Career Planning and Development

A bank clerk is promoted to officer. A year later she moves from loans to the treasury desk. Later still, she is asked to join the committee that sets branch targets. All three are career moves, but each is a different kind of move.

Schein's cone. Edgar Schein pictured an organisation as a cone and said a career can move in three directions. Each direction crosses a different kind of boundary.

Radial movement needs no promotion. A senior clerk whom the manager consults before every big decision has moved inward, though her title has not changed.

Career stages. A career also moves through time. The standard scheme has five stages. The ages are rough guides.

Don't confuse the stage schemes. Textbooks differ on the ages and on how many stages there are. Super's scheme runs growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance and disengagement. Greenhaus's has preparation for work, organisational entry, early career, mid-career and late career, with overlapping ages. Another common list has four: establishment, advancement, maintenance and withdrawal. Learn the five above with their ages as rough guides, and note which scheme your course uses.

Where it breaks. The stages describe a typical working life that runs in one line. Real careers include breaks, a change of field at 40, and returns after years away. A person can be in the exploration stage of a new field at 45. Use the stages to ask what a person needs now, not to decide what they should be doing.

For exams. Know the three directions of the cone and which is which: vertical is rank, circumferential is function, radial is closeness to the centre. Know the five stages in order.

Cone: up and down, across, and inward. Stages: explore, establish, mid, late, decline.

An engineer at an auto-parts firm in Pune wants to run a plant one day. Her manager sees her as a specialist. Neither has said so. Career planning is how such hopes become visible and get a plan, and these three terms say who does what.

Three terms sit close together. Werther and Davis set them out like this, and a broader textbook wording follows.

The seven steps of career planning. Here they are for Meera, a junior accountant at the same Pune firm. The figures are an illustration.

Why organisations bother. A firm that supports career planning attracts and keeps able people, offers promotions that people can plan for and prepares staff for future challenges. It makes better use of its managerial reserves and places people better. It also cuts dissatisfaction and turnover and lifts morale. Employees gain too. They learn what opportunities exist, pick work that suits their life and family, and tend to commit more when they can see a future.

Tools and initiatives. An organisation supports careers through five usual initiatives: career planning workshops, mentoring, career counselling, coaching and personal development plans (PDPs). A PDP is a written plan of the skills and experience a person will build, with dates, so progress can be tracked. Online learning gives flexible skill-building alongside these.

What the individual can do. Employees also act for themselves. They perform well enough to deserve a chance and make their skills and results known to those who decide on promotions (exposure). They seek guidance, move to another job in the firm, or leave if better options lie elsewhere.

Don't rely on the nesting of the three terms. Some textbooks call career management the umbrella that covers planning and development. Others say career development contains planning and management. Both are common. Learn each term's own definition and say which book you follow.

Where it breaks. A plan can raise hopes that the organisation cannot meet, especially in a flat structure with few promotions. Developed staff are also more employable elsewhere. And a plan built on today's jobs can fail when the business changes.

In practice. The person owns the plan; the organisation supplies information, chances to grow and support. A manager's most useful move is an honest talk about where the person stands.

For exams. Know the seven steps in order, the five initiatives (this list has come up as a question) and Werther and Davis's definitions.

Go deeper for practitioners

Setting up a career development system. A common four-step approach runs as follows. First, assess needs. Second, agree a vision that links those needs to the interventions that meet them. Third, draw up an action plan with top management's support. Fourth, fold the programmes into the firm's training and management development, and evaluate them from time to time. The last step stops career development from becoming a separate, forgotten scheme.

Another seven-step list. Some textbooks give the process in a different form. Analyse the person's skills and abilities. Analyse opportunities inside and outside the firm. Analyse what each career demands. Relate specific jobs to career opportunities. Set realistic short- and long-term goals. Form a strategy for change and adjustment. Prepare and carry out an action plan. It covers the same ground as the list above, starting from analysis instead of self-assessment.

A decision. A high performer tells you she will leave unless she gets a promotion you cannot offer this year. Do you promise one, offer a lateral move with a bigger role, or accept the loss? The honest answer depends on what you can deliver, since a broken promise costs more than an open refusal.

A plant head retires on 31 March. Nobody has been told who takes over, and the two likeliest candidates have never run a budget. The plant limps through a bad year. Succession planning is how a firm avoids that.

Its aims are leadership continuity, keeping the knowledge senior people hold and being ready for sudden vacancies. It lowers risk and strengthens long-term stability. The successor may come from inside or from outside, but the plan works mainly by building internal candidates. It matters most where key posts would be hard to fill at short notice, such as when senior people are near retirement.

The six steps. They follow a logical order. You cannot map the skills of a job you have not chosen, and you cannot judge readiness before you know what the job needs.

Don't confuse succession planning with career planning. Career planning starts with the employee and her goals. Succession planning starts with the organisation's key jobs and asks who can fill them.

The two meet in the middle. A person on a succession list needs a career plan that matches it, and a good career plan tells the organisation whom to put on the list.

Links to other chapters. In human resource planning, replacement charts are the simple form of succession planning: for each key post they name likely successors and show how ready each one is. In training and development, the talent pipeline is the flow of people being readied for bigger jobs, and succession planning fills the gap when no one is ready.

Where it breaks. Plans can favour people who resemble today's leaders. Named successors may expect the job as of right, while people not named may lose heart. Plans go stale when the strategy shifts and the key skills change.

For exams. Learn the six steps in the order above. Diagrams of the process sometimes show the steps in a circle without numbers, and a circle can be read starting from the wrong box. Expect the career planning versus succession planning table, as employee-focused against organisation-focused.

Go deeper for practitioners

Readiness. Many firms label each candidate as ready now, ready in a year or two, or needing longer. Many also plot performance against potential on a nine-box grid. A high performer with limited potential is valuable in her present job but not necessarily a successor.

A decision. A family-owned auto-parts firm must choose between the founder's son, who is keen but has run nothing larger than a showroom, and a senior manager who has run the plant for ten years. A development plan with a clear test, such as running a unit with its own targets for two years, lets the family judge on evidence. It also tells the manager what he can expect, so he is less likely to leave.

Two clerks join the same bank branch in the same year. One is promoted twice. The other has done the same work for eight years and is told to be patient. Both are on career paths, and the second has reached a plateau.

A person may move up most of the time, but also sideways or into another function. Textbooks list three kinds of path, according to where the path comes from.

Career mobility is movement across grades and positions, upward or downward, or a complete change of occupation. Either side can start it: the employee by choice, or the employer by transfer, promotion or demotion. Mobility should be planned, with transition support and training where people change roles, inside or outside the firm.

Career plateau is a point in the career path where the chance of promotion is low and the work becomes repetitive. Hierarchies narrow toward the top, so after some point there are fewer posts above. Two causes are usual. Structurally, no higher post is open (a structural plateau). Or the job no longer teaches the person anything (a content plateau). A plateaued person may still perform well. Ways to respond include a lateral move, job rotation, a bigger role in the same job, a mentoring role or retraining.

Career anchors. Edgar Schein found that people hold on to one theme that they will not give up when they must choose. He called it the career anchor: a person's self-image of their talents, motives and values, formed through real work experience. Schein's early research found five anchors, and later work extended the list to eight.

An anchor is found by self-assessment. Someone anchored in security fits a public-sector bank. Someone anchored in autonomy may prefer consulting or freelance work.

Don't confuse a plateau with the decline stage, or an anchor with a goal. A plateau can come at 35 and the decline stage comes near retirement. A goal is a future position; an anchor is the underlying value that makes some positions satisfying and others not.

Where it breaks. Career paths drawn from history copy the past, including its bias. An anchor rests on self-report, can shift with life events and tends to show only after some years of real work. Treat a result as a start for discussion, not a verdict.

In practice. Matching assignments to a person's anchor helps. Offering an expert a ladder that rewards skill, without forcing a move into management, keeps people who are anchored in technical competence.

For exams. Know the three path types, the definition of mobility and plateau, and that the anchor concept is Schein's.