Professional Development and Planning

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Professional Development and Planning

• Choices and Challenges

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Definitions

• What are careers?
• Sequence of work-related positions held by
  someone during lifetime
• What is career success?

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Definitions

• What is Professional Development Planning?
• Deliberate process of thinking about self,
  opportunities, limitations, and choices to
  develop goals and plans to reach these goals

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Factors that Affect Career Choices

• Individual
• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Values, ethics, attitudes
• Goals
• Personality and interests (avocations)
• Education
• Socialization

• Organizational
• Profit vs. nonprofit
• Large vs. small
• Private vs. governmental
• Military vs. nonmilitary
• Industry
• Occupational area

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How is career development today different from
the past?

• Old Paradigm
• Career in one organization
• Relational contract
• Movement through hierarchical advancement or
  intra-organizational mobility
• Career planning by firm

• New Paradigm
• Career spent in several organizations
• Transactional contract
• Movement through various organizations for
  advancement
• Individual is totally responsible for career
  planning

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Factors Influencing these changes

• Employment shifts
• Organizational changes (technology and resources)
• Changes in organizational structure (new
  organizing principles)
• Changing workforce characteristics
• Individual changes (attitudes and values)
• Global competition

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Personal Development and Career Stages
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Early Career Challenges

• Age range 20s to early 30s
• Issue 1 Education
• Issue 2 Getting a Job!
• Know yourself
• Know what employers want
• Good resume writing and job search strategies
• Interviewing well
• Internships and cooperative programs

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Early Career Challenges

• Issue 3 First Years on the Job
• Learning the ropes
• Proving oneself
• Moving around
• Further developing skills and expertise

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Full Membership and Mid-careers

• Issue 1 Advancement or Getting Ahead
• Taking on new assignments and experiences
  (cross-cultural transfers)
• Being an independent contributor and leader
• Continuing education
• Being a key player visibility, problem solving,
  delivering on difficult assignments
• Building good peer relationships

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Full Membership and Mid-careers

• Issue 2 Possible Roadblocks
• Becoming complacent about your skills, your
  career, and/or your place in an organization
• Not keeping up in your field, your organization,
  your industry, your world
• Inability to work well with others
• Balancing work and non-work lives dual careers,
  children, elder care issues

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Transitions to New Careers or Late Careers

• Issue 1 Dealing with midlife crises and other
  transitions (about 30 have this crisis)
• Issue 2 Pathways
• Stars
• Solid Citizens
• Decliners
• Late Bloomers

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Transitions to New Careers or Late Careers

• Issue 3 Managing the second part of your life
• Second careers
• Parallel career (through volunteer activities or
  hobbies?)
• Entrepreneurship
• Must begin thinking of this before you enter this
  phase to prepare for it

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Pre-retirement and Withdrawal

• Issue 1 Begin separating from work
• Mentoring the young
• Providing organizational memory
• Internal entrepreneur or maverick
• Focus on issues external to organization
• Issue 2 Retirement Options
• Phased retirement
• Planning and preparation

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Contemporary Career Patterns

• Linear Progression up the hierarchy
  (traditional)
• Expert Devotion to developing increasing
  knowledge and competency in a specialty
• Spiral Progression of periodic moves (7-10
  years) across related occupations/ specialties
• Transitory Progression of frequent (3-5 years)
  moves across different/unrelated jobs

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Contemporary Career Competencies and Strategies

• Establish a clear identity
• Focus on employability, not employment (portable
  competencies)
• Commit to lifelong learning
• Invest in reputation building
• Maintain a technical specialty, but make sure to
  develop additional skills
• Gain experience in team and project collaboration

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How to Establish Career Identity

• Self exploration, introspection, and feedback
  from trusted others
• Use self assessment tools, discuss with career
  counselors, and managers

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Scheins Career Anchors

• Technical/Functional Competence
• Managerial Competence
• Security and Stability
• Entrepreneurial Creativity
• Autonomy and Independence
• Service and Dedication to a Cause
• Pure Challenge
• Lifestyle

Career anchors are self-perceived talents and
abilities motives and needs and attitudes
and values
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Butler and Waldroops Embedded Life Interests

• Application of technology
• Quantitative analysis
• Theory development and conceptual thinking
• Creative production
• Counseling and mentoring
• Managing people and relationships
• Enterprise control
• Influence through language and ideas

Embedded life interests are long-held,
emotionally-driven passions for certain types
of activities
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Hollands Model of Vocational Choice

• Realistic
• Investigative
• Social
• Conventional
• Enterprising
• Artistic

These six areas represent different clusters
of vocational interests that people have and
that determine their attraction to various
careers
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What you need to do

• Be proactive in your career planning and
  development
• Along with self exploration, need to explore the
  work world around you and network
• Set career goals road maps and rudders
• Have conscious career strategies evaluate
  organizations on what they can offer to you
• Perform career appraisals

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What organizations can do

• Create environment of continuous learning
• training and development
• support employees joining professional groups
• Provide opportunities for self assessment and
  introspection
• benchmarking employee skills and competencies
  against those needed by company or job market
• in-house or outsourced career centers

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What organizations can do

• Respond to work-life issues
• dependent care, scheduling flexibility, culture
  change
• Ensure consistency between career progression and
  organizational expectations
• revamp promotional and reward systems that still
  might weigh tenure and political skills heavily

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What organizations can do

• Ensure career development is consistent with
  other HR processes and programs
• developmental performance appraisal
• succession planning processes
• skill-based rather than seniority based
  compensation
• Re-deploy rather than outplace
• requires investing in employee skills

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Professional Planning Assignment

• Career goals may not be specific yet--but must
  have some!
• Self assessment is critical
• Professional development plan provides strategies
  to help you reach your career goals
• Dont forget the rest of your life when thinking
  about your work!