Jul 22'

Why Career Development is Vital for your Organization

The world of work has changed.

Whereas once employees might have stayed in a job for life, today’s organizations have to navigate a fluctuating job market where traditional career paths are a thing of the past. Add to this the impact of the global pandemic alongside the Great Resignation, and it’s easy to see why you might be tempted to push career development to the bottom of your agenda.

But in doing so you could be making a huge mistake. That’s because supporting your employees with their career development isn’t just a long game, in fact, it has a huge number of short-term benefits that can help you to improve engagement, support employee retention, attract top talent and ultimately boost your bottom line.

Here are just some of the reasons why career development is vital to your organization.

Employee motivation and productivity

Offering career development opportunities has been proven to help boost engagement and employee motivation.

That’s particularly true of younger talent. Indeed research suggests that 68% of Millennials believe that a clear path to career progression is a key factor in keeping them engaged and motivated in their roles. So while your employees are no longer looking to your organization to chart the rest of their careers for them, they do at least expect you to take an interest in their future.

Put simply, if your people can see that you’re willing to aid their development they’re much more likely to put in the kind of effort that benefits you in the here and now.

An employee retention solution

It’s not just engagement and motivation that an investment in career development can help you deliver, it could also help you retain your top talent.

Research has shown that you can trace a clear line between people’s perception of the opportunities for growth within an organization and their willingness to stay in their roles. One study by Deloitte, for example, shows that companies with a strong development culture have retention rates that are 30-50% higher than those without.

In the current competitive climate, where organizations are scrambling to hold onto their top performers, career development can’t be seen as an optional extra. Instead, it should be front and centre for your employees, so they can see the value you place in their futures.

Attract top talent

Of course, there are very real benefits to supporting your staff with career development. After all, by nurturing talent from within your organization you might be able to bridge skills gaps and reduce the costs involved with external hiring processes.

But even when you do have to seek out external talent, career development opportunities can be a big draw. The prospect of career progression opportunities and working for an employer who takes an active interest in their future can be key to a candidate’s decision to accept a job offer.

So it’s vital that your organization does everything to signpost progression and development opportunities if you’re going to stand out from the crowd in today’s market.

How to implement career development in your organization

So now that you’re sold on the benefits, what can you do to implement career development in your organization? There are a whole host of possible tactics you can use from mentorships to training programs. At BucketList we’ve taken things further and built a dedicated development plan for every employee within our organization.

These plans are built around quarterly meetings where team members come together with their managers to discuss their career goals and what we, as an employer, can do to help them achieve their long-term vision.

Implementing these kind of meetings within your own organization can be a quick and effective way to start reaping the rewards of career development. To help you on the way we’ve provided a template agenda below that you can use to create your very own career development program.

Quarterly Career Check-in agenda

1. Go over goals from last quarter and this quarter
2. Discuss overall performance this quarter
3. Discuss professional development this quarter
4. Discuss successes / challenges from last quarter

Want to boost your employee engagement and retention?

If you’d like to find out more about how the Bucketlist employee recognition software can help your business, contact us for a free demo. We’d love to help you improve your company’s culture!