Suffer Career Stagnation? Wrong Career Choices? Zero Career Growth? Career Confusion? Video 6551

Careers have been described as a sequence of positions held within an occupation. A career has also been described in the context of mobility within the organization. A protein career is based on self-direction, with the goal of psychological success in one's work. Employees take major responsibilities for managing their careers. The protein career has several implications for employee development. The goal of a new career is psychological success, the feeling of pride and accomplishment that comes from achieving life goals that are not limited to achievements at work, such as raising a family and having good physical health. Psychological success is self-determined rather than solely determined through signals employees receive from the company like salary increases and promotions. It's important for employees to develop new skills rather than rely on static knowledge base. This resulted from organizations' need to be more responsive to customer service and product demands. Learning is continuous, often informal, and involves creating and sharing knowledge. The emphasis on continuous learning has altered the direction and frequency of movement of careers, known as career patterns. Traditional career patterns consisted of a series of steps arranged in linear hierarchies, with higher steps related to increased authority, responsibility, and compensation. Development planning or career management system refers to a system to retain and motivate employees by identifying and helping them to meet their developmental needs. Companies' development planning systems, also known as development planning processes, vary in the level of sophistication and the emphasis they place on different components of the process. The steps and responsibilities in the development planning system are shown here. They include self-assessment, reality check, goal setting, and action planning. Self-assessment refers to the use of information by employees to determine their career interests, values, aptitudes, and behavioral tendencies. It often involves psychological tests such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, known as the MBTI, and the Strawn-Campbell Interest Inventory, and the self-directed search. Through the assessment, a development need can be identified. This need can result from gaps between current skills and or interests and the type of work a position or employee wants. Reality check refers to information employees receive about how the company evaluates their skills and knowledge and where they fit into the company's plans. Some companies also use 360-degree feedback assessment, which involves employees completing a self-evaluation of their behaviors or competencies and their managers, peers, direct reports, and even customers also providing evaluations of them. Goal setting refers to the process of employees developing short and long-term development objectives. An action plan is a written strategy that employees use to determine how they'll achieve their short and long-term career goals. The development approach used depends on the needs and developmental goal. Four approaches are used to develop employees' formal education, assessment, job experiences, and interpersonal relationships. Many organizations use a combination of these approaches. Regardless of the approach used to ensure the development programs are effective, the program should be developed through the same process used for training design, assessing needs, creating a positive development environment, ensuring employees' readiness for development, identifying the objectives for development, choosing a combination of development activities that will achieve the objectives, and ensuring that the work environment supports the development activities and the use of skills and experiences acquired and evaluating the program. To determine the development needs of an individual, department, or company, an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses needs to be completed so that appropriate development activities can be chosen. Many organizations have identified key competencies for successful managers. Competencies are the areas of personal capability that enable employees to successfully perform their jobs. Competencies can include knowledge, skills, abilities, or personal characteristics. Formal education programs include off-site and on-site programs designed specifically for the company's employees. Short courses offered by consultants or universities, executive MBA programs, and university programs in which participants actually live at the university while taking classes. These programs may involve lectures by business experts, business games and simulations, adventure learning, and meetings with customers. A number of institutions in the United States and abroad provide executive education including Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and so on. Executive education includes executive MBA programs as well as specialized curriculum on topics such as leadership, entrepreneurship, change, innovation, and global business. Executive education programs typically involve a blended learning approach. This means that managers visit campuses for face-to-face instruction and between sessions work online on assignments such as team projects, cases, or reading assignments. Enrollment in executive education programs or MBA programs may be limited to managers or employees identified that have management potential. As a result, many organizations also provide tuition reimbursement as a benefit for all employees to engage them to develop on their own. Assessment involves collecting information and providing feedback to employees about their behavior, communication style, or skills. The employees, their peers, managers, and customers may provide information. At an assessment center, multiple raters or evaluators evaluate employees' performance on a number of exercises. An assessment center is usually at an off-site location such as a conference center. Six to twelve employees usually participate at a time. Assessment centers are primarily used to identify if employees have the personality characteristics, administrative skills, and interpersonal skills needed for managerial jobs. Performance appraisal is the process of measuring employees' performance. Performance appraisal information can be useful for employee development under certain conditions. The appraisal system must tell employees specifically about their performance problems and how they can improve their performance. Upward feedback and 360-degree feedback are popular tools for development particularly for managers. Upward feedback refers to appraisal that involves collecting subordinates evaluations of manager behavior or skills. The 360-degree feedback process is a special case of upward feedback. In 360-degree feedback systems, employees' behaviors or skills are evaluated not only by subordinates but by peers, customers, their bosses, and themselves. The raters complete the questionnaire asking them to rate the person on a number of different dimensions. Most employee development occurs through job experiences, relationships, problems, demands, tasks, and other features that employees face in their jobs. A major assumption of using job experiences for employee development is that development is most likely to occur when employees are given stretch assignments. Stretch assignments refer to assignments in which there is a mismatch between the employee's skills and past experiences in the skills required for success on the job. Job enlargement refers to adding challenges or new responsibilities to employees' current jobs. This could include special project assignments, switching roles within a work team, or researching new ways to serve clients and customers. Job rotation and lateral moves gives employees a series of job assignments in various functional areas of the company or movement among jobs in a single function area or department. Mentoring and coaching are two types of interpersonal relationships that are used to develop employees. A mentor is an experienced productive senior employee who helps develop a less experienced employee known as the protege. Because of the lack of potential mentors and recognizing that employees can benefit from relationships with peers and colleagues, some organizations have initiated and supported group and peer mentoring. In group or peer mentoring programs, a successful senior employee is paired with a group of four to six less experienced proteges. One potential advantage of peer mentoring is that proteges are engaged to learn from each other and from more experienced senior employees. Most mentoring relationships develop informally as a result of interests or values shared by the mentor and protege. Mentoring relationships can also develop as part of a formal mentoring program like a planned company effort to bring together successful senior employees with less experienced employees. Mentoring programs have many purposes including socializing new employees, developing managers, and providing opportunities to share experiences and to gain the exposure and skills needed to move into management positions. One major advantage of formalized mentoring programs is that they ensure access to mentors for all employees regardless of their gender or race. An additional advantage is that participants in mentoring relationships know what's expected of them. One limitation of formal mentoring programs is that mentors may not be able to provide consulting and coaching in a relationship that has been artificially created. A key to successful mentoring programs is the mentor and protege are well matched and can interact with each other face-to-face or virtually using video conferencing. Both mentors and proteges can benefit from a mentoring relationship. Research suggests that mentors provide career and psychological support to their proteges. Career support includes coaching, protection, sponsorship, and providing challenging assignments, exposure, and visibility. Psychological support includes serving as a friend and role model, providing positive regard and acceptance, and creating an outlet for the protege to talk about anxieties and fears. Mentoring relationships provide opportunities for mentors to develop their interpersonal skills and increase their feelings of self-esteem and worth to the organization. Reverse mentoring refers to mentoring in which younger employees mentor more senior employees. Mentoring programs can also help encourage women and minority who tend to be underrepresented in leadership positions to develop into management. Succession planning refers to the process of identifying, evaluating, developing, and tracking high potential employees who are capable of moving into different positions in the organization, resulting from planned or unplanned job openings due to turnover, promotion, or business growth. Succession planning helps organizations. It identifies and prepares future company leaders, helps ensure the company runs smoothly when key employees leave, and creates opportunities for development and promotion. High potential employees are those people that the company believes are capable of being successful in higher level managerial positions. Bench strength refers to having a pool of talented employees who are ready when needed. The nine box grid is a three by three matrix used by groups of managers and executives to compare employees within one department, function, division, or an organization. As shown here, one axis of the matrix is based on assessment of job performance. The other axis is typically labeled potential or promotability. The manager's assessment of performance and potential influences employee development plans. The value of the grid is that it is based on the shared perspectives of talent. It helps managers provide development plans and experiences that best fit employees based on their performance and potential, and provides a snapshot of talent. One of the important issues in succession planning is deciding whether to tell employees if they are on or off the list of potential candidates for higher level manager positions. One advantage of making succession planning lists public, or telling employees who is on the list, is that they are more likely to stay with the company because they understand they likely will have new career opportunities. Another is that high potential employees who are not interested in other positions can communicate those interests. The disadvantages of identifying high potential employees are that those not on the list may become discouraged and leave the organization, or changes in business strategy or employees performance could take them off the list. Also, employees might not believe that they've had a fair chance to compete for leadership positions if they already know that a list of potential candidates has been established. A number of studies have identified managerial behaviors that can cause an otherwise competent manager to be a toxic or ineffective manager. These behaviors include insensitivity and aggressiveness towards others, inability to be a team player, arrogance, poor conflict management skills, an inability to meet business objectives, and an inability to change or adapt during a transition. In the coaching phase of the program, the manager is first presented with information about targeted skills or behavior. This information may be about principles of effective communication or teamwork, tolerance of differences in the workplace, or methods for conducting effective meetings. The second step is for the manager to participate in behavior modeling training. The manager also receives psychological counseling to overcome beliefs that may inhibit learning the desired behavior.