately posts a list of open positions (which include the job requirements as well as their descriptions) in order for the current employees who aspire to shift to different functional areas or positions may apply.
3) Career Resource Centers
- A career resource center returns the responsibility of career development to the employee.
- The center offers self-directed, self-paced learning, and provides resources without creating dependence on the organization.
- Career development works only if employees accept responsibility for their own careers.
- One of the fundamental goals of career development is to help facilitate career decision making, which helps to develop career exploration and evaluation competencies.
- The primary services provided at career resource centers are: educational information, career planning, and personal growth, and job-finding skills.
4) Mentoring Activities
- The primary purpose of a mentoring system is to introduce people to the inner network of the organization, which may assist them in their career advancement.
- Mentoring systems help clarify the ambiguous expectations of the organization, provide objective assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of new employees, and provide a sounding board for participants.
Mentoring activities make use of the same skills and models of listening, questioning, reframing and clarifying connected with coaching. Conventionally, however, mentoring in the workplace has managed to describe a relationship wherein a well-experienced co-worker utilizes his/her own greater know-how and deeper understanding of the job or workplace in order to sustain the growth of an inexperienced colleague.
