Career Development Plan Frameworks

Attract, Engage, and Retain Top Employees
If you want to attract, engage, and retain top talent, here’s a priority that might serve you better than any other approach while at the same time it can drive sustainable business results: career development. Studies show again and again that career and talent development are closely linked to prized business metrics, leading indicators, and positive overall outcomes. Provide your employees with an individual career development plan.

How Does This Work?
Employees highly value the opportunity to learn and grow, to expand both capability and capacity, and to work toward their personal and professional goals. Organizations, too, recognize the benefits of a workforce that focuses on each individual’s continuous improvement. Additionally, businesses that support employee engagement through designing agreed-upon career paths for their workers face lower turnover.

For example:

• If employees remain in the same-old, same-old job for three years, there is only a 45% chance that they’ll stay.
• With a lateral move during that time, the likelihood that they’ll stay with the organization is 65%.
• If the move is the result of a promotion, the likelihood of retention is 70%.

Bottom line ― If employees change positions either through a linear move or a promotion, they just stay longer.

Career Development Done Right
A career development plan provides the path for employees to change job roles in a well-considered, mutually beneficial way. However, career development planning must be done right. More than a track record of an employee’s progress in their job, career planning needs to be set within a career development framework that incorporates the following five areas from our new manager training program:

1. Employee Starting Position
   Baseline for skills at this level
2. Current achievements
   Information about employee’s direction and readiness for next steps
3. Development Needs
   Skill gap assessments and targeted training opportunities
4. Employee’s Professional Goals
   The preferred role and responsibilities the employee would aim for as skills and experience are acquired
5. Steps Toward the Goal
   Actionable steps with timelines and milestones to guide the individual employee and assess their progress as they move forward and upward

True champions of a people first culture assume that every employee has the potential to learn and grow. With this career development mindset, leaders inspire in their workers a belief that there are rewarding opportunities in their future. These enlightened leaders work with their employees to identify strengths and to perform at their peak.

The Bottom Line
Employee engagement depends on many factors but one of the most powerful is an employee’s belief that they are valued, their professional growth is fully supported by the organization, and there are future opportunities in the company that suit them. How would you rate your business in terms of career development?

To learn more about creating better career development mindsets to engage and retain top talent, download How Organizations and Managers Must Reassess Career Development