"What is most important to you in your job, apart from the salary?"
If you would ask your employees this question, there is a 21% chance that they would say ‘career advancement!’At least this is what was found by a survey prepared by the staffing firm Accountemps conducted by an independent research firm (Robert Half) [1]. This spells very clearly that employees are looking for organizations who value them as a resource and invest in their career progression.
It is no longer enough for organizations to hire employees, give them the initial training, and forget about them. It is important that you give some thought to their career advancement options within the organization.
If you are part of the Learning and Development team of an organization, you should ideally be planning for the long-term career advancement of employees in the organization, not just one-off training programs. By doing this, you will demonstrate to your employees that:
There is nothing dramatically different you need to do to plan for career advancement. All you have to do is think of the different job levels you have in a department. Identify the skills required at each level, and then chalk out training modules for the different skills sets. Let’s take the sales department, for example. Depending on the organization, you may have levels like these:
What does it take for a sales representative to grow to the level of the national sales manager or the sales director of the company? What if a sales rep does not want to move up to the sales director, but is interested in other options? Are there opportunities for employees to move to other departments such as customer support, marketing, or public relations?
Your employees should have a good indication of the answers to these questions that might pop up in their minds. Ideally, you should have a tentative suggestion and a career advancement plan for the individual. You should, then, populate resources that will equip the employee to prepare for their future role. There could also be lateral shifts to other departments or generic skills that may be common to many departments. Therefore, it would be best to prepare a training curriculum for career advancement and share it with employees either on the HR portal or the Learning Management System (LMS), where it is easily accessible to them.
The training programs can be either face-to-face or in the eLearning format, depending on the feasibility. These programs will enable employees to learn about the diverse options open to them within the organization, before looking elsewhere. You will obviously need a team to help you with this. And that could be a course development partner.
Developing a training curriculum is one part; the next part is the execution of the training program. While some programs need face-to-face interaction, some might do with eLearning, and others might need both interventions. However, a bulk of the heavy lifting needs to be done by eLearning programs because of its sheer viability in terms of cost and reach.
If you have an in-house team that can handle the requirements, you can get them to develop the online courses. Otherwise, you can work with a course development partner or an outsourcing partner who can be your long-term support for planning the career advancement of your employees. All you need to do when selecting a course development partner is assess their capabilities. The following parameters might serve as some guidelines:
It is a good idea to choose a partner with whom you can have a long-term relationship. That way, the partner will have a good overview of the courses they have developed and will support you in structuring a curriculum, based on your organizational structure and hierarchy without duplication or rework. If the partner can also customize the Learning Management System and design the training workflow to suit your needs, it is even better.
The key or the basic thought process is to provide a scope for career progression and a future within the company for employees. Offering career advancement is one of the prime means you can leverage retain your employees—a win-win proposition. The sooner organizations realize this and incorporate it as part of their L&D strategy, the better.
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