Managing human capital is like assembling a jig-saw puzzle: The scattered pieces of current and future job skills, organizational needs, and human talent have to align with rapidly changing market needs, capital markets, and innovation.
The new millennium brought about a complex and chaotic economy that generated a plethora of new opportunities, yet unbundled traditional organizational structures and the ways that workers interface with them. The impact on individual careers has been dramatic.
In their book Blur, authors Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer use the word blur to describe the increasing speed of change in today's “connected economy”:
Because we are so newly caught up in the whirl-wind of this transition, we are experiencing it as a BLUR. The BLUR of Connectivity, as players become so intimately connected that the boundaries between them are fuzzy; the BLUR of Speed, as business changes so fast it's hard to get your situation in focus; and the BLUR of Intangible value, as the future arrives at such a pace that physical capital becomes more liability than asset.
Efforts to help individuals organize and manage careers in the “blur modality” are not always easy. Organizations want speed, flexibility, accuracy, innovation, and workforce dependability. The ability to change the size, location, and deployment of a workforce can quickly stress the organization's capability to retain top talent.
People want fulfilling work, training, challenge, yet expect minimal job security. Performance may suffer if people operate in a vacuum or under conditions of uncertainty. Career development systems can help sort out these puzzle pieces and do much more for everyone involved.
As part of such a system, workers become more active in acquiring new skills, knowledge, and work experience aligned with competitive needs, and more resilient to change when the organization needs to manage costs. They become more energized and challenged to navigate the maze of economic and social change and to sustain some sense of stability and fulfillment.
In an ideal world, people are trained to facilitate their own career development. They make sure they know what their job goals are. They become intentional about having the skill and experience as well as the mobility needed to move into diverse jobs or work assignments, including jobs outside their current organization.
The organization, in turn, informs the community about what job skills are needed, and offers opportunities for people to add value to internal as well as external customers.
When the pieces fit together and human talent alignment is consistent with changing market and customer needs, the organization gets the welltrained, flexible workforce it needs. In return, individuals get what they need in terms of job challenge and meaningful work experience, while acquiring new skills and a sense of a self-directed career.
This issue of Info-line gives you some of the current trends in career systems and also some of the field's best practices. The content in this issue assumes that an organization intends to initiate activities, processes, and systems for the strategic development of its workforce's careers.
The greatest source of sustained competitive advantage is the capacity of the organization to develop and sustain its human capital. One of the significant purposes of career development systems is to strengthen and sustain, long term, the organization's human capital investment in its people.
Beneath any official organizational endorsement of career development is a philosophical shift in the individual-organization relationship. As organizations abandon the entitlement of lifelong employment, their workforces change expectations and loyalties. In addition, recent statistics reveal that more than 25 million Americans are identified as independent contractors. Thus, the organization and its employees, both salaried and contractor, move from a dependent relationship to an interdependent relationship. Although each needs the other, their long-term goals may be quite different, as well as their commitment to each other's growth.
Consequently, when we speak of career development, it may or may not include “employees,” but rather a community of workers who interface with the organization in some capacity to bring value-added service. This new relationship includes the following key assumptions:
Management needs its workforce to stay competitive, agile, and responsive to market needs. Therefore, management needs to deploy its workforce at the right time, with the right people and right skills, as well as in the right place.
An organization's workforce may include both salaried and contract workers.
Organizations need to recruit, hire, and develop high-performance professionals who have ever-increasing skills, experience, and talents that add value.
The value of an individual's skills or job tasks is not guaranteed for the long term; it may increase or decrease over time.
Individuals will develop their talents and skills continuously, becoming more knowledgeable and more responsive.
Career development is part of the organization's overall competitive human capital strategy, with substantial, measurable return-on-investment that has the interest of the individual and shareholders at stake.
Career mobility is experience based and does not always mean promotion upward; it also can mean rotational, lateral, or downward job changes to work on meaningful assignments.
Workplace community learning, performance feedback, self-management, and meaningful work assignments are key to career satisfaction, career success, and increased organizational capability.
The workforce is less traditional and more dynamic and diverse than ever before. Highspeed Internet providers allow for work opportunities at any time and any place.
Individuals possessing career competence are more self-directed, willing, and able to facilitate their own careers.
Although layoffs and downsizing might characterize the current state of the organization, these actions should not be so shortsighted that they have an impact on the long-term success of either the enterprise or the individual.
What exactly does the career system do for the organization?
The career development system is an intentional strategic initiative, designed to build and sustain the organization's human capital capacity in successfully executing its business strategy. It also is an important factor for shaping leadership and organizational performance.
Business strategy begins with customers and their requirements for innovative products, quality, service, and technology. Organizations must align their operations—including their workforces—to meet those requirements.
Organizations likewise desperately need better ways to bring people in, through, and out of the organization while retaining their top talent. Specifically, workers with unique talents, skills, knowledge, and experience capabilities are needed in varied sectors and industries, including those with technical environments.
Because customer requirements are moving targets, organizations must be agile as well if they want to hit these targets. Career systems help ensure a dynamic and responsive workforce that can react quickly to this changing market, while helping individuals attain career goals at the same time.
A career system's three primary components are:
Corporate. Defined as senior management governance and stewardship roles that first charter the system and prepare a business case that supports the initiative. Equally important is providing leadership to determine the system's direction, metrics, and business benefits. Finally, senior management keeps the system alive by providing the necessary financial, technical, and human capital needed to support the initiative.
Strategic. This component includes everything that makes a career development system relevant to an organization and its business model, such as strategic staffing, succession planning, and competency profiling.
Program. This component includes any process, structure, or relationship that will work with existing organizational activities to help individuals increase their “career competency” to successfully facilitate their own careers as well as organizational performance. (See the sidebar, Case Study: Career Development.)
There are five levels of help an organization can provide in its career development program:
Informing. People need to know what a career system is and what it will do for them. Organizations can provide current information about the system through their managers, coaches, mentors, newsletters, online company documents, career resource centers, email, or computer software.
Connecting. People want and need career planning. Organizations can create a system that is easy to use and opens doors to key resources, within the organization and its community as well as external to the organization.
Training. People need career competency training to appreciate business direction; clarify goals; identify values and interests; assess talents, skills, knowledge, and experience; and develop a career plan and actions. Organizations can help by providing career training designs, to include self-directed learning; facilitating meaningful career dialogue with others (that is, manager, coach, mentor, and mentees); small group discussions; informational inquiry; interview techniques; individual consultations; and career management planning seminars and work sessions.
Coaching. Individuals are concerned about their jobs and careers, even if they do not always express this concern in workshops with their peers. The new millennium also brought an increased capacity for coaching services for people at all levels in an organization. Organizations can help by providing individual professional career counseling, career advisers, mentors, and coaches, or training to improve career discussions at any level in the organization.
Mentoring. This is a temporary, voluntary relationship between mentee and mentor formed in the context of integrating and assimilating individuals into the workforce, job, or career situation. Mentors, acting in a third-party, non-authority role, bring experience, talent, and competence from various sectors, networks, levels, and functions to assist mentees to connect, grow, and access resources. Mentees act in a self-directive role, facilitating inquiry with mentors to strengthen their own job/career roles in the organization. Menteementor discussions can include:
needs, goals, and roles
work-related issues and concerns
time
competencies
resources.
Mutual learning occurs for both parties. (For an example, see the sidebar Case Study: Successful Mentoring at Kimberly-Clark.)
Most people never ask themselves a very important question: “What kind of work do I want to do?” The answer to that question—which would indicate a “job fit”—is critical to the success of any career system. Job fit means aligning what the individual wants with what the organization needs. Ultimately, a good job fit leads to improved productivity and fulfilled career goals. And that is what a career development system is all about.
According to Marlys Hanson, an expert in job fit, career management systems must focus on the individual, reflecting not only his or her preferences, but also his or her real-life experiences and values.
To answer the question above, ask people to describe their most satisfying activities and achievements. How did they get involved? What role did they play? How did they know what to do? And more important, what was rewarding and satisfying about the activity or achievement?
When we examine the responses to these questions, we will find that themes appear. Hanson calls these themes motivated abilities or motivated patterns. Work and careers that follow the individual's themes will be consistently productive and satisfying.
You also must perform a similar analysis on relevant jobs and careers for the person's motivated patterns to make sense. Examine the organization's jobs and tasks to identify any requirements that are critical in performing that job. When you've completed both analyses, making a good decision about the person's job fit becomes easier.
This decision ultimately can lead to:
an individual clearly articulating his or her own strengths and working with his or her manager on performance opportunities
a person suggesting ways to predict and better manage his or her job fit—for example, teaming up with other individuals to perform some tasks
an individual developing new career directions to find a better job fit.
Once you know where the person stands in his or her own job, you can use specific career strategies to help them better tailor their own job fit. Because a key role of the career system is to align the individual with the competitive requirements of the organization, the system's design has to include ways to help them achieve that alignment. (For an example, see the sidebar, Case Study: Fortune 10 Oil Company.)
Some of these specific techniques include the following:
Career management or planning workshops: structured group sessions where people can learn career planning and management strategies and formulate actions on career plans.
Career resource centers: small libraries with information about the organization, reference materials, self-directed learning systems, skill profiles, and inventories.
Assessment processes: using learning and testing instruments and various inventories to help people discover their own interests, motives, skills, competencies, values, beliefs, and behaviors, and how those strengths can add value to the organization.
Self-directed workbooks or software: self-directed exercises and processes conducted with workbooks or computer software, e-learning courses, and online Websites.
Private professional consultations: individualized career coaching and testing.
Job-posting systems: formal systems to notify the workforce of existing openings within the organization.
Online job listing: by function or business sector to locate employment opportunities (internal and external) to organization.
Career inquiry: structured dialogue that can include looking at development and future career opportunities; this usually takes place between individuals and their supervisors.
Career advisers: people formally trained to provide career guidance specifically related to their own function or organization business unit.
Mentoring programs: formal or informal processes in which an experienced individual voluntarily helps another person to become more knowledgeable about the organization and to achieve his or her own professional development plan.
Tuition reimbursement: partial or total funding for education and training programs.
Pre-retirement or career transition workshops: sponsored by the organization to help people prepare for life and career changes. Transitions can include preparing individuals for internal career change, or being laid off or outsourced.