12 July 2019

Career planning: what is it and how to implement it in the company?

career plan

Table of contents

A career plan is a plan that directs the professional development of an employee or a team within a company. It builds employee loyalty and prepares them for the present and future needs of the company, which, at the same time, involves training the employee in the future areas and departments they will occupy, as well as ensuring that the employee in question will be a human resource that the company can count on both in the short and long term.

What is a career plan

As mentioned above, a career plan is the forecast of the professional path that an employee is going to have in the company. In this way, it is based on the current situation of the worker incorporated in the company and, subsequently, it is carried out the career planning within the company itself

In this sense, a career plan is something that assesses both the strengths and weaknesses of the employee in question and, on the basis of these, directs the employee's career development in one direction or another. In this way, it prepares the employee in question to highly skilled and specific tasks and jobs, This is because it starts this preparation from the moment the career plan is initiated, which ensures highly professional and highly qualified workers in each of the specific sectors or fields in which they will be working in the years to come. 

What are the advantages

The main advantage of implementing a career plan in the company is that it ensures a pool of professionals perfectly adapted to the environments and objectives that the company will demand, both in the present and in the future. In other words, by investing in employee training During the same period in which they are working in the company, the professional profile of the worker can be moulded to the specific needs of the company, while at the same time being sure that they are a worker who responds to the needs, since they come from within the company itself and have been trained for years. 

In addition, because the process of training employees in a career plan is spread over years, this allows to take decisions reorienting the profile of the worker if, after a few months or years, the decision is taken to redirect it towards a different objective. In the end, it is a great advantage for the company to ensure that it has the necessary specific and necessary human resources The employee himself will demand and, for the worker, it is an opportunity for job improvement and loyalty with the company itself, which becomes employee involvement in corporate life much more than a mere form of subsistence. 

How to implement a career plan for workers

There are different elements to take into account when developing a career plan for an employee. The first thing to assess is that any career plan must be personalised and tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of each employee. It is also essential to ensure that the necessary resources are allocated to ensure that the career plan is successful and, above all, that the talent being developed is retained. 

In this sense, the implementation of continuous training programmes in the company itself and the sector in which the company in question works is fundamental. Likewise, the remuneration and the benefits provided by the company The integration of the employee's personal and family life is another common element in career plans, especially those designed with a long-term perspective. Having certain advantages such as the Flexible Compensation, as well as having solutions such as the Per Diem Ticket (especially useful in the case of seconded employees), are two good complements that improve the employee's perception of work motivation and, in the long term, ensure talent retention.

Edenred Spain

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