The Philosophy of Career Development

The philosophical foundation of career development stems from human development where
individuals form their identities. This is an evolutionary process that can span throughout the lifetime
of the individual. Career development occurs naturally and can begin as early as elementary school
continued through their adulthood. The environmental factors that people encounter in their lives may
and probably will influence their career guidance. The awareness of career development comes from
the different ways that people choose to make a living for themselves, and it continues as they explore
different occupations in the workforce that leads to pursuing a career of their choice.
Many individuals look for an organizations ability to provide them with personal growth and
development. This allows them to feel that their organization has invested in them individually and
their potential to succeed in life and within the organization. Career development is not just about
being promoted with a high salary it is about an employees ability to be their best in the organization
in a position that demonstrates their excellence. There are very few organizations that actually take the
time to reflect on the personal aspirations of their employees and want to provide them with a fostering
environment that will promote growth and development. In order for organizational career
development programs to succeed they must intensify to their employees the strong mission behind the
career development value to add development and training in their current job position; that can lead to
other opportunities within the organization. Career development programs will continue to be a part of
the evolution of change in organizations; due to the dynamics of the workforce employees who have
the desire to reach their potential by personal achievement by becoming all they are capable of
becoming in life.
Project background and scope
ABC College is a small Christian college with around fifty staff members in addition to 10 fulltime faculty members. Currently, employee development is not an organization-wide effort but is done
in each individual department at the discretion of the department-head, if it is done at all. On their

website, the college indicates that they value leadership development and mentoring as part of their
culture, but this is not evident in the lack of a career development program for their staff members.
Due to the small size of the organization, there is not much opportunity for staff members to be
promoted and there is not an effort for the organization to develop the staffs skills in their current
positions. Recently, many staff members who worked at the organization for over ten years left
voluntarily when the administration announced that there may be lay-offs. The staff left behind is
juggling increased workloads without the benefit of higher salaries or any other type of appreciation or
development. The organization often hires people or assigns people with new tasks with little to no
training, yet holds them accountable for what the organization views as poor performance. At certain
higher levels of the organization, executive poor performance is blamed on staff members lower on the
chain of command.
Methodology
High rates of employee turnover and employees expressing discontent with their jobs are two of
many indicators that the implementation of a career development program is necessary (Merchant).
After a series of major organizational changes, ABC College demonstrated higher rates of employee
turnover than they had experienced in the past ten years. Additionally, employee satisfaction surveys
administered by NCST Consulting Firm revealed that few staff members feel properly trained or
encouraged to develop in their current positions.
Provide a comprehensive set of self-service online career tools to empower employees to direct
their own development. Enable employees to examine their personality, values, skills, interests and
preferences independently or with a career advisor, and learn how their lives fit into career paths they
make. Offer resources for employees to build their internal brand, as well as access to internal career
advisors. Employees can then leverage these resources to learn more about themselves and their career
preferences, and independently discuss career path preferences and options with advisors. Online career
tools provide information regarding how to successfully navigate a fulfilling career within the

company.
Findings and Conclusions
Our research indicated that there are three main problems at ABC College that need to be
addressed. First, it is evident that employees are not satisfied in their jobs and there is no room for
upward movement through the organization. Second, there appears to be a lack of training for
employees in multiple levels of the organization, from entry-level employees who do not know what is
expected of them and are not familiar with policies and procedures, to managers who struggle with
developing their subordinates and maximizing their strengths and abilities in their positions. Finally,
while ABC College specifically mentions development as something that is part of the fabric of their
culture, this is not something that is part of organizational culture in practice.
ABC College needs a workforce that is engaged in their work and committed to the mission of
the organization, and it is obvious that the organization knows that development is a valuable and
worthy task. In order to address these problems and implement a career development program at ABC
College, NCST proposes that career development becomes something that is part of each level of the
college: the organization itself, the leadership and management, and the employees. At the
organization level, it is crucial to implement a way for employees to know the mission of the college
and to understand how they contribute to the mission as it is lived out in their day-to-day duties and
responsibilities. The leadership at ABC College needs to understand how powerful it can be to give
employees a sense of empowerment in order to begin to see them become fully engaged in their jobs.
Understanding individuals strengths, interests, and preferences is an important element of beginning
to develop this sense of empowerment and using assessments like the Job-Person-Environment
Assessment and StrengthsFinder can begin this process of determining what kinds of tasks suit the
employees.
Recommendations and Implementation Guidelines
Organizational Level

Implementing career development in the ABC College is more than just hiring the right coaches
and working with a selected group of employees to train and develop. The career development
implementation has to be viewed and introduced to the employees as a new element of developing the
organizational culture. When an organization is implementing career development to their employees it
is important that they understand the vast differences amongst their employees. In knowing that what
motivates one employee may have little to no effect on another employee. Many employees will
display a higher level of motivation towards the missions and goals of the organization if they are able
to relate to them and contribute to the success of the work environment. The ABC College must
establish trust with their employees throughout their organization without this trust the initiatives of the
institutions mission will not be perceived as trustworthy from the employees. After phase 1 is
completed we can now move on to the next steps of the career development implementation process.
A. Evaluation Process
1. ABC College will define what career development means for the organization and groups of
employees within the organization (i.e. senior management vs. management, employees vs. supervisors
and HR)
2. Determine the need for career development in the organization; this needs to be done on a full-scale
approach with conversations with all levels of management and employees. The institution will need to
initiate a company-wide survey making sure they put emphasis on concerns and needs of the
organization.
3. Identify and communicate the concepts and models of the goals to be achieved through the program
by the managers and employees. These concepts should answer the questions Why do we do it?,
How do we get there and What are the benefits for the managers and employees.
B. Implementation Phase
1. Launch and promote the results of the program to employees throughout the organization. Set goals
and objectives to where each level of management and employees are held accountable for their

behavior and performance.

2. Continue to evaluate the results of the program and in 6-12 programs conduct the same survey
given in the beginning to measure the results.
As the implementation process is being conducted at all levels of the organization it is
important for the employees to see visible support from the senior management to have a sustained
development process in the organization. If the employees do not see these efforts from senior
management any attempts in trying to get their people to change will be unsuccessful they must see all
levels of management being held accountable for the same outcomes.
C. Coaching Process
1. ABC College will provide support systems for their employees at all levels such as mentoring,
counseling, informational interviewing with intra-companies, online website training courses, and
monthly engagement chats with their management and employees. This will help the organization to
stay focused on the objectives and goals set during step 1 of the career development implementation
process.
ABC College must follow the implementations of the career development process in order to
stay to the mission and goals of the organization. The most effective organizations will realize that
their employees commitment and productivity are directly related to the organizations overall success
now and in the future.
Manager-Level
This career-centered plan values the thriving of people, which goes beyond the merely
development of a college, as we believe that the full development of people is the core of the
organization and propels its growth. Both managers and employees should be facilitated to manage
their own growth and development, which will not only benefit them in their current positions, but also
foster their lifelong career. Managers should take their role in developing employees with
transformational and positive leadership.

Recommendations
The plan includes two stages. In the first stage, the managers, like other employees, will get
career counseling which will help managers understand their strengths, needs, values, skills, and
personal goals; in the second stage, managers will get proficiency specialty training in which they will
be trained how to coach and mentor in order to take ownership of their role in developing employees.
STAGE 1 Counseling
Goals:

Identify managers with their performance potential;

Assist managers to locate their realistic career opportunities.

Implementation:
1. The managers will be explained about the philosophy and the goals of the career development plan
to help them develop a positive attitude.
2. NCST staff will hold one-on-one meetings with each manager about their background experiences,
current work, and their aspirations as well as expectations about their career and their lives. In the talks,
the manager will be encouraged to better understand and play to their strengths in order to realize their
full potential. Managers will be asked some facilitative questions through which they will form a list of
their strengths. NCST staff will set with each of them another meeting time a week later. Before the
next meeting, managers will contact or meet their friends, family, co-workers, or mentors to ask about
who they are in other people's eyes.
3. During the second one-on-one meeting with NCST staff, managers will talk about their experiences
of knowing themselves and their findings. In addition, NCST staff will explain the benefits of taking
StrengthFinder and JPEA in order to get them psychologically better ready for the self-assessment
journey.
4. Group meeting facilitated by NCST staff will be held after the second one-on-one meeting. All the

managers will share their experiences in knowing themselves in the past two weeks and then take
StrengthFinder and JPEA assessments.
5. A lecture will be held to explain how to illustrate the two assessments. After that, the third one-onone meeting will be held, in which NCST staff will talk with the managers about how the current jobs
match their strengths, how their aspirations match their strengths. After the meeting, the managers will
make an action plan about how to play to their strengths better in the organization and in their future
career and email it to their counselor before the fourth one-on-one meeting.
6. In the fourth one-on-one meeting, the managers will get feedback about their action plans which will
include achievable developmental objectives and specific actions to take.
7. NCST counselors will hold regular communication, either through internet or face-to-face, with the
managers to monitor how the action plan goes.
8. Another group meeting will be held for managers to share about their experiences.
STAGE 2 Training
Goals:

Improve positive verbal communication skills

Develop the four leadership roles, namely, coach, appraiser, adviser, and referral agent.

Implementation:
1. The managers will be told that the training aims to help them thrive as a leader in their career.
2. The managers will be divided into two groups and each group will work with a counselor of NCST.
3. Communication workshops will be held for managers to know how to be verbally positive by
encouraging compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude.
4. Lectures on the four leadership roles will be held and the managers will be encouraged to put them
into practice with the employees.
5. Regular meetings will be held to talk about how to help employees develop their potentials. Before

each meeting, they will be asked to focus on and journal about one or two employees closely so that
each of them has some case studies; during the meeting, the cases and their findings will be brought
and discussed. The counselor will facilitate the discussion and monitor whether their plans work and
how to improve them.
Employee Level
At the employee level, career development is about staff members understanding their strengths
and how to effectively use them in their positions, being heard by supervisors and school
administration, and feeling like a valuable asset in the ABC College community. We recommend that
employees interested in career development be provided with assessments to determine what types of
tasks suit them in an effort to enable them to begin to understand the unique abilities they bring to the
work that they do at ABC College. Staff members will also be given opportunities to provide feedback
to supervisors and school administration, a practice in which ABC College engaged in the past, but
abandoned in the past five years. Additionally, managers and employees will work together to come to
understand how individual staff members contribute to the vision and mission of the college.
Implementation
Employees will be provided with the opportunity to complete the following assessments (it is
important for ABC College to note that some of these assessments require interpretation or counseling
by someone trained in how to interpret and apply the data collected):
1. Job-Person-Environment Assessment (JPEA)
This is an on-line assessment used to analyze a persons tendency to operate in specific
ways in the workplace. Staff members will learn about how they tend to make
decisions, what types of feedback they prefer, whether they may work more efficiently
in group or one-on-one settings, and many other preferences or tendencies that may
affect their work. This tool may also be effective when members of an entire
department or office take the assessment because the results can be collected and

analyzed together to get a combined picture of the preferences of every staff member in
the department. (CITATION)
2. StrengthsFinder
This is an assessment used to determine a persons strengths. The StrengthsFinder
assessment provides users with their top five strengths and explanations for each of
them. Staff members who take this may discover their unique contributions to the ABC
College community, and can begin to learn about the tasks they may engage in that
develop their strengths. (CITATION)
3. Career Anchors
This assessment may assist the staff members in determining those aspects of their jobs
that can serve to anchor them to their position. The Career assessment helps participants
to determine those things that can anchor them in certain positions. For instance, staff
members may feel anchored to a position in which they are able to display their
technical knowledge and another may feel anchored to a position in which they have
autonomy or security.
In addition to completing assessments, staff members will have the opportunity to provide
regular feedback to the schools administration through yearly anonymous surveys completed during
the annual employee review. To ensure that surveys remain anonymous, they may be administered by
means of on-line surveys through websites such as Survey Monkey. While the administration may
solicit answers to specific questions, it is important to provide staff members with the opportunity to
construct free answers and submit them as part of the survey.
Finally, interested employees will meet with their supervisor once per month to discuss their
career development paths. During these meetings supervisors will have the opportunity to coach their
subordinates, discuss assessment results, and suggest ways in which the employees may be able to
continue to learn and grow in their present position. This is also a time when the manager can discuss

the specific ways in which the employees work at ABC College directly contributes to the mission of
the institution.

Summary of Benefits
The career development will benefit ABC College in several ways. First of all, it will help
construct an organizational culture valuing holistic development by helping both managers and
employees map out their potentials and realistic career goals. Secondly, this organizational culture will
in turn enhance employees' autonomy and their commitment to the college. Furthermore, the leadership
and mentoring training will build a quality team of leaders who will bring about long-run
organizational development.

References
Merchant, R. The Role of Career Development in Improving Organizational Effectiveness and
Employee Development