Future of Career Planning and Development

             

There exist no empirical studies worth the name on career planning and development. New challenges like, competition, market globalization, deregulation and total quality management have now  made  it imperative for organisations to

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restructure their career planning and development programmes to retain  best  talents. Below are possible changes you can effect in your firm.

1.       Consider your employees as your most important assets. The concept of total quality management considers every employees as  customers (internal) to the organisation. Making employees entrepreneurs for the organisation and empowering them, is now  compelling the organisations to re-design career progression tracks  to attract and retain the best employees. Making people psychologically prepared for ownership, some organisations are also experimenting with flatter organisation structure with adequate decentralization.

2.       For manning senior executive positions, give more importance to knowledge than functional skills. This perhaps is the only reason for selecting people even in their early thirties for senior managerial posts.

3.       You may be keen to getting rid of those employees who are now redundant due to changing requirements, by offering golden handshake, rather than developing these persons for better redeployment.

4.       Merit is now getting overriding priority than seniority. This, therefore,  renders career progression paths less important. Many, however, feel that even with greater priority of merit over seniority, career progression paths do not become completely meaningless, since for even promotion by merit, the lines of progression paths are relevant. For any succession planning or promotion planning this is still important.

In addition, organisational restructuring programmes are now rendering many employees surplus and it has become a major problem for the organisations to redeploy employees in restructured jobs. Career panic has now become a global issue. Most of the organisations, fearing employee turnover, are now working on designing jobs which can offer employees recognition, creativity (by lateral transfers etc.), challenges and empowerment.