Why are effective career conversations so important right now and why do they not always hit the right spot?
With over 1.3 million UK job vacancies currently unfilled and 87% of organisations struggling to recruit (May 2022) – the job market has never been so candidate driven. In addition, and as we already know, we are all living and working longer, we work in different ways, and we want more fulfilling work and purpose from our employment. There is an overwhelming amount of choice and flexibility for potential job applicants. So, when recruitment is proving to be such a considerable challenge – what can you do to focus on the retention and development of your people and why isn’t this always happening?
The first question that we need to consider is why don’t people pursue career opportunities within their current organisation?
A recent survey by Gartner (2021) found that the most common reasons people cited for NOT applying for an internal post were:
- 83% did not feel encouraged by their organisation to pursue an internal role
- 80% did not feel supported by their team to explore internal opportunities.
- 71% were unclear on how to apply for an internal position
- 49% not aware of internal vacancies
If this is the case within your business, the first practical task is to make sure that employees know where to find out about any current vacancies that you have and make sure they know how to go about applying for them. The other issues are a little trickier to unpick as they involve tackling employees’ perceptions, or perhaps misconceptions, about an organisations’ attitude towards the pursuit of internal roles.
In order to address this, we need to ask our second question – why don’t effective and ongoing career conversations happen within the business and why are these conversations important?
There are no doubt many possible answers to the first part of this question – why don’t effective career conversations take place? The answers may be practical and also cultural, and may include:
- Lack of time
- Lack of skill in conducting these types of conversation
- Fear that it will encourage people to leave the organisation and look for an external role
- Failure to recognise the importance of career conversations and/or trying to include them within a performance review
The second part of this question – why are these conversations important ? There is enough material here for a completely separate blog but in essence – effective career conversations:
- Stimulate a learning and development culture
- Increase both productivity and employee engagement
- Future-proof the organisation and upskill the workforce
- Improve employee retention
- Encourage better working relationships between managers and direct reports
- Enable employees take ownership of their career and professional development
Do we need to go on?
Our third and final question then is what we can do to improve the quality of or career planning conversations?
In our experience the standard Personal Development Planning Conversation just is not cutting it. They tend to be very near term focussed in terms of development to achieve specific goals. This is of course necessary, however, the conversation about longer term aspirations tends to be unstructured, woolly and seen all too often through the lens of one organisational function.
Career planning conversations need specific and different support to that offered in a generic coaching programme or a typical PDP conversation. These are:
- The need to establish a mindset that is positioned for personal change and the resourcefulness to manage themselves through this
- The need for tools and resources to stimulate thinking and arrive at decisions about what is truly important to us
- The need for challenge and / or reality checking around these decisions / choices
- The identification of systemic processes and practices that actually get in the way of the amazing career transition opportunities that major companies have to offer
If this blog has given you some food for thought and you would like to explore this further, please don’t hesitate to contact us on 01347 879056 or at enquiries@h2h.uk.com for more information or to have an informal conversation about our Internal Careers Transition support.
