How people create opportunities for career development, and growth through learning has aways fascinated me.
I’ve previously undertaken research into the subject which has yielded some worrying results.
For example, at a major UK charity I worked with, over half (53%) of 800 respondents said they did not have a development plan outlining agreed training and development needs for the coming year, and almost half (49%) said they did not meet regularly with their manager to discuss progress.
I also found that out of 1800 respondents working for a local authority, only 33% felt their career development aspirations are being met, and from a team of 400 graduates in a global company, only 35% felt they got regular, useful feedback from their manager.
These statistics are pretty uninspiring I think you’d agree, but so what?
Companies are always talking about the importance of attracting, retaining and engaging the best people, but these numbers show that these experiences are not always well delivered.
And employees are looking for personal involvement and more self determination in their work and career choices, yet these numbers show me that neither the company or the employee is well served by the processes currently in place.
What do you think?
How representative is the research I have though? For sure the sample sizes are reasonable but is the approach to career and development planning really this bad across the board?
I’m currently doing some work with a company called Careergro, and we want to improve and share a broader understanding of how companies and employees perceive career development.
So we would like you to help us with this research and in order to do this, we’ve published two very short surveys, one for employers, and one for employees. Each survey takes only around three minutes to complete and will give us useful data which we will freely share.
The first cut of data will be available at the forthcoming CIPD learning and development event in London on 25th and 26th April, and we will also be sharing the results and reporting back here on HRZone.
We would really appreciate your help in completing this and if you can share it with your colleagues too that would be great. Thanks in advance for your help and I look forward to sharing the results with you soon.
Doug Shaw is head of employee and customer engagement consultancy, What Goes Around.
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