Leaders and HR professionals are sometimes at a loss for how to support employees’ career goals, especially in smaller businesses and organizations. They avoid talking to employees about their career development out of fear that they lack knowledge or tools to do so, or won’t be able to help employees progress. At the same time, employees who do not feel there is room for them to grow and progress may become disengaged, and either underperform or move on to a new company. However, career management and development can be built into an organization of any size. These powerful tools can help leaders build a more engaged and satisfied workforce.
These resources, including books, worksheets, guides, webinars, articles and more can help you get a start on supporting employee career management within your workplace.
Tools
Books, worksheets, guides and more to help leaders support employees’ career development.
Activate Your Agile Career [book]
Marti Konstant’s Activate Your Agile Career explores the rise of the agile careerist as a powerful response to today’s changing work world. This book may be useful to you if you are:
- Looking to energize your teams and take them from uncertain to inspired leaders
- Managing staff seeking to optimize their time and talents within your organization
- Ready to explore the individual motivations of your staff
- Restless or desire something more from your work life
Career Development in a Digital Workplace: Six Ways to Retain and Engage Top Talent (Workday) [ebook]
This ebook shares six strategies for employers to use to help employees get where they want to go – and build a more engaged and motivated workforce. These strategies include the following:
- Rethinking traditional career pathways
- Applying agile employee development methodologies
- Enabling continuous workplace learning
- Developing strong managers and future leaders
Career Pathing as a Talent Imperative (Talent Guard) [white paper]
Helping employees understand their skills and the skills of a future career opportunity creates a powerful conversation. Employees get real insights into how they can accomplish career goals, employers see where skills gaps occur and how to fill them with existing talent, and businesses reap the rewards of increased retention.
Coach Approach (McMaster University)
Guides to help managers coach more effectively focused on performance reviews, approaches for managing different personality styles, goal setting and self-review.
Developing Employee Career Paths and Ladders (SHRM)
This guide discusses the types of career paths and career ladders that an employer can use to assist employees in their career progression within the organization. Traditional career paths and ladders are discussed, as well as non-traditional methods of career progression developed in response to changes within society, organizations and the workforce.
Life Cycle Of High-Potential Employees: Drive Leadership Through A Culture Of Continuous Learning (Infopro Learning) [ebook]
This ebook highlights the critical measures that affect the future success of high-potential talent. High-potential leadership development is a long-term investment that results in a measurable performance impact on organizational development.
Lifelong Career Management (CERIC)
This chapter of CERIC’s Career Development Practice in Canada: Perspectives, Principles, and Professionalism textbook, co-authored by Sandra Boyd and Kim Spurgeon, shares five simple steps to managing your career over a lifetime, regardless of the ups and downs of the corporate world. The focus is on understanding that one’s marketability is as important as employability.
Individual Development Plan Examples (The Balance Careers)
An individual development plan (IDP) is a tool that helps facilitate employee development. This guide discusses preparation, goal-setting, assessing strengths and development needs, creating an action plan and discussing the IDP with employees.
Individual Development Plan (McGill)
Worksheet examples to create an IDP.
People as Competitive Advantage (Josh Bersin Academy) [Online course]
How do we attract and retain the right people? How do we engage them? What does digital mean for our people, our customers, and the ways we work? How do we redesign our organizations to best leverage, empower, and inspire them? The People as Competitive Advantage Program explores these questions and asks how we can best transform ourselves and our organizations to put people first.
Retain and Gain: Career Management for Non-Profits and Charities (CERIC)
This Playbook, written by Lisa Taylor, identifies 40+ low-cost tips, activities and actions that non-profits and charities can take right now (some in only 10 minutes a day) to attract, engage and retain staff. A pdf can be downloaded free or the publication can be purchased in print or as an ebook.
Retain and Gain: Career Management for Small Business (CERIC)
Career management offers a strategic lever for stronger company performance. This Playbook, written by Lisa Taylor, identifies 40+ low-cost tips, activities and actions that small business can take to attract, engage and retain staff. A pdf can be downloaded free or the publication can be purchased in print or as an ebook.
Steps to Create a Career Development Plan (The Balance Careers)
A guide to helping employees create a career development plan, including tips on how to prepare for a career development planning meeting, how to carry out the plan and pitfalls to avoid.
Talk The Talk: How Ongoing Career Conversations Drive Business Success (Right Management) [White paper]
How does an organization engage employees looking for growth opportunities while meeting its own business objectives and goals? The answer lies in reinventing the “career conversation.” Research shows that a full two-thirds of individual performance drivers are tied to career conversations, making it the most important people process in an organizational culture that embraces career development.
Video/webinars
Championing Career Management: Preventing Talent Hoarding (Talent Guard)
In this webinar, managers will learn how to recognize and prevent talent hoarding, and become a champion of their employees’ career development goals. A pdf of the slides is also available.
Talent Guard also offers a webinar on “Building Personalized Career Experiences for the Modern Workforce.”
Developing a Skills Strategy for Your Organization (Desire2Learn)
This webinar covers the following topics:
- Building and nurturing a culture of continuous learning
- Cultivating growth mindsets among leaders
- Creating communities of practice to share expertise, knowledge and skills
- Measuring and improving the impact of organizational learning
How Landit, a Workday Ventures Company, Is Redefining Career Development (Workday)
“Amazing things happen when you enable people with tools and know-how and access to bring the best version of themselves to the workplace,” says Landit founder and CEO Lisa Skeete Tatum in this Workday interview. While some of the interview is about the company, it also has interesting information about what a career development approach means for underrepresented groups in the workforce.
No time? No budget? No problem! Retain and Gain: Career Management for Non-profits and Charities (CERIC)
Learn what’s driving the future of work and the value of incorporating new tools and approaches into how you address staffing challenges. This webinar, presented by Lisa Taylor, features Canadian sector-specific research, resources and recommendations so that non-profits and charities can attract, engage, develop and retain employees.
Skills Gaps are Opportunities to Develop a Future-Ready Workforce (Randstad)
This webinar shares how training and development approaches are being leveraged to close skills gaps, as well as improve the value proposition for candidates and current employees.
Your Top Talent and You: The Value of a Career Mobility Strategy (Randstad)
In this webinar, find out how you can shift to long-term talent employability through career mobility strategies that incorporate the overall value that existing employees bring.
Articles
- Building a Career-Focused Culture – Avoiding the Number One Mistake (LHH)
- Careering magazine: Career Development in the Workplace issue (CERIC)
- Career Management as an Employee Engagement Strategy (PeopleTalk)
- Career planning and development: Meeting business and employee needs (MaRS)
- How non-profit managers can become champions for employee career development (CareerWise)
- It’s learning. Just not as we know it (Accenture)
- New workforce skilling for innovation and growth (Accenture)
- Promoting internal career development in organizations (CERIC)
- Responsible workforce planning through redeployment and career development (Randstad)
- Retain and Gain: Employee Retention in the Non-profit Sector (HR Professional)
- What “good” career management looks like (CharityVillage)
- Why career management competencies matter in your organization (SHRM)
- 6 Things Employees Absolutely Hate About Your Internal Career Development Program (Talent Guard)
- 6 Ways To Promote Internal Talent Mobility in Your Organization (Saba)
- 7 Ways to Support Employees’ Career Advancement (Robert Half)
Are we missing something? If you know of a resource you think could make this article stronger, share in the comments below or email lindsay@ceric.ca.
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