DESIGNING CAREER DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM
Organizational career development process includes both individuals and institutions. Individuals plan their own careers whereas institutions or organizations manage the careers of the employees. Career planning by an individual includes several sub processes such as occupational choices, organizational choices, job assignment choices and career self-development. While the major sub processes of career management by organizations include recruitment and selection, human resource allocation, appraisal and evaluation and training and development. In order to have effective career development attempts by the organizations, designing automated career development systems plays a crucial role as it integrates a series of activities related to individual career planning and organizational career management involving employees, management and the organization. An individual’s career is a series or sequence of work-related activities as well as his or her future aspirations. It is affected by several factors such as his or her behaviour, attitude, values, ambitions and desires and opportunities and threats and weaknesses and strengths plus the outer environment and economic eco nomic conditions. It is a deliberate process followed by an individual depending upon his or her desires and aspirations over the span of one’s life. Career management is an ongoing process that takes into account a particular job title or designation while preparing, implementing and monitoring succession planning depending upon the future requirements of an organization . Obviously, it also takes human factors in account but the entire process is directed and operated as per the needs and convenience of an organization. The best planning takes into account both organization’s and individual’s aspirations and creates a perfect mix where both the parties can be benefited. Designing Career Development Systems
Designing career development systems according to specific n eeds and requirements of an organization can help h elp HR specialists in bringing efficiency to the entire process of career management. Since the system tries to integrate all the activities of an employee, management as well as an organization, it has to be tailor-designed. There is nothing that fits all since the nature of the every eve ry business is different and aspirations of every employee in every industry are different. Most companies along with career management programs also involve career assessment process by the employee. If they have supportive environment such as a facilitator and properly automated system, they will properly assess their careers and fill genuine information about themselves. Most organizations such as Xerox, IBM, Wal-Mart, Lincoln electric and Bell Atlantic have their own specific career development systems. Along with this, they provide their employees with supportive environment and a culture that supports the whole process of career development. This is the reason why these companies are considered as the best places to work. Since they manage manag e the careers of their employees seriously and treat them
as the most valuable assets of the organization, a very high percentage of university graduates prefer joining them even if they offer low compensation. While designing career development system for an organization, the nature of their business, the industry and the business environment they are operating in should also be considered. Although it is an internal process p rocess of an organization but outer environment factors such as job market, current trends, economic econo mic conditions, etc affect the entire process. Career Development System Options Options for consideration in designing and implementing a career development system include •
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Executive briefing with two main objectives 1. Elicit Elicit their their definition definition of future future skills skills required, required, style style of people people they want to develop develop and keep and where the organisation may be at risk with emerging skills gaps between what you have and achieving your strategic objectives. 2. Explore Explore the core core concepts concepts in current current career career developme development nt within within organisat organisations ions and the available options. Develop a shared understanding of and commitment to the preferred approach to meet organisational business needs. Provide a resource centre / library that can include - information about the organisation and its career opportunities - self help career books and tapes - computer programs to guide employees through a career self assessment and action planning process - referral information to educational institutions, career counsellors etc. - Educational support policy, internal training available
Skill Human Resources staff as career consultants Train managers as career coaches to assist their staff in identifying development needs and options Provide a mentor system, initially target 'endangered' areas of the organisation where specific skills retention is essential to your business Provide a 'safety net' of external career counsellors for employees in crisis Skill employees in career management understanding and techniques (workshops, self help kits) Ensure the Human Resources information system can easily gather and analyse skills development
What is career development? The definition of a career has changed over the the years. A career no longer refers to to a single pathway to work. Careers are 'constructed' through the series of choices ch oices we make throughout our lives. A career is a life-long life-long process. It includes the variety of work roles (paid and unpaid) which you undertake throughout your lifetime, such as everyday life roles (parent, volunteer), leisure activities, learning and work.
Career development is the process of managing life, learning and work. Career development is a term used to describe the management of work-related activity throughout your life. Career development includes providing services (in many different settings) to assist people gain more knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours that help them to manage their career more effectively. Career development is simply a way of thinking about your life, particularly in the context of education, training and employment. It puts you at the centre of decision d ecision making about your future. Career development is equally important if you are looking for work; if you are already employed; or you are an employer, as it recognises the need for skilled workers in a world of increasing change and complexity. Career development is a lifelong process. Individuals will con tinue to build and draw on their experiences and capabilities. The process is unique to each individual and people will require different types of assistance dependant on the many factors affecting your life, such as family, society, work history and the labour market.
Factors Affecting Career Choices Choosing a career is one of the most influential decisions you make in your life. Unlike a job that is used to solely pay bills, a career is a pursuit that normally requires a lot of time and emotional investment on top of the need to provide for yourself and a possible family. Choosing a career can be difficult and a number of different factors play into the decision of what career to pursue.
Environment o
The environment a person is familiar with compared to the environment a career requires plays a large role in what people decide to pursue. For example, someone who grew up near an ocean or spent a lot of time in the water growing up is more likely to have an interest in marine biology than someone who lived in the desert most of her life. A career that requires a lot of travel, such as an airline pilot, could be appealing to someone without as many home attachments, while someone who just had a child or who has an ill relative may prefer a career anchored closer to home.
Salary o
The initial pay and overall earning potential of a career is a huge factor for anyone considering what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Everyone has different lifestyles and financial needs to sustain those lifestyles and a
starting salary of $25,000 per year could be lucrative for some and unthinkable for others. Some people might choose a career based solely on a high earning potential, such as a doctor or lawyer, while others attempt to blend a career choice with something that might pay less but they enjoy doing, such as teaching or playing music.
Personality o
A person's personality is a huge factor in what career is pursued. Salespeople generally need be naturally outgoing, so someone with a timid nature or a fear of talking to strangers would likely struggle in that profession. Likewise, someone with a gregarious personality who needs to be social would probably be miserable in a clerical position filing paperwork all day. A person's personality also shapes her interests and aptitudes, which also influences what careers are examined and pursued to achieve maximum enjoyment in life.
Balanced Scorecard Basics The balanced scorecard is a strategic planning and management system that is used extensively in business and industry, government, and nonprofit organizations worldwide to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the organization, improve internal and external communications, and monitor organization performance against strategic goals. It was originated by Drs. Robert Kaplan (Harvard Business School) and David Norton as a performance measurement framework that added strategic non-financial performance measures to traditional financial metrics to give managers and executives a more 'balanced' view of organizational performance. While the phrase balanced balanced scorecard was was coined in the early 1990s, the roots of the this type of approach are deep, and include the pioneering work of General Electric on performance measurement reporting in the 1950’s and the work of French process engineers (who created the Tableau de Bord – literally, a "dashboard" of performance measures) in the early part of the 20th century. The balanced scorecard has evolved from its early use as a simple performance measurement framework to a full strategic planning and management system. The “new” balanced scorecard transforms an organization’s strategic plan from an attractive but passive document into the "marching orders" for the organization on a daily basis. It provides a framework that not only provides performance measurements, but helps planners identify what should be done and measured. It enables executives to truly execute their strategies. This new approach to strategic management was first detailed in a series of articles and books by Drs. Kaplan and Norton. Recognizing some of the weaknesses and vagueness of previous management approaches, the balanced scorecard approach provides a clear prescription as to what companies should measure in order to 'balance' the financial perspective. The balanced scorecard is a management system (not only a measurement system) that e nables organizations to clarify their vision and strategy and translate them into action. It provides feedback around both the
internal business processes and external outcomes in order to continuously improve strategic performance and results. When fully deployed, the balanced scorecard transforms strategic planning from an academic exercise into the nerve center of an enterprise. Kaplan and Norton describe the innovation of the balanced scorecard as follows: "The balanced scorecard retains traditional financial measures. But financial measures tell the story of past events, an adequate story for industrial age companies for which investments in long-term capabilities and customer relationships were not critical for success. These financial measures are inadequate, however, for guiding and evaluating the journey that information age companies must make to create future value through investment in customers, suppliers, employees, processes, technology, and innovation."
The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a strategic performance strategic performance management tool - a semistandard structured report, supported by proven design methods and automation tools, that can be used by managers to keep track of the execution of activities by the staff within their control and to monitor the consequences arising from these actions. actions.[1] It is perhaps the best known of o f several such frameworks (it is the most widely adopted performance management framework reported in the annual survey of management tools undertaken by Bain & Company, Company, and has been widely adopted in English-speaking western countries and Scandinavia in the early 1990s). Since 2000, use of the Balanced Scorecard, its derivatives (e.g., Performance Prism), Prism), and other similar tools (e.g., Results Based Management) Management) has also become common in the Middle East, Asia and Spanishspeaking countries.[
Characteristics The characteristic of the Balanced Scorecard and its derivatives is the presentation of a mixture of financial and non-financial measures each compared to a 'target' value within a single concise report. The report is not meant to be a replacement for traditional financial or operational reports but a succinct summary that captures the information most relevant to those reading it. It is the method by which this 'most relevant' information is determined (i.e. the design processes used to select the content) that most differentiates the various versions of the tool in circulation. As a model of performance, the BSC is effective in that "it articulates the links between leading inputs (human and physical), processes, and lagging outcomes and focuses on the importance of managing these components to achieve the organization's strategic priorities",[2] The first versions of Balanced Scorecard asserted that relevance should derive from the corporate strategy, and proposed design methods that focused on choosing measures and targets associated with the main activities required to implement the strategy. As the initial audience for this were the readers of the Harvard Business Review, the proposal was translated into a form that made sense to a typical reader of that journal - one relevant to a mid-sized US business. Accordingly, initial designs were encouraged to measure three categories of non-financial measure in addition to financial outputs - those of "Customer," "Internal Business Processes" and "Learning an d Growth." Clearly these categories were not so relevant to non-profits or units within complex organisations (which might have high degrees of internal specialisation), and much of the early literature on Balanced Scorecard focused on suggestions of alternative 'perspectives' that might have more relevance to these groups. Modern Balanced Scorecard thinking has evolved considerably since the initial ideas proposed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the modern performance management tools including Balanced Scorecard are significantly improved - being more flexible (to suit a wider range of organisational types) and more effective (as design methods have evolved to make them easier to design, and use). PERSPECTIVE •
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Financial : encourages the identification of a few relevant high-level financial measures. In particular, designers were encouraged to choose measures that helped inform the answer to the question qu estion "How do we look to shareholders?" Customer : encourages the identification of measures that answer the question "How do customers see us?" Internal Business Processes : encourages the identification of measures that answer the question "What must we excel at?" Learning and Growth : encourages the identification of measures that answer the question "Can we continue to improve and create value?".
Balanced Scorecard Balanced Scorecard Perspectives •
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The Financial Perspective covers the financial objectives of an organisation and allows managers to track financial success and shareholder value. The Customer Perspective covers the customer objectives such as customer satisfaction, market share goals as well as product and service attributes. The Internal Process Perspective covers internal operational goals and outlines the key processes necessary to deliver the customer objectives. The Learning and Growth Perspective covers the intangible drivers of future success such as human capital, organisational capital and information capital including skills, training, organisational o rganisational culture, leadership, systems and databases.
What are the Key Benefits of using Balanced Scorecards? Research has shown that organisations that use a Balanced Scorecard approach tend to outperform organisations without a formal approach to strategic performance management. The key benefits of using a BSC include: 1. Better Strategic Planning – The Balanced Scorecard provides a powerful framework for building and communicating strategy. The business model is visualised in a Strategy Map which forces managers to think about cause-and-effect relationships. The process of creating a Strategy Map ensures that consensus is reached over a set of interrelated strategic objectives. It means that performance outcomes as well as key enablers or drivers of future performance (such as the intangibles) are identified to create a complete picture of the strategy. 2. Improved Strategy Communication & Execution – The fact that the strategy with all its interrelated objectives is mapped on one piece of paper allows companies to easily communicate strategy internally and externally. We have known for a long time that a picture is worth a thousand words. This ‘plan on a page’ facilities the understanding of the strategy and helps to engage staff and external stakeholders in the delivery and review of strategy. In the end it is impossible to execute a strategy that is not understood by everybody. 3. Better Management Information – The Balanced Scorecard approach forces organisations to design key performance indicators for their various strategic objectives. This ensures that companies are measuring
what actually matters. Research shows that companies with a BSC approach tend to report higher quality management information and gain increasing benefits from the way this information is used to guide management and decision making. 4. Improved Performance Reporting – companies using a Balanced Scorecard approach tend to produce better performance reports than organisations without such a structured approach to performance p erformance management. Increasing needs and requirements for transparency can be met if companies create meaningful management reports and dashboards to communicate performance both internally and externally. 5. Better Strategic Alignment – organisations with a Balanced Scorecard are able to better align their organisation with the strategic objectives. In order to execute a plan well, organisations need to ensure that all business and support units are working towards the same goals. Cascading the Balanced Scorecard into those units will help to achieve that and link strategy to operations. 6. Better Organisational Alignment – well implemented Balanced Scorecards also help to align organisational processes such as budgeting, risk management and analytics with the strategic priorities. This will help to create a truly strategy focused organisation.
These are compelling benefits; however, they won’t be realised if the Balanced Scorecard is implemented half-heartedly or if too many short cuts are taken during the implementation. For a more in-depth discussion of the main pitfalls please read the API white paper ‘What paper ‘What is a Balanced Scorecard'.
Conclusion The idea of the Balanced Scorecard is simple but extremely powerful if implemented well. As long as you use the key ideas of the BSC to (a) create a unique strategy strategy and visualise it in a cause-and-effect map, (b) align the organisation and its processes to the objectives identified in the strategic map, (c) design meaningful key performance indicators and (d) use them to facilitate learning and improved decision making you will end up with a powerful tool that should lead to better performance.
Diagram of the Balanced Scorecard
Financial
Customer
Strategy
Learning & Growth
Business Processes
