As HR Professionals we are called on to find solutions to a wide range of market and workplace pressures:
- Labour and skills shortages projected as employees retire with a projected 70% shortfall in the supply of supervisors and managers.
- Competitive business pressures requiring increased performance and productivity results, while reducing turnover rates and costs.
- Leadership candidate gaps in many companies, prioritizing the need to develop leadership capacity and succession plans.
As a result pro-active companies are now putting employee career development at the top of their priority list.
Career Development provides a competitive advantage for your organization in the following ways:
- Increase your profile and become an employer of choice by creating recruitment campaigns that promote your employee development culture.
- Promote targeted positions within your organization along with associated career pathways and advancement potential.
- Increase employee engagement and lower employee turnover by discussing with employees their career progress and potential. Career coaching conversations, career development workshops and online resources combine to provide employees with a vision towards the future and their career potential within your organization.
- Reduce the costs associated with high turnover rates by uncovering career and job role dissatisfaction. Providing adjustments to roles and responsibilities, lateral job moves, or career change opportunities within your organization can pre-empt a resignation or dismissal.
- Align corporate and departmental goals with those of individual employees ensuring both productivity and employee engagement are increased and sustained.
- Improve the ROI on your leadership training dollars by targeting training to the specific skills gaps and development needs of each employee.
Getting Started:
Initiating a Career Development Program can begin by simply integrating career development resources and career conversations into your existing performance review process. Alternately, companies with more resources designate an in-house Career Practitioner (or HR Lead) to conduct career conversations, offer career assessments and workshops, and link the results of these efforts to corporate training and talent management initiatives.
In either case, the first step is to assess your organization’s most pressing HR needs and find the career development tool, resource, or program that will provide the most targeted and tangible results.
Adapted from BC HRMA Voice Article written by: Joanne Loberg, Principal, JL Careers and Gregg Taylor CHRP, former President, Transitions
JL Careers is Here to Help You Get Started:
We provide leading-edge career development resources, models and workshops. Our clients include: First West Credit Union, BC Hydro, City of Vancouver, Flight Centre, First Calgary Savings, City of Richmond, Paragon Gaming, and City of Burnaby, to name a few. Read more about our work with Flight Centre and Envision Financial.
We provide two foundational workshops – Retaining & Engaging Your Employees: A Manager’s Guide to Leading Career Conversations for your organization’s supervisors and managers, and Ignite Your Career designed to help your employees explore career options within your organization, analyze their skills and developmental gaps, develop strategies to build their career, and create a Career Action Plan.
For more information and to discuss what options would best fit your organization’s needs please contact Joanne Loberg, Principal Consultant at JL Careers.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Joanne
