Aspirations, Conversations, and Options

What is a Career Management process for? How is it different from Succession Planning?

There is a need for an organization to have a ready pool of talent. There is also an individual’s need to have a satisfying and rewarding career. While Succession Planning caters to the former need, Career Management is supposed to cater to the later need.

As is obvious, Succession Planning and Career Management must be integrated processes -both go hand-in-hand.

Now let’s say a fellow HR professional tells you “We have good Career Management processes in place in our company. Aspirations of the individuals are captured in a template and we see how best to cater to those aspirations.”

How would you know whether Career Management process in his/her company really caters to individual aspirations or not?

I can think of a few possible areas that can be explored from an employee’s perspective:

• What career discussions/conversations happen with you and how frequently?
• What gets discussed in these career conversations? What opportunities do you have to express your career aspirations? Does the process involve exploration of reasons for your career preferences/aspirations too?
• What developmental support is provided to you to work towards your career aspirations?
• Are career opportunities presented to you as diktats (there is this opportunity-take it or leave it-we can only discuss how best can you fit in) or are options provided to you from which you can choose?

Career movements are tricky. Both the needs of the organization and the individuals need to be taken care of.

But a Career Management process where:

1. an individual doesn’t get a space to express his/her aspirations; and
2. where career opportunity discussions are not about ‘options’ but about ‘I feel this is the best for you and so take it.’

is most certainly flawed in addressing individual needs.

This can lead to a paradoxical situation in an organization - significant investment in talent and capability building but significant leakages and consequently inadequate strength of talent pipeline.

How would the organization respond in this case? Think of a situation where you put in significant efforts but derived insignificant benefits. How did you feel and respond?

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Sourav