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

Workforce Diversity in India!

Ensuring diversity of workforce is a prerogative for most companies worldwide. In USA, the historic origins of diversity lie in part in Equal Opportunity Employment Act. In one of the Scandinavian countries (Norway if I am not wrong) there is a mandate that 50% of the board members of all companies have to be women. There is currently an intense battle happening in UK between the government and Industry on issue of increased representation of women in the workforce.

What does diversity of workforce mean in Indian context?

Reservations in government services and in public educational institutions are the first overt measure we have seen towards this end.

India is a country of cultural diversity. This also gets reflected in the cosmopolitan nature of its cities – Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, etc. A company in India which broad-bases its recruitment from different parts of the country and different kinds of institutes usually has cultural diversity.

Meritocracy based entrance examinations for most institutions of higher education in India also ensure there is representation of people from different socio-economic backgrounds in companies.

The challenges in India seem to be around ‘gender diversity’, and ‘international workforce diversity’. ‘Gender diversity’ problem is something many companies have tried to consciously address for sometime. Many industries, specifically service industries, have seen significant increase in participation of women in workforce.

But what about ‘international workforce diversity’? Many Indian companies today are becoming multi-national. Do we see representation of their international (non-Indian) workforce in the company’s leadership? Is this international workforce considered a source of top leadership talent pipeline?

I don’t see much of ‘international diversity’ in manufacturing industries in India.

Maybe a good starting point for this would be ‘Skill based jobs’. In a survey done by Manpower in 2011, R&D jobs were found to be the ones for which companies in India faced most severe talent shortages.

Pharmaceutical companies and leading edge technology companies may soon become the torchbearers for ‘international workforce diversity’ in India.

Indian companies which are looking at using R&D capabilities as a source of competitive advantage might also turn to be the first to adapt an ‘internationally diverse workforce’ manpower model.

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Sourav