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Your Career Development Strategy Needs These 5 Things

It’s easy to tell you to set up a career development program to nurture your employees’ futures; it’s a little tougher to actually implement one. Should you enter into a partnership with an outside learning organization, such as a college or university? Should you build an internal learning program? What would you even include? Don’t worry—we’re here to help!

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, and make sure everyone is on board with setting and meeting the goals. Set yourself up for goal-meeting success by teaching a module about setting and measuring goals. Goals without a plan and follow-through are called wishes!

Assessments

Assessment tools can tell you a lot about your current and prospective employees. For example, cognitive ability testing can provide a baseline for career development dialogue. This testing can also be used during the hiring process to understand candidates’ strengths, weaknesses, and trainability. Then when you hire a candidate, those results can steer 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! Technical skills are a helpful focus, 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, and so on. 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 you can think of. Check in regularly to make sure the company and the employees are on the same page.

In conclusion

Your most valuable resources are always your human resources. So when investing in their career development means investing in a stronger future for your company, try these five strategies and see what happens!

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