When an organization entrusts developing a career plan, it is naturally thinking of making a rational scheme of progress 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 consists of showing senior management the necessary path to travel, so that expectations remain adjusted to reality and reinforcements for each step achieved are lived collectively.
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 assess people and proceed to your ascent.
Models will vary depending on the size, purpose, culture, structure, and even the life span of the institution. In most, 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 graph of the labor value of individuals, and practical in terms of containing elements that can be consulted when evaluating the prospect for a higher position.
Likewise, the model should contain the fewest possible indicators. There the law of diminishing returns is fulfilled, if they are sufficient, we will not redound.
I can cite the case of a training management to which we commissioned to prepare 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 little and presented a plan with 14 topics and two weeks duration; all the themes were certainly important, but they made induction unfeasible.
The model establishes which is the methodology to be adopted for the employees and the supervisory role, the variables to be taken into account, their relative weight, the measurement instruments to be used, in what order they will be applied and which workers it will cover.
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 bargaining agreement. It should also be consistent with the organization's structure, its job types, and its culture.
It is necessary to develop a duly documented procedure obtained from a wide consultation that includes 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.
It is, as in the model, to be realistic and practical. Adopting a career plan should not mean hindering, bureaucratizing, delaying or degrading what already exists; on the contrary, it must represent progress, the opportunity to review existing processes to improve them; study them “downstream”, with the executing employees themselves, 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” them, but how they are done in practice, to make sure that incorporating them into the career procedure means an improvement in effectiveness and efficiency.
The final obtaining of the rules and procedures manual must contemplate a phase of "coexistence", of parallelism between the previous one and the new promotion system 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 spread to the following areas in order of importance.
Career planning expertise resembles that of a declatonist, because the professional must be able to speak the same language as recruitment, training, and compensation personnel, even in the most technical aspects. This is the first challenge, because a group of individuals specialized in each of these areas, working in isolation, could never build a career plan, since this is the result of a synergy, of a common language; where the codes of selection, training and compensation are linked with legal formulas, systems and organization.
The team must be proportional to the size and complexity of the organization. If the current Human Resources standard is set at 1 for every 50 workers, a good estimate would be on the order of one career planner for every 500. So a company of 1000 workers should have at least 2 people dedicated to planning career.
