The Edge of Work Presents: Making Career Development a Strategic Priority

Welcome To The Edge of Work LinkedIn Newsletter, a bi-weekly newsletter that explores how the workplace is changing, what it means for leaders. In each edition, we'll share ideas and insights to help leaders like you build better workplaces for your people. Drawing on lessons and wisdom from The Edge of Work podcast, you'll get new ideas for attracting and retaining talent, leadership, and building healthy and sustainable organizations. Here's our first edition on Career Development

Improving The Employee Experience By Making Career Development a Strategic Priority

During Season 2 of The Edge of Work, a common theme from our guests has been a renewed sense of urgency around career development & mobility inside of organizations. 

There is an acknowledgement and sense of urgency around putting in programs and opportunities that help employees sense and spot opportunities, identify their strengths and skills, and navigate toward paths and options that advance themselves and the organization. 

While as Matthew Daniel (Guild Education) pointed out in our interview that internal mobility and programs to help people grow inside organizations isn’t something new and something many traditional corporations once did well, many have either moved away from these programs or reserved them for “high potential” employees or leaders. 

But between:

1. Today’s economic environment and the need to retain engaged employees
2. Companies needing to evolve their workforce (and skills) to meet the market demands
3. A desire to create more inclusive workplaces

Career development has moved from a nice thing to talk about to a critical enabler of business results.

To be sure, as George Westerman and Abbie Lundberg point out in their recent Sloan Management Review blog post, while many companies believe they have great career development programs for their employees, many employees have a differing opinion.

The Promise of Career Development

The promise and potential of this is a win-win in a sense that it helps drive engagement, reduces attrition to the business, and helps employees feel confident in the path inside the organization. But actually making career development happen inside of organizations is not as easy as it sounds.

Fortunately, our guests who have all had a role in shaping career development and internal mobility strategies inside their companies have come on the show to offer up some strategic guidance as well as tactical advice. Here are a few of the key learnings:

#1) Start with the definition - This may seem simple but this step is often overlooked. When speaking with Ryan McCrea (Head of Leadership and Learning at Ameren) Ryan highlighted the importance of a coming up with  “career development philosophy” inside of your company. This is really just your own definition of what you want career development to look like at your company.  Another example comes from another Season 2 guest, Jim Conti a Talent Partner at Hyde Park Venture Partners, often works with their portfolio companies individually to develop talent strategies that work for them at their unique stage of growth. One area that some of his companies have recently honed in on is really taking the time to define terms like “career development” or “internal mobility” and “retention.” It can be very easy to throw around these words, but being intentional about articulating them helps put clarity and structure which can help put them into practice.

#2) Gain Alignment & Clarity - If you talk to 5 different people and ask them what career development or career mobility means, there is a high likelihood you get a lot of different answers.  Making sure that you have a clear definition is a great start, but then ensuring that you have buy-in and support from other leaders is critical to success. This is what has helped Ryan McCrea in his effort in leading career development at numerous organizations. It’s also something that helped Melanie Naranjo (VP, People, Ethena) get the buy in and support from managers to play a critical role in the development of their own employees.

#3) Measure, Test & Learn - When I spoke to Melanie Naranjo (VP, People, Ethena) she underscored the importance of using a test and learning and experimentation approach when it came to rolling out any kind of programming, content or resources around career development inside of their organization. Instead of the traditional “programmatic” approach that can often take a long time, she and her team would quickly spin up a first draft of a small piece, such as a deliverable, release it, get feedback, and then strengthen it through another release with incremental improvements. 

If you’re working on career development programs or processes inside of your organization, I would love to hear from you how you are approaching it, what you are learning, and how it is going!

📗 Resources You Should Read 📗

Looking for a good read on career development? Check out the following articles and resources

Why Companies Should Help Every Employee Chart a Career Path - Drawing on interviews with numerous companies to better understand their career development programs, George Westerman and Abbie Lunberg document three key learnings of some of the more innovative career development programs they found.

The Link Between Social Capital and Career Development - The one thing that all employees, managers and leaders can agree upon is that each employee goes to work each day and wants to be successful. One way to do this, both in the short and long term of an employee’s career, is to help them gain the social capital they need to advance in their careers.

Systems and Scaffolding For Internal Mobility - Having an internal gig platform technology or doing a training for managers on career conversations is important, but in of themselves these are not enough to make career development happen inside your company. Instead, you need systems and scaffolding in place to ensure career development is a strategic capability. 

🔎 Career Development Experts You Should Follow 🔎

One of my favorite parts of LinkedIn is connecting and finding other people who are experts in career mobility and career development. If this topic interests you, make sure to check out the conversations and content that these individuals are sharing across LinkedIn.

⭐️ Ryan McCrea, MA - Ryan is passionate about career development and unlocking the growth of people, currently heads up Leadership & Learning Development at Ameren, and previously deployed career development programs at Commerce Bank.

⭐️ Larry McAlister - Former VP of Talent Management at NetApp, Larry is passionate about using technology to transform talent, and successfully rolled out enterprise wide career mobility, internal talent marketplace and coaching programs in his former role.

⭐️ Nithya Vaduganathan - A Partner and Thought leader at BCG, Nithya has written numerous thought leadership pieces and conducted research on companies that are unleashing the power of career mobility within their organizations.

⭐️ Matthew Daniel - Matt is a longtime talent management leader and currently leads a team that conducts research around career mobility at Guild and regularly shares this and other content and expertise on LinkedIn as well as other various talent management publications.

⭐️ Divkiran Kathuria - Divkiran has led the career mobility programs at Seagate that have included the rollout of an internal talent marketplace that has helped employees find new opportunities and projects within the organization. --> https://lnkd.in/dZjqXEiX

⭐️ Erica Keswin - An HR and People Speaker and Consultant, Erica writes and speaks about topics related to talent and the workplace. Erica is currently working on her third book due out next year which will focus on employee retention

⭐️ Nick Holmes - Nick heads up Career Experience at Fishawack Health, and has led a transformation effort to make Fishawack a career destination of choice for top healthcare talent

⭐️ Jeff Schwartz - Jeff is a retired Human Capital Partner from Deloitte Consulting, an author, and now VP of Insights at Gloat. He regularly writes and posts about internal mobility & career development.

This Week’s Podcast - New Language For a New World of Work

This week’s guest is Steve Cadigan. Steve is an Author, Speaker and Talent Strategist. He is the former CHRO of LinkedIn, and the author of Workquake, Embracing The Aftershocks of COVID-19 to Create a Better Model of Working.

Prior to the pandemic, Steve began noticing fractures in the world of work, namely around frustrations employees and employers had around long standing workplace norms, such as career mobility, employee retention, and attracting talent. This motivated him to start writing a book prior to the pandemic on a new way of thinking about some of these key topics.  

Before he could finish, the pandemic happened, and he began to look more intently to figure out why our model of work was failing, and what we could think and do differently in order to make a better workplace for people. 

Drawing on his experience as the former CHRO of LinkedIn as well as an HR leader at many organizations, Steve published his book and spends his time advising organizations on talent strategies.

Steve’s book is timely, but what brought me to reach out to Steve was a shared view around needing new language and new imagination around the world of work. 

In our episode, we talked about:

• The power of language, and why our old language and legacy mindsets around work are no longer relevant
• The realities of topics like retention, employee engagement, and career mobility, and why being honest about them matters
• Examples of companies and industries that have been disrupted, and how they began to build new models for attracting and retaining talent.

Listen Today on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

That's a wrap for this week.

PS - What topics would you like to learn more about in upcoming newsletters?

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