Career planning and management

An important component of the performance management process is the growth and development of employees’ work-related competencies. This process offers an opportunity for employees to work together to improve and build upon their performance and to contribute to organizational effectiveness. Developing an employee’s performance furthers the mission of the University and enhances the overall quality of our workforce by:

* Promoting a climate of continuous learning and professional growth
* Helping to sustain employee performance at a level which meets or exceeds expectations
* Enhancing knowledge, experience, position, or career related skills
* Enabling employees to keep abreast of changes in their fields
* Making employees competitive for employment opportunities within the University
* Motivating employees
* Promoting affirmative action objectives

The Career Planning tool helps to think about how we would like our career to develop. This is particularly useful in jobs where there is no clear, established career path or where we are locked into a job that does not satisfy us.

Planning career helps us to avoid the boredom, disillusionment, frustration and stress that come with failing to have achieved your potential. This is a real risk if a good, clear, satisfying career path is not open to you.

The tool provides a 5-stage process for thinking through your Career Plan:

* Analyzing your current position;
* Thinking through what you want to achieve in your career;
* Research your options;
* Plan your approach; and
* Take action

Career Planning (CP)
- Training Programs and services that assist employees in conducting individual assessments and establishing a professional career development plan that helps them reach their full potential and fulfill the organization's mission. "Career planning" is when the employee analyzes his/her own aptitudes, skills, qualifications, interests, and values and plans accordingly. "Career management" is when the company supports and assists in the development and achievement of a career plan through a commitment made by the employee’s manager/supervisor and department

Concept and objective for succession planning
succession planning to be a process by which one or more successors are identified for key posts (or groups of similar key posts), and career moves and/or development activities are planned for these successors. Successors may be fairly ready to do the job (short-term successors) or seen as having longer-term potential (long-term successors). Succession planning therefore sits inside a very much wider set of resourcing and development processes which we might call succession management. This encompasses the management resourcing strategy, aggregate analysis of demand/supply (human resource planning and auditing), skills analysis, the job filling process, and management development (including graduate and high flyer programmes). Organisations use succession planning to achieve a number of objectives including:

* Improved job filling for key positions through broader candidate search, and faster decisions
* Active development of longer-term successors through ensuring their careers progress, and engineering the range of work experiences they need for the future
* Auditing the ‘talent pool’ of the organisation and thereby influencing resourcing and development strategies
* Fostering a corporate culture through developing a group of people who are seen as a ‘corporate resource’ and who share key skills, experiences and values seen as important to the future of the organisation. Of these, it is the active development of a strong ‘talent pool’ for the future which is now seen as the most important. Increasingly, this is also seen as vital to the attraction and retention of the ‘best’ people.

Typical activities covered by succession planning include:
* identifying possible successors
* challenging and enriching succession plans through discussion of people and posts
* agreeing job (or job group) successors and development plans for individuals
* analysis of the gaps or surpluses revealed by the planning process
* review, ie checking the actual pattern of job filling and whether planned individual development has taken place.