How Employers can Add Value to Career Development

Employees may one day hope to advance in their careers, by having the right attitude and working hard.  So, how can employers demonstrate an interest in career development while getting their employees’ best efforts on the job?

The success of every business is based on the people that work there. And one of the most costly impacts is the loss of key people.

Growing your business means growing your people.  Research consistently underscores the link between employee engagement and critical business priorities like innovation, productivity, efficiency and results. Yet too many organizations fail to see the connection between talent and the bottom line.

In their new book Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go, leadership experts Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni lay out the breadcrumb trail from career development to extraordinary results.

Best-in-class managers ensure that they have the most capable, flexible, and engaged workforce possible to drive organizational results by making career development a priority. They don’t do this through formal meetings, onerous processes, or piles of paperwork.  They do this through the human act of conversation.

Here’s a sampling of some of the best ways leaders at all levels can make a difference.

Just talk with people.   In today’s workplace, everyone knows that employees own their careers.

But there’s a lot you can do through conversation to help focus, energize, and activate that ownership toward satisfying results by merely talking with employees.

Keep learning about employees — and help them learn about themselves throughout their careers.  Genuine interest is too frequently in short supply, yet it goes a long way toward building loyalty, retention, and results.

Encourage and enable foresight. What people are good at, what they love, and how they like to work needs to be filtered through a foresight lens. When you help employees develop the ability to scan the environment, anticipate trends, and spot opportunities, you provide a constructive context for career development.

Leverage insights... Opportunities exist where what the employee wants to do can find expression in the real, ever-changing world of work. Help employees mine that intersection.

Paint a more expansive picture of career development and available growth opportunities.  Most people have blinders on when it comes to how to advance their careers, and they look only upward. Encourage them to develop in all directions.

Help others think through how to turn their career goals into action. Ideas and objectives are a good starting point, but they don’t get far without the creativity of opportunity mindedness, the tactical focus of planning, and the ongoing conversations that help employees recognize and make the most of education, exposure, and experiences designed for development.

Find ways to bring development to life day in and day out. Waiting for an annual or pre-scheduled meeting to discuss career matters robs you and the employee of the energy and opportunities that are present always and everywhere. Infuse development conversations into the workflow and see how quickly they permeate the culture.

Career development is one of the most powerful and underutilized levers managers have to drive engagement, retention and results.

Dr. Beverly Kaye is an internationally recognized authority on career issues and on retention and engagement in the workplace. She was recently honored with the “Distinguished Contribution” award by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) for her groundbreaking and continued impact on workplace learning over the past three decades.

As founder and Co-CEO of Career Systems International and a bestselling author on workplace performance, Dr. Kaye and her team have worked with a host of organizations to establish cutting-edge, award-winning talent development solutions.

Julie Winkle Giulioni has spent the past 25 years improving performance through learning. She’s partnered with hundreds of organizations to develop and deploy innovative training products that are in use worldwide. Julie is well known and well regarded for her creative, one-of-a-kind solutions that consistently deliver bottom-line results.

As co-founder and principal of DesignArounds, Julie leads multidisciplinary teams that create award-winning electronic and instructor-led training. She is an author and respected speaker on a variety of topics, including performance improvement, leadership, sales, and customer service.

For more information on their book, visit www.help-them-grow.com.