Jobs come and go, from early roles babysitting or scooping ice cream during the summertime, to later career roles that might involve managing teams or projects. A career, though, is a lifelong journey and a way of crafting a cohesive story and path from one job to the next. Done right, a person’s career is rewarding, not just monetarily but in terms of feeling fulfilled and offering opportunities for engagement and growth.
At organizations, it’s wise to nurture your employees’ career growth and ward off a skills gap. Providing opportunities for professional growth encourages individuals to stick around — and also leads to an increase in skills and abilities. Find out more about career development, along with the steps you can take to help your employees achieve their career-related goals.
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What is career development?
Career development is the ongoing and lifelong process of setting career-related goals, establishing the steps to achieve them, and then working through those steps. This process can vary, but the path to career development can involve things like learning skills, networking, forming relationships with mentors, and gaining more experience (perhaps by attending classes or volunteering beyond a job description in the workplace).
This can sometimes be fairly concrete: For instance, if a person’s goal is to become a doctor, they’ll need to attend medical school, pass medical boards, and undergo training. Career goals can be more nebulous and subtle, however, and sometimes the path toward achieving professional success may be fuzzy. For instance, a person who seeks to tell stories might find themselves on stage, working at a magazine, or behind the scenes as a radio producer during various points in their career.
That’s where employers can help, by illuminating options and providing pathways to increase skills, competencies, and knowledge. A person’s career development rests on the decisions they make (for example, do they choose to take on job A or job B, or opt to major in X or Y), as well as the responsibilities they take on and where they turn their focus.
What are the stages of career development?
Experts sometimes speak of career development as having several key stages, including:
1. Exploration
This is when people begin considering what their career might look like. This phase can begin in youth and continue through college and first office jobs. Early roles (including internships and jobs held as a teen) can reveal a lot about innate skills and preferences!
2. Establishing (early career)
In this phase, people direct their own career path (no guidance counselor or parental hand-holding required) and begin to dig further into how they’d like their career to unfold. At this point, people typically hone in on an industry, have a good sense of their talents (and areas that could use improvement), and establish themselves in an area of expertise. Career development is helpful here, as employees build the foundation for their future.
3. Maintaining (mid-career)
During this phase, people continue to grow but may find themselves learning fewer new skills. They have a wide network of contacts and may have held multiple roles. For employers, this is a good moment to engage people so they remain motivated and tuned in.
4. Disengaging, reinventing, transitioning
Call it whatever you’d like but there’s a certain point where people may consider retirement, shifting to consulting, or more low-key roles. While it may not seem like it, this is also a great moment to engage employees in reskilling or upskilling. Employees at this phase of their career may have tremendous amounts of institutional knowledge and experience, and once that’s married with updated hard skills, it can benefit organizations.
Importance of career development
There are many reasons why employers benefit from providing professional development opportunities:
Increases skills and knowledge
An investment in increasing employees’ knowledge, whether through subsidizing a graduate degree, offering a certification, or providing self-guided training modules, means that employees gain more skills and understanding. In turn, they can apply these skills to the work at hand. For companies, this can lead to increased efficiency, reduced errors, or an influx of strategic insights.
Boosts morale and motivation
It’s unsurprising that for employees, increasing skills is typically linked with increased job satisfaction. That is: Employees who are engaged in professional development are likely to feel happy, engaged, and motivated at work (which in turn leads to increased output). According to HR Digest data, companies that opted to prioritize employee development in 2022 experienced a 24% productivity uptick.
Improves retention
With access to professional development, employees are 15% more engaged, and also have a 34% higher rate of retention, according to a survey from Better Buys.
In fact, a 2022 report from McKinsey found that 41% of people who quit did so due to a lack of career development or advancement. While some people may quit when they don’t get a promotion, for others, a feeling of being stuck and not learning more can drive a decision to depart.
Attract the best talent
Career development is a key reason for employees to remain in a role. Given this, it’s only reasonable to anticipate that having top-tier career resources will increase the quantity and quality of your hiring options.
Data from an older survey from the Execu|Search Group backs that up: In 2019, their survey found that a vast majority of working professionals — 86% — noted they’d change jobs if it means more professional development opportunities.
Supporting employees’ career development
So, how can your organization prioritize supporting career development for your employees? There are a few ways to dig in:
Integrate learning from day 1
Right from the start of your onboarding and training, make it clear that your organization values professional development by providing information on available opportunities. You’ll also be encouraging employees to stick around when you promote from within when possible (rather than hiring external candidates).
Promote networking opportunities
This doesn’t have to be fancy. Lunch-and-learns and social events create opportunities for people to connect with colleagues they may not interact with on a day-to-day basis. Networking like this can open up possibilities for information mentoring relationships. Cross-functional projects are another way to encourage people to mix and meet more colleagues.
Or, consider setting up more formal mentorship programs.
Incorporate professional development into key touchpoints
The best way to make it clear that your organization values employees’ career growth is to talk it up. Encourage managers to mention options in one-on-one meetings and during annual reviews. You can also share feedback with employees in more informational ways and offer them coaching opportunities.
Provide easy access to training and continuing education
You can offer employees opportunities to gain knowledge and skills on the job through programs you set up. You can also encourage people to take classes, attend workshops or conferences, or earn degrees or certifications by covering the fees required for these tasks.
Other ways companies can encourage employees’ career development include offering opportunities for self-assessment, providing access to career coaches, and helping them create a career development plan (along with aiding them with the various steps in the plan).
For every potential disadvantage to providing career development to employees, there’s a corresponding perk that outweighs it. Yes, there’s a cost to these efforts, but you might consider that offset by greater retention levels and employee engagement. And while it’s possible that employees may take their newly earned knowledge and apply it to other jobs, it’s also the case that not providing career development opportunities has a negative impact on retention.
Crafting a career development plan
Creating a career development plan can be overwhelming, particularly for employees who don’t tend to think in terms of five-year plans. Your organization can help with this process!
Encourage self-assessment
The first step is for employees to know what they want, as well as where they shine (and where they can improve). Encourage employees to engage in exercises like imagining where they are in one, five, and 10 years and crafting a list of current skills.
Set career goals
Once employees have a sense of what they want to achieve, they can start framing dreams in terms of goals. For instance, if someone’s ambition is to be a CEO, they’ll want to think in terms of the various stepping stones along the way.
Tip: Encourage employees to set SMART goals or at least have a timeframe in mind. Having a deadline encourages action.
Develop skills
Along with setting goals, employees will need to develop skills. For instance, perhaps someone is eager to manage teams, but isn’t very savvy when it comes to accounting and tracking spending. They may benefit from some basic classes to help them learn how to set and manage a budget.
Career development resources
As an organization, you can do so much to help power employees’ career development efforts by providing resources.
Consider incorporating online courses and other programs. A series of lunch-and-learns can be meaningful, for instance.
Another option is to fund opportunities for individuals to continue their career growth. After all, earning a degree or certification, or even attending a conference in another state, can be pricey endeavors. Your company may decide to fully or partially fund certain efforts. It’s a cost, but one with a payoff in the form of both higher engagement and increased knowledge.
You can also opt to provide training to help employees gain additional skills.
Get started with Absorb Skills
Growing your employees’ skills is good for them — and really good for your company, too. If you’ve been considering development as an optional item, think again. Not only does providing professional development opportunities grow employees’ skills (which they can put to use in the workplace), but it also increases engagement and boosts retention levels.
With Absorb Skills, your team will gain access to an AI-powered solution that provides a personalized learning path that meets people where they are based on their roles and skills and suits their individual goals. With an extensive library of over 20,000 training courses, there’s something for everyone, regardless of industry or field.
Learn more and get a demo to see how Absorb Skills can boost your team’s career development.
