Culture Hacker

10Career DevelopmentIt's at the Heart of Long-Term Employee Commitment, Yet No One Is Doing Anything about It

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

Confucius¹

It is time to talk about career development, a topic on every employee's mind but one that doesn't seem to be as important for many employers. You must have a framework and plan to develop your people and invest in their career.

Let's begin by thinking about what career development means. In his 2010 book Employee Training and Development, Raymond A. Noe explains that career development is “the idea of looking at an employee's career as a whole and designing different sets of formal training, developmental activities, and relationships at each stage.”² In short, career development is about investing in the skills and abilities of your people while providing them with mentoring and coaching for direction. This seems like a very reasonable expectation for today's modern employee, and one that provides a lot of value to the company as well.

It seems over the past couple of years I have been asking employees more and more about their career development aspirations and whether they believe their current company is able to satisfy those needs. The feedback is concerning in that career development just does not seem to be a priority for many organizations today. Yet, with benefits of higher job performance, increased engagement, and lower turnover—all of which positively impact the bottom line, customer ...