Career Development Within A Company

Career Development Within A Company In all organisations, irrespective of their structure, the employees have aspirations to advance and grow in their organisation, and also a desire to achieve a sense of fulfilment. Unless these aspirations and desires of employees are taken care of, the organisation cannot move to higher level of efficiency and productivity. The strength and vitality of any organisation much depends on the fact that whether its employees are convinced that they are taken care of, not only in financial and other tangible terms but also emotionally and mentally. A well thought-out system of career planning is one way of achieving this organisational objective. An organisation without proper career planning and career development initiatives is more likely to face the high attrition rate, affecting all its plans and programmes and causing a lot of harm. Without succession planning, manning of vacancies at higher levels becomes difficult. Therefore, effective HRP encompasses career planning, career deve lopment and succession planning. With the advent of rapid technological advancement, organisations are be-sighed with manpower redundancy and concurrently equally concerned with the problem of retention. On the other hand, organisations need to address career development need of employees that mostly revolves around individuals by taking care of proper career planning and career management system. With the given scenario, since success of manpower planning much depends upon career planning, there cannot be effective manpower planning, if there is ineffective career planning in the organisation. In other words, career planning is an integral part of the manpower planning that affects business strategy and corporate planning. The Concept and definition of Career planning Career is viewed as a bunch or collection of jobs or positions. Generally, it describes an applicable career path within the structure of the organization. Basically, it shows the principal personnel development paths within the organization. Career is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a person’s â€Å"course or progress through life or a distinct portion of life†. Usually, it is referred to remunerative work and sometimes also formal education. The etymology of the term derived from the Latin word career, which means race. All the jobs, that are held together during one’s working life, constitute career. It is also viewed as the sequence of positions held by an individual during the course of his employment life. Edwin B. Flippo defined a career, as a sequence of separate but related work activities that provide continuity, order and meaning in a person’s life. A career may be viewed as amalgamation of the changes in values, attitudes and motivation an individual embrace, as he or she grows older. This constitute subjective element of the concept â€Å"career†. Greenhaus and Schein described several themes underlying different definition of career as : The property of an occupation or organisation: In this way the career describes the occupation itself or an employee’s tenure within an organisation. Advancement: It denotes the progression and increase in success an individual receives within an occupation or organisation. Status of a profession: In this sense, career is used to distinguish different profession. Such as engineering, medical profession is different from other occupation like plumbing carpentry etc. The former is said to have a career where the latter does not have.