Ensuring your employees can advance their careers without having to leave your company is essential. If there are too many roadblocks, your best and brightest will start seeking out opportunities elsewhere to keep their careers on track.
Fortunately, there is plenty that employers and managers can do to open up doorways for advancement. If you want to help your employees grow and work their way up the ladder, here are some steps you can take.
Learn About Employees’ Career Goals
Before taking any other step, it’s critical to understand what your employees want for their careers. Every team member has different professional goals. As a result, a one-size-fits-all approach to advancement won’t lead to universal satisfaction among your team members.
Managers should schedule one-on-one meetings with their employees and find out about their career goals. Gather information about what the workers want to achieve and identify positions within the company that align with their targets. Then, managers can personalize their approach, leading to better results.
Develop Formal Training and Advancement Plans
Having formal training plans that support employee advancement gives managers a framework to spur growth and ensure job satisfaction. Ideally, companies need to identify skill and experience requirements for the roles employees want to land. Then, they can develop programs that allow workers to acquire what’s required in order to advance.
Many training avenues are highly effective. Whether it’s using an eLearning platform internally or covering the cost of outside training or education, these efforts ensure employees can move up in time.
Use Coaching, Mentoring, and Job Shadowing
Coaching, mentoring, and job shadowing are all effective ways to help workers acquire new skills and keep their careers moving forward. Plus, they often involve one-on-one support from a manager or other employee, which can make the experience more satisfying.
With coaching, workers receive personalized guidance about areas they can improve and techniques they can use to bolster their performance. Mentorships let employees find out more about how higher-level team members secured their roles and create opportunities for direct training. Job shadowing allows workers experience other positions firsthand, leading to chances to learn and making it easier for them to ensure the promotion they’re targeting is genuinely a great fit.
Make Stretch Projects Available
Stretch projects require employees to work a bit outside of their comfort zone, exposing them to new skill and knowledge areas they haven’t encountered previously based on their existing workload. As a result, they serve as learning opportunities, as workers often need to hone different capabilities and conduct research to handle their associated responsibilities.
When possible, make one position on projects a stretch assignment for a current top performer. By doing so, the selected employee gets to learn, and the project receives sufficient support from experienced employees to remain on target.
Ultimately, all of the strategies above can let companies assist their employees as they work to advance their careers. If you’d like to learn more or need to augment your current team, TempStaff can help. Contact us today.
