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How to Support Employee Career Goals

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You likely know that professional development has been proven to improve employee engagement. Offering your employees opportunities to learn and grow demonstrates that you care about your employees as growing professionals, not just as employees of your organization.

So what can you do to show that you are invested in your employees as people? Show interest in their passions and goals by working with them. In this post, we will cover a few tips on how you can help your employees become the happiest, best versions of themselves.

  1. Invest in continuous learning
    According to 15Five’s Blog, continuous learning is important now more than ever due to evolving technologies and demand for new skills. Investing in platforms such as LinkedIn Learning provides your employees with over 16,000 courses in a plethora of topics ranging from writing press releases to learning JavaScript or business analysis. What is so wonderful about services like these is the ability for employees to learn skills they are interested in as well as skills that apply to their current positions.

  2. Provide feedback
    Employees cannot get better if they do not know how to be better. According to Glassdoor, feedback should be given in real time rather than just at employees’ annual reviews. Pay attention to areas where each employee could use some improvement and address it in a positive, consistent way. This also applies to positive traits—make sure you are frequently showing your appreciation for areas where employees excel.

  3. Consider new positions for your employees
    Employees do not often stick with employers that do not provide opportunities for their staff to move up the ladder. If your employees constantly see outside hires brought into manager positions, they will likely feel held back. Some may excel in their role, but may not possess the leadership skills to be promoted to manager. Consider other roles for these employees. For example, Get Smarter discusses the role of the “Individual Contributor.” This employee might be promoted into a teaching role rather than a manager role. They have a narrow focus and are used to teach others in their position rather than overseeing their department.

  4. Have a career development meeting
    Consider having annual or semi-annual career development meetings with your employees to discuss their goals within the organization and their broader goals as a professional. The Balance Careers recommends having the employee think about where they would like to be in three years. If they would like to move up in your organization, give them some suggestions on how they can improve their performance and move forward.

  5. Encourage and reward
    Glassdoor emphasizes the importance of recognition and rewards. Positive feedback motivates employees and helps build trust. Take the time to get to know employees and give them personal rewards to thank them for a job well done and show that you have taken time to get to know them as a person, not just as an employee.

Managers obviously want hard working, loyal employees, but this cannot be obtained by micromanaging and keeping them in the same position forever. Help them help you by giving them the care and resources it takes for them to be the best employees they can be.

Watch for our new podcast, Associations Next! We plan to launch it soon.

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Setting Personal Professional Development Goals

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Many of us have participated in some form of professional development. Whether it be an orientation video for work, a certification course or an implicit bias training, professional development is key to having a successful career. Indeed defines personal development goals as “objectives you set to improve your character, skills and capabilities.”

So how do we go about creating these goals for ourselves?

The Education Service Center of Lake Erie West laid out a framework to properly set what they call IPDP (Individual Professional Development Plan) goals. While the document was created for educators, this method for setting professional development goals can be applied to all professions. According to this framework, you should state an action, an area of focus, and your rationale for that action.

Start with an area of focus. What do you want to accomplish? Let’s say you would like to get better at video editing. Your area of focus might be proficiency at a specific editing software. Be specific about your goal to know exactly what you are working toward.

What is the action you will take to achieve that goal? For video editing, this might be “I will learn Adobe Premiere” or “I will take an online course in video editing.” Dictating an action helps you commit to it.

Finally, add your “because” statement. Why do you want to achieve this goal? For video editing this may be, “because I would like to be promoted to a senior marketing position.” Think through your purpose for putting effort into this new skill.

Overall, the statement should look something like, “I will take a course in video editing through LinkedIn Learning in order to become a senior content creator.” The specificity of this goal statement is helpful because it gives you the what, how and why.

With this framework, setting specific professional development goals will become clearer and easier to achieve.

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