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The Case for Balancing Organizational and Individual Career Management

In the January e-Letter I wrote about the case for balancing organizational and individual careers. In case you are not convinced of the urgency of this need, consider the following national statistics concerning lost productivity:

64% of workers say they would start their careers over again if they could because they do not feel they are in the right job
Over 50% of workers admitted they ended up in their current jobs through chance or the advice of others
On average, it costs approximately $25,000 to train someone to full productivity in a job
4,000 people (1.6 percent) leave their full time jobs in their first year in any moderate sized Canadian city
The direct and indirect costs conservatively add up to more than $100 million nationally
A 1% increase in their productivity would result in an increase of $11 billion+ in goods and services

(Source: Statistics Canada, CANSIM II, Consolidated federal, provincial, territorial, and local government data, August 2002)

In this e-Letter, I would like to share with you some of the critical elements of an organizational career management system. A balanced approach includes:

Individual career planning processes
Joint career dialogue
Organizational workforce development

Each organization needs to work out for itself a framework, which balances the ownership of the individual for his or her career and the needs of the organization to utilize its resources to maximum advantage. The range of processes available in career management is summarized below.

Individual Career Planning Processes

These processes refer to the activities that an individual will undertake in order to self-manage their career. Although the organization may provide the resources, the individual is responsible for taking the initiative:

Continuous self-assessment of career preferences and choices
Engaging in professional development plans and activities
Professional competency profiling
Developing and maintaining professional networks
Writing CV’s and career portfolios
Accessing career information resources and expertise via carer seminars, workshops, lunch and learns, books, videos, tapes, newsletters and Intranets / Internet career systems

Joint Career Dialogue

When an individual is aware of who they are, where they are going and what they have to offer, they are able to enter into a dialogue with their team and their manager. There are a number of processes that can facilitate this dialogue:

Team development sessions wherein the team is able to develop a comprehensive profile of its competencies and identify team developmental areas
Manager appraisal and development reviews
Skills coaching for short term development
Mentoring relationships for long term development
Career counselling sessions with career process experts
Developmental assignments in other teams or departments

Organizational Workforce Development

Organizational processes are systems designed to ensure that the systems are in place to facilitate both individual and joint career development processes. It is important to note that these do not necessarily demand the development of new human resources tools or processes; rather, it is more the intentional inclusion of these practices to ensure workforce development. These may include:

Designing human resources information systems to include both individual competency profiles and development plans
Providing development resources to assist managers and teams to engage in development dialogue
Facilitating skills coaching and mentoring relationships
Generating opportunities for developmental assignments
Constructing succession planning for all levels of management
Forecasting and communicating workforce needs and providing incentives for individuals to fill these requirements

Through this balanced approach, organizations can create the capacity to retain and develop their workforce today while leveraging their capacity to develop the competencies to be competitive tomorrow!

Wishing you balance, passion and fulfillment in your lifework!

Rob

"Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context -- a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." ~ Eliel Saarinen, "Time", July 2, 1956