Steps for Career Planning and Development

Steps for Career Planning and Development

The career, planning and development process is a continuous endeavor. If ‘career’ means a continuous and long stretch of professional work-life covering a series of jobs or positions of higher responsibility ‘commensurate with time and experience, then there should be some planning, imparting management programmes for the incumbents whether they are operated through ‘cadre’ system or ‘position-classification’. This begins with the placement of person through recruitment and goes on to ensure their growth potentiality through training, promotions, and adaptation of proper retention system.

Recruitment

Recruitment to positions in government is done from the open market to fill in the jobs in the organization. It is undertaken, after doing a good preparatory assessment of current needs and anticipated manpower requirements on the basis of an analysis of estimated growth of the organization, its diversification of functions and necessary skills required. This means there is an attempt at perfect matching of people and job.

An important first step in this procedure is to prepare, an inventory of positions giving information about the duties, responsibilities and functions of each job, together with the requisite academic qualifications, training and skills, and personality traits essential for performing these duties and discharging the responsibilities. For building up this inventory, information has to be collected on the number of jobs and positions broken down into occupational groups and sub-groups at each level of career fields, the number of vacancies likely to occur due to normal turn-over, retirement etc. and the additional needs, or cadre expansions on account of implementation of developmental or new programmes. On the personnel side, for a proper development of career, it is simultaneously necessary to take stock of currently available manpower resources, compilation of requisite bio-data of existing incumbents, covering the levels of their knowledge, academic qualifications and training. This should also indicate a chronological record of different assignments held, skill drills gone through levels and kinds of exposure and quality of performance.

Such informative data-details, together with an estimate for future manpower requirements (planned on the basis of available forecasting techniques) provide a sound base for planning, developing and managing the cadres of personnel in the organization, including recruitment and selection of eligible and qualified personnel at various levels of hierarchy, at different points of time. If recruitment from open market is to be designed, any such policy should be based on the organization’s philosophy or ideological concern. The organization, has to decide whether problems of tomorrow can be solved by existing people with some appropriate training or re-training, whether there should be ‘lateral entry’ in each grade, what should be the correct age distribution of recruits etc., once the answers to these are determined, the organization can proceed further. At the same time, it is apparent that whatever option is exercised, the career development framework for all the people in the organization is bound to be different. For obviously, career graph for a young recruit with 35 years to go will be differently drawn from the one for an older lateral recruit with only 10 years to go.

The policy of the management about an optimum mix of newcomers in the organizations and the old employees who have earned their way up, will determine what kind of career opportunities are to be made available to these two categories of personnel. In both the cases, the aspects that need to be kept in view in planning their careers are variety of exposure that need to be given to them in the corporate interest, time span, hierarchy of grades to be built into the system, structure, policies of organization and last but not the least the nature of management.

Promotions

‘Promotion’ basically must be related to the ‘tomorrow’s’ of the organization. It is important to note that current competence of individuals cannot alone be the basis for elevation but certain relevant traits are required like growth-potentiality, capacity to take on higher responsibilities, risk-bearing dynamism, a vision and a perception for total organizational progress. Indeed, if rewards are not commensurate with demonstrated accomplishments, the organization is bound to suffer. Career planning, must include not only the very best and brilliant achievers in the organization, but also those who are senior, averagely competent and adequate and who have rendered long service by growing with the organization.

The whole system of promotion, owes its rationale to two important factors:

Personnel factors connected with the reward for longevity. loyalty and good work; motivation for better performance, urge for recognition; search for job satisfaction and goal of self actualization or fulfillment.

Organizational factors connected with accomplishment of its objectives through obtaining of right persons at the right time within its own jurisdiction, generation and availability of such requisite skills and specialized knowledge specific’ to the relevant tasks and programmes.

Retention

Apart from the promotion system, the employees’ retention programmes policy must cover all other compensation packages, including salary, bonus, wages etc., which are financial in nature. Non-financial compensation covers the satisfaction that a person receives by performing meaningful job tasks or from the physical and psychological environments in which the job is performed..

Developmental policy coupled with succession planning, particularly at the middle and top levels, which are critical ingredients of career development help in boosting the morale of personnel and strengthen the organization organizational growth and progress. The motivation management operating through fringe benefits, satisfiers, motivators and so on, is crucial in career planning and development.