Importance of Career Planning
A career may be defined as ‘a sequence of jobs that constitute what a person does for a living’. Career planning is a process by which one selects career goals and the path to those goals. It involves a clear selection of career goals and career paths. It encourages individuals to explore and gather information, which enables them to synthesize, gain competencies, make decisions, set goals, and take action. It is a crucial phase of human resource development that helps the employees in making the strategy for work-life balance.
Career planning is needed for the following reasons:
Provides career goals and paths
It is needed to provide career goals and career paths to an employee. It provides clear future directions in terms of career.
Develop competencies
It motivates and encourages an employee to develop competencies for higher level jobs. The competencies can be conceptual, interpersonal and technical.
Creativity
It is needed to increase employee creativity. It is needed for innovation in an organization. It can be lead to entrepreneurship within the organization.
Employee retention
It is needed for retention of qualified employees in the long-term. This is needed to decrease costs of recruitment, selection, and training.
Motivation
It motivates employees for higher performance. Upward movement in the organization is based on the quality and quantity of performance.
Benefits of Career Planning:
- Career planning ensures a constant supply of promotable employees.
- It helps in improving the loyalty of employees.
- Career planning encourages an employee’s growth and development.
- It discourages the negative attitude of superiors who are interested in suppressing the growth of the subordinates.
- It ensures that senior management knows about the caliber and capacity of the employees who can move upwards.
- It can always create a team of employees prepared enough to meet any contingency
- Career planning reduces labor turnover.
- Every organization prepares succession planning towards which career planning is the first step.
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