An effective career plan: How to create and implement?

Over the past few years, the initiative to create a career plan has experienced a remarkable boom in the labour market worldwide. According to the 2019 Human Resources Technology Evolution report by consulting firm ICD, only 3% of companies rely on internal talent to fill critical positions. To improve these numbers, companies should start by creating a professional career plan that trains and qualifies employees to take on new roles within the organisation.

How do you create a career plan for a company?

Assess employee talent

Before creating a career plan, it is important to get to know our employees better to find out their strengths and weaknesses and what areas they need to improve in. It is also important to know their aspirations in the company. Performance Appraisal can be used for proper career planning. It is a software for assessing and analysing the talents of professionals used in day-to-day work. This tool also helps to reduce uncertainty and increase motivation - all by setting clear objectives that allow employees to follow the business strategy and realise their full potential.

Staff performance appraisals

As a leader, you should not only evaluate performance, but also ask questions and scenarios to employees to see how they react. And on a case-by-case basis to see if they are ready to make decisions in a more responsible position. If you add to all of this the ability to conduct confidential surveys, this tool becomes a great option for gathering information about employees. Once the baseline situation is fully known, the HR department can begin to identify the various goals to which it wants to direct employee training. To do this, it is important to not only know the goals, but also to identify the major challenges that separate employees from that desired point. Therefore, during the goal-setting phase of the career plan, it is essential to define the training objectives and identify the major weaknesses that need to be strengthened during the training period.

Train employees to learn new things

Employees may request or suggest different training plans or specific topics on which they want to expand their knowledge and which they believe will be beneficial to the company. The key to a good training plan is to make the content adaptable and accessible. A technology known as a learning management system (LMS) can help with this. It is designed to facilitate all tasks associated with learning management, including the process of developing a professional career plan. An LMS allows training to be organised for all staff without interfering with normal day-to-day operations.

Once the content of staff training has been defined, it is necessary to describe in detail how the training will be delivered:

• Select the method of training - face-to-face, remote or blended;
• Determine the timetable within which all educational activities will take place and draw up a budget that includes all costs associated with the programme;
• Plan proper communication with staff and managers, as the entire company needs to be aware of the training campaign.

The company should also rely on technology tools to help it improve talent management and learning. Maximise the strengths of your employees by using automation for career planning.

How do you make a career plan effective?

Consider the interests of both parties involved in the process. On one side, a company that is interested in creating a career plan to have a better trained workforce that can take on more responsibility when the time comes. On the other hand, the employee who wants to grow professionally to reach higher positions in the company. For this to work, it is very important that career development plans are known to all parties and that they follow fair and clear policies. It is also essential to have the right tools to develop the necessary competences.

What data is needed?

In order to start implementing a career plan, you need to have a set of data that will properly guide the process. These include: Name and age of the employee(s), maximum level of education attained, current position held in the company and a detailed description of its functions, possible positions that can be reached through a professional career plan, number of years he/she has been with the company, a brief description of identified strengths and weaknesses, competencies required to achieve the new position.

Knowing this information about our employees gives us an advantage in certain areas of development:

• Avoiding talent leakage;
• Improving the employer brand image;
• Improved employee performance through higher levels of satisfaction;
• Reduced recruitment and selection costs;
• Reducing the time required to adapt to a new position in the company;
• Increased job stability;
• Reduced stress through a long-term career plan that reduces uncertainty in work life.

You also need to identify all the positions in the company and the key job skills for each of them.

Use gamification of learning

This learning technique is all about transferring the game into a professional environment for better results. These include improving some key knowledge or skills. Gamification is based on creating a mechanism that rewards the employee based on the goals achieved. The reward techniques may include accumulation of points, level or rating increase, gifts or prizes. Thus, gamification within a career plan is not just a game, but a system of goals and rewards that motivate the employee to achieve new goals.

Track training progress

While many employees have the potential to move up to a higher position, not all of them want to. Attention should be paid to identifying those employees whose goal is to advance in their careers. There is also such a thing as a ‘talent matrix’. This tool allows you to closely monitor the training process, tracking employee progress to make sure that all employees are going through the process at a good pace and are in a good frame of mind to reach their maximum potential and achieve high results. At the end of the training, the programme itself invites employees to rate the quality of the training and its usefulness. This information can be used by the HR department to further improve career plans.

Outcomes

The creation of a company career plan does not depend on a magic formula, but on a good knowledge of the company and a high capacity for foresight, which allows you to focus on being able to respond to future needs arising in the company. For successful implementation, it is important to take into account the individual needs and aspirations of employees, provide them with the necessary resources for training and development, and continually evaluate and adjust the plan as necessary. In this way, the company can not only utilise the potential of its employees effectively, but also adapt to future challenges and opportunities in the marketplace.