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Include these 5 things in your career development strategy

Why aren’t more companies focused on career development? After all, your future workforce has to come from somewhere. Why not grow the employees you’ve got through a career development program?

OK, so it’s easy to tell you to set up a career development program. It’s a little harder to actually implement one. Should you enter into a partnership with an outside learning organization, like a college or university? Should you build an internal learning program? What the heck would you even include?

Tell you what. If you’re designing your own career development program, consider these five things:

Goals. What do you want to achieve with this career development program? You’ll want to set company goals as well as individual employee goals. Is everyone on board with setting and meeting the goals? Hint: Set yourself up for success with a module that teaches employees how to set and measure goals. Goals without follow-up are called wishes!
Assessments. You can tell a lot about your prospective and current employees through the many assessment tools out there. Cognitive ability testing can provide a baseline for career development dialogue. This testing can also be used during the hiring process to understand a candidate’s strengths, weaknesses, and trainability. Then if you hire the candidate, you can use those results for career development guidance.
Training and professional development. Training helps employees better perform their current jobs, while professional development helps employees prepare for the future. Great career development should include both! It should focus on technical skills, yes, but more important are the soft skills employees need to succeed as leaders.
Teaching strategies. Today’s technology lets employees learn in a variety of fun ways: conferences, webinars, podcasts, blogs, and so on. When choosing the best medium for a topic, consider scalability, cost, development time, technology… You get the idea. Make sure the delivery method is easily disseminated and easily digestible.
Feedback. How can you be sure your employees are happy? Ask them! Set up multiple ways to exchange feedback about career development: open conversations with management, anonymous suggestion boxes, and anything else creative you can think of. Check in regularly to make sure the company and the employees are on the same page.

As we like to say, your best resources are your HUMAN resources! So investing in their career development means investing in a stronger future for your company. Try out these five strategies and see what happens!

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