Function of Career Management for Career Development

Career management plans and shapes the progression of individuals within an organization in accordance with assessments of organizational needs and the performance, potential and preferences of individual members of the enterprise. Career management has three overall aims:

• To ensure that the organization’s needs for management succession are satisfied.
• To provide men and women of promise with a sequence of training and experience that will equip them for whatever level of responsibility they have the ability to reach.
• To give individuals with potential guidance and encouragement they need if they are to fulfill their potential and achieve a successful career with the organization in tune with their talents and aspirations.

Career Management Policies

Career management policies covers the following area.

1. Short or Long-term Policies: Policies for determining the time-scale for investment in careers fall into one or other of the following categories.
2. Short-term Performance: Employers who adopt consciously or unconsciously this policy, concentrate on the ‘here and now’. They recruit and train high performers who will be good at their present job and are recorded accordingly. If they are really good, they will be promoted-there is plenty of opportunities and the enterprise will get what it wants. Deliberately to train managers in this type of organization may well say; “If we get good people to do work the future will take care of itself.” They will prove and mature their abilities in their present job and be ready and indeed eager to take on extra responsibilities when the occasion arises. The future can take of itself. If there’s no one around at the time, then buy someone from outside-no problem.
3. Long-term Plans: Employers who believe in long-term career planning develop highly structured approaches to career management. They go in for elaborate reviews of performance and potential, assessments centres to identify talent or confirm that it is there, ‘highflier’ schemes and planned job in line with a predetermined programme.
4. Long-term Flexibility: Employers who follow this policy appreciate that they must concentrate on getting good performance own and that are doing so they will do a considerable extent, be preparing people for advancement. To this extent, they adopt the same attitude as short-term employers. However, they also recognize that potential should be assessed and developed by training which is not job-specific, and by deliberately broadening experience through job rotation or the direction of career paths.

As a generalization, the short-term system is likely to be more common in smallish, rapidly growing companies. The longer-term system is more prevalent in larger, bureaucratic ‘mechanistic’ types of organization. Long-term flexibility is the approached in strategic planning-oriented organizations, which appreciate that the HRM approaches they have developed must be adaptive and flexible.