What is employee development?
Combination of formal education, job experiences, relationships, and assessment of personality and abilities to help employees prepare for the future of their careers.
What is development about?
Development is about preparing for change in the form of new jobs, new responsibilities, or new requirements.
What is a protean career?
A career that frequently changes based on changes in the person’s interests, abilities, and values in the work environment.
What are the four approaches to employee development?
Interpersonal relationships, formal education, job experiences, assessment.
What is formal education about?
- Workshops
- Short courses
- Lectures
- Simulations
- Business games
- Experiential programs
What is assessment about?
Collecting information and providing feedback to employees about their behavior, communication style, or skills. Information for assessment may come from the employees, their peers, managers, and customers.
What are the assessment tools?
- Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI)
- Assessment centers
- Benchmarks assessment
- Performance appraisal
- 360-degree feedback
What is MBTI?
Psychological test that identifies individual’s preferences for source energy, means of information gathering, way of decision making, and lifestyle, providing information for team building and leadership development.
Most popular test for employee development.
Poor psychometric qualities (e.g., low reliability). Test should not be used in practice.
What are assessment centres?
An assessment process in which multiple raters or evaluators (assessors) evaluate employees’ performance on a number of exercises, usually as they work in a group at an offsite location.
What are benchmarks?
A measurement tool that gathers ratings of a manager’s use of skills associated with success in managing.
What are performance appraisals?
- Appraisal system must tell employees specifically about their performance problems and ways to improve their performance.
- Employees must gain a clear understanding of differences between current and expected performance.
- Appraisal process must identify causes of performance discrepancy and develop plans for improving performance.
What is 360-degree feedback?
- Raters identify an area of behavior as a strength of the employee or an area requiring further development.
- Results presented to employee show how rating on each item and how self- evaluations differ from other raters’ evaluations.
- Individual reviews results, seeks clarification from raters, and sets specific development goals based on strengths and weaknesses identified.
What are job experiences?
Combination of tasks, relationships, problems, demands and other features
of an employee’s jobs. Most employee development occurs through job experiences.
What do key job experience events include?
- Job assignments
- Interpersonal relationships
- Types of transitions
What are the steps in the career management process?
Data gathering, feedback, goal setting, action planning & follow-up.
What is data gathering?
Use of information by employees to determine career interests, values, aptitudes, behavioral tendencies, and development needs.
What is feedback?
Information employers give employees about their skills and knowledge and where these assets fit into the organization’s plans.
What is goal setting?
Based on information from self-assessment and reality check, employee sets short and long-term career objectives:
- Desired positions
- Level of skill to apply
- Work setting
- Skill acquisition
What is action planning & follow up?
- Employees prepare an action plan for how they will achieve their short and long-term career goals.
- Any one or a combination of development methods may be used, depending on development need and career objectives.
What are the development-related challenges?
Glass ceiling, succession planning, dysfunctional managers.
What is glass ceiling?
Circumstances resembling an invisible barrier that keep most women and
minorities from attaining the top jobs in organizations.
What is succession planning?
Process of identifying and tracking high-potential employees who will be able to fill top management positions.
What are dysfunctional managers?
Manager who is otherwise competent may engage in some behaviors that make him or her ineffective or even “toxic” – stifles ideas and drives away good employees.
What must employees do to remain marketable?
To remain marketable, employees must continually develop new skills.
