HR Leadership

Career development plans turn talk into reality. They are a comprehensive and essential part of ensuring that ambitious employees are in the right place, on time, and with the right skills, to fill the most important positions in your organization. Done right, a career development plan also allows HR/L&D to prepare development programs to be as successful as possible.

A career development plan is a tool used to define the exact steps that an employee will take in completing a career ladder.

If the career ladder is the outline of a path for the worker to take on their way to a certain place in the company, then the career development plan is the document showing the steps, timeline, and resources required. It’s basically a list of all the things that need to happen to get an employee from where they are to where they want to go.

A lot of terms are thrown around when it comes to building a career, so let’s break them down:

• Career management is the entire process that supports an employee’s progress within an organization. We’ve defined it as “all of the activities undertaken by a company to ensure that an employee decides upon, and then follows, their chosen career path”. Behind the scenes of career management are a range of HR activities, such as sourcing fantastic L&D platforms.
• Career development, on the other hand, is what happens from the employee’s point of view to encourage career growth. Nowadays, career development is also known as career pathing. Sitting down with somebody from HR and discussing how you’d like to be a senior manager one day is part of this process.
• When the HR person describes how to get to this point, they set out the steps in a career ladder. This is a generalized roadmap that gives the employee an idea of what they will need to do in order to reach their goal.
• The final process is to build a career development plan. Keep in mind that it’s not so practical to define every step from now until the end goal. For example, a career development plan might show L&D courses that the employee will need, including start and end dates. Usually, it’s not possible to have such information years in advance. Instead, the career development plan typically covers what will happen in the next year or so.

Another important clarification is the difference between professional and career development.

“Professional development” is an initiative organized by HR/L&D to improve the professional skills of employees. Professional skills are those that can be used by someone throughout their career, no matter where they are. For instance, if you are a bookkeeper and learn advanced accounting, that’s a skill to be used in the future, even though you might not use such new skills in your current position.

In contrast, a career development plan helps you to figure out a career path in your current organization. Not every career is about moving up in the company. As described below, some career development opportunities are remedial (helping to improve current skills) or transitory (finding a new role).

From an HR perspective, providing L&D programs for professional hard and soft skills can be seen as a waste if that employee leaves the company. On the other hand, career development is always focused on the skill gaps that your company has and will fill through career development.

Creating a career development plan yields benefits for both the organization and the employee. Career development plans help organizational development by clarifying required resources and timelines. Employees who follow their plans may be candidates for leadership development through L&D, and their enhanced skills improve performance in their current roles. A clear plan also signals organizational investment in an employee’s future, which can boost retention and attract qualified applicants.

Some key statistics related to career development include:

• Companies that focus on career development may have mature career development practices; approximately 50% provide individual career plans.
• L&D programs are increasingly…