Businesses need to care about their employees’ career development. Why? Because employees care. This is especially true for younger generations, who are hungry for a range of experiences to develop their skillset and set them up for future success. In fact, at any given moment 6 out of 10 millennials are looking for new employment opportunities, according to Gallup polling.
As an HR leader, the challenge is offer your top talent the opportunities they need to grow within your organization. If you don’t, you’ll be faced with high, costly turnover. Developing employees gives you the ability to plan ahead—but it’s also 6 times less expensive than recruiting from outside your company.
What is Career Management?
Effective career management is all about giving your team the right opportunities at the right time—and building robust succession plans. This means taking a bird’s eye view of how skills and experience are spread throughout your organization and identifying potential risks.
Solutions may include moving staff between departments, doubling down on training in key areas or, if required, recruiting to fill skills gaps. An essential part of career management is tracking employee performance, identifying those with high potential and making sure they’ll be ready to step up, when needed.
Why is Career Management Important?
Most companies understand the importance of forward thinking when it comes to replacing executives. Too often, though, there’s a shortage of the same kind of planning about skills across an entire organization. Leadership is important, but employees don’t need to be senior to possess institutional knowledge and technical skills that, if they were to leave, would be hard to replace.
The reality is, you’ll never be able to keep every single employee around long term. But when a key team member departs, especially at short notice, you need the security of knowing that there are other employees ready to step into their shoes. Identifying and hiring the best talent from outside your organization has a place, but you can’t rely on recruitment to solve all your problems.
Here’s the good news: development is exactly what employees are looking for. Sixty-nine percent of employees rate “professional or career growth and development opportunities” as important to them and for millennials this reaches 87%. A strong development culture breeds engaged and productive employees who stick around long term—the alternative is disengaged employees whose careers stagnate.
Career Management and Talent Development
It’s best to think of career management as comprised of two key elements. First is understanding what your business needs to be productive—this could be specific skills, experiences or employee profiles—and planning an organizational structure where no single individual becomes indispensable.
The other side of career management is making this a reality. This requires a culture of talent development, where employees frequently receive feedback, targeted training and understand where they need to improve in order to advance.
Why to Use a Career Management System
Understanding ever-evolving business needs while tracking the career trajectories of individual employees is no small task. It’s certainly too big for pen and paper or even a spreadsheet. Leaders need to be on the frontlines developing talent, not wasting time on repetitive admin—that’s where a career management system can help.
Software gives you the ability to put in place personalized development programs across your whole team, be alerted to succession risks before they happen and use analytics to better understand how skills are spread.
Paycor Career Management features include:
- Role and Growth profiles: Increase alignment on what each role requires and whether employees are meeting expectations.
- Job Assessments and Competency Determinations: Help employees understand what they need to thrive in their current roles and be ready for future opportunities.
- Talent Attributes: Track employee progression to be better understand the skills of your whole workforce.
- Workforce insights: Use dashboards to easily spot and mitigate risks.
How Paycor Helps
Paycor builds HR solutions for leaders. With Paycor, you can modernize every aspect of people management, from the way you recruit, onboard and develop your team, to the way you pay and retain them. See how Paycor can help the leaders of your organization solve the problems of today and tomorrow.