When an organization orders to develop a career plan, it is naturally thinking of making a rational progress scheme within the organization in favor of its workers, in order to obtain their maximum productivity. However, the first forecast to optimize the scope of this task is to show senior management the necessary path to follow, so that expectations remain in line with reality and the reinforcements for each step achieved are lived collectively.
How to make a career plan
If there has not been a previous career plan we will find four basic demands: 1) which model to use; 2) whom to empower as an expert team; 3) how to turn the plan into a process; and 4) finally, how to systematize it according to the current operation of the institution.
The model
The first requirement is the model, that is, what will be the pattern or device where the so-called "career" or trajectory of people will be represented, in other words, what are the elements to take into account to value people and proceed to their promotion.
Models will vary depending on the size, purpose, culture, structure, and even the lifetime of the institution. In most of them seniority and experience will be important as indicators of expertise in performing the functions, however in others other indicators with as much or more value come into play, such as performance evaluation, language proficiency, specialized knowledge, having been commissioned as a temporary supervisor or academic studies.
The model must be realistic and practical, realistic in terms of being a true spelling of the labor value of individuals, and practical in terms of containing possible elements to be consulted when evaluating the prospect for a higher position. In this sense, I recall an experience in which the designer of the model tried in the procedure to ask the applicants for promotion, a certification of their expertise issued by the Training Institute of the same industrial organization. When making the observation to him of the complicated thing that would be, he said to me “it is the ideal”. But the ideal is not always the good, it was ideal and impractical, therefore it had to be replaced by another indicator.
Likewise, the model should contain as few indicators as possible. There the law of diminution of the returns is fulfilled, if they are sufficient, we do not redundant.
I can cite the case of a training management that we commissioned to develop the basic training plan for all incoming workers, in order to assign a potential score. Originally it had 6 subjects spread over 24 academic hours. One of the training professionals thought it was little and presented a plan with 14 topics and two weeks' duration; no doubt all the issues were important, but they made induction unfeasible.
The model establishes what is the methodology to be adopted for employees and the supervisory role, the variables to be taken into account, their relative weight, the measurement instruments to be used, in which order they will be applied and which workers they will cover.
The process
The administrative device by which the Career Plan will be put into practice must be in accordance with the different regulatory aspects such as labor laws, the provisions of the company itself and when this applies: the collective employment contract. It should also be consistent with the organization's structure, its types of position, and its culture.
It is necessary to develop a duly documented procedure and obtained from wide consultation that covers all the parties involved. You cannot simply affect, for example, the selection area in your processes without having built the steps to follow with them.
As in the model, it is about being realistic and practical. Adopting a career plan should not mean hindering, bureaucratizing, delaying or degrading what already exists; on the contrary, it should represent progress, the opportunity to review existing processes to improve them; study them “downstream”, with the same executing employees, to incorporate their observations.
The ideas of the Total Quality approach or that of the so-called Quality Circles are applicable; the role of the career planner is not precisely to sit down with a manager to see selection, training or compensation processes as a flow chart "paints" but rather how they are done in practice, to ensure that incorporating them into the career procedure means an improvement in effectiveness and efficiency.
The final obtaining of the manual of rules and procedures must contemplate a phase of "coexistence", of parallelism between the previous one and the new system of promotions or any career process, to ensure that its operation is in accordance with the theory and if it has really meant an improvement.
It should be noted that career plans always start with the company's Core Business, its area of greatest impact, and gradually it is extended to the following areas in order of importance.
The expert team
Expertise in career planning is similar to that of a declatonist, because the professional must be able to speak the same language of the selection, training and compensation personnel, even in the most technical aspects. This is the first challenge, because a group of specialized individuals in each of these areas, working in isolation, could never build a career plan, since this is the result of synergy, of a common language; where the selection, training and compensation codes are intertwined with legal, system and organization formulas.
The team must be proportional to the size and complexity of the organization. If the current Human Resources standard is set to 1 for every 50 workers, a good estimate would be in the order of one career planner for every 500. So a company of 1,000 workers should have at least 2 people dedicated to planning of career.
The first aspect to take care of must be the selection, being relevant competences such as: information search, achievement motivation and impact and influence; Since the excellent career planner will be a born researcher, who sets goals for himself and is able to convince people in the organization to obtain the necessary information. Operational workers would be of little use for this task, since the ability to create solutions, solve problems in a new way, and combine skills from different specialties is important.
The second relevant aspect is the transdisciplinarity that career training requires. A team of this nature cannot be monolithic; For example, if we only employ psychologists, they will talk to each other about psychology, not career planning. The same will happen with other disciplines, therefore the career team must integrate with people from psychology, education, administration, industrial relations, systems engineering, mathematics, organization and methods, among others.
The third element to observe is the certified training of personnel, not simply through practice but through the theory and state of the art of career planning; For this, hours of formal preparation should be spent with internal and external instructors, so that the career planner sees himself as specialized personnel with relevant responsibility within the organization.
Another important matter to empower the team is the assignment of tasks to be performed by professionals from different backgrounds, for example a lawyer with a systems engineer in the elaboration of succession charts. This will allow for the adoption of a common language and exchange learning, provided the final work is supervised by a senior member.
Regarding expertise, it is a fact that whoever performs an activity for the first time must be understood as an apprentice; then, if you have already done it once, you are an experienced person; And only when you can innovate and teach it can you consider yourself a senior of the activity.
Career Planning is not a common or broad-based knowledge among Human Resources professionals; simply because it is not a subsystem, but a sophistication that demands a high degree of development from the institution that adopts it, and on the other hand its methods and techniques are jealously guarded in the Know How of the most famous consulting companies in the world, for what its implementation through outsourcing is highly expensive.
The system
The simultaneity of elements that a career plan manages makes its full implementation impossible without a system specifically designed to consider applicants for a promotion vacancy, control their eligibility status, record their evaluation and assign a new status to them, whether promotional or deferred, in addition to addressing a certain training action.
Now, the development of the system or its application requires that all the required outputs are determined and that the complete procedure, conceived according to the career model adopted, has been duly carried into process language with its different alternatives.
A first stage will show the succession studies, in the case of management personnel, or the projections of possible promotion according to the applicability of the career plan for personnel without reports, manually.
This is useful because, in addition to developing the required outputs in practice, it indicates different aspects or trends that the management personnel show when evaluating the prospects in their charge, which can be very useful to prevent certain rules in the system, for example the discretion or not to modify a rating made.
In any case, the systematization requirement should be considered the culmination of the process by the career planning team, because it represents the establishment of the route and the technical milestones of the project that will materialize the institution's intention to have its career plan..
