Great leaders recognise that supporting employees' careers is the right thing to do, even if it sometimes means they lose a good staff member.

People matter, of course, and the influence a leader can make on individual careers can be significant. In addition to being the right thing to do, from a humanistic viewpoint, it also makes good sense from a business point of view. 

Investing time and effort in employee career development helps to improve employee retention, enhances the company's desirability to future employees and creates a better trained and more resilient workforce.

 

But what are some of the practical things a leader can do to support employees to identify and traverse their career path? 

 

 

1.  Have career conversations with your employees

One of the responsibilities of a leader is to ensure the recruitment, development, and retention of staff. One of the best ways to do this is to create a culture within the organisation that incorporates an ongoing career conversation with employees. 

 

Talking with employees about career goals and aspirations will help them reflect on what's important and what they want to accomplish in their careers.

 

This helps employees understand and communicate which work or projects they enjoy most, and which work environments are preferable. In addition, the conversation can address what new skills they would like to learn and what are their future aspirations. All these questions help your employees become more self-aware.

 

2.  Help employees outline a potential career path

 

Developing this conversation further, it's essential to help employees set a career path within the company; this allows them to see how they fit into the business and what might happen if they say around. 

 

Such career conversations increase employee engagement, and a study conducted by LinkedIn shows that the top reason why people leave their companies is that they don't see opportunities for career advancement.

 

To ensure fairness, this should be done in the context of clear, direct, and consistent communication about career advancement. It's important not to fall into the trap of having 'favourites' within the organisation, as this is detrimental to employee engagement and team culture. 

 

When it comes to career decisions, this needs to be driven by the employee but facilitated, encouraged and supported by the leader. 

 

3.  Provide opportunities for employees to widen their experience

 

Leaders and managers are often in an ideal position to facilitate opportunities for employees to grow and develop. One way to do this is via a job rotation programme, encouraging staff to work in related departments or positions or even a secondment to another organisation. 

 

Such opportunities broaden the employee mindset, skillset and are a great way to understand the business better.  The company benefits from having a more informed, motivated, and well-rounded team.

 

Job rotation can also effectively increase cross-departmental working resulting in a more well-rounded workforce.

4.  Support learning and development

 

Career development (and job performance) works best when there is a blend of growth through performance in the role and growth through learning and development opportunities. It's essential, therefore, to provide opportunities for such learning and development and encourage employees to pursue such opportunities.

 

In addition to external training, webinars, site visits, online training programmes, and developmental reading, there is also an opportunity to run in-house training sessions of the 'lunch and learn' variety. This is a cost-effective way of sharing learning and can also be a significant development opportunity for those providing the sessions.

 

You will also, of course, want to encourage employees to keep up with what's happening in the wider industry, in current affairs and the world generally.

5.  Facilitate mentoring opportunities

 

Setting up a formal mentoring programme is a great way to guide internal career aspirations and support staff development. It can also be very effective for increasing employees' confidence and motivation levels and for growing an internal network.

 

The key to a successful mentoring programme is to set it up right at the beginning. This means providing some training for mentors and establishing guidelines on how the mentoring programme will work. This ensures, whilst the conversations are confidential, that there is some consistency in how these mentoring relationships are conducted. This also increases the likelihood of beneficial outcomes for the mentee, the mentor and the organisation

So, there you have it, the 5 ways that leaders can support employee career aspirations.

 

1.    Have career conversations with your employees

2.    Help employees develop a potential career path

3.    Provide opportunities for employees to widen their experience

4.    Support learning and development

5.    Facilitate mentoring opportunities

 

Leaders often worry that by developing the internal talent, they will make it more likely that such talent will leave to work elsewhere on the back of this growth. Whilst this might be the case, on some occasions,investing time and effort in employee career development helps to improve employee retention, enhances the company's desirability to future employees and creates a better trained and more resilient workforce.