Let's face it: in the rapidly evolving world of work, a one-size-fits-all approach to career development just doesn't cut it anymore.
Your team members? They're a blend of aspirations, talents, and motivations.
Traditional career ladders? More like winding, interconnected pathways now. And everyone on your team wants to feel like they're progressing, evolving, and, most importantly, valued.
Fail to offer that, and they are out of the door.
But how do you offer tailored career development in a world of diverse professional ambitions? Let's navigate this together.
This article will:
Career development tools are resources, assessments, techniques, and software that organizations can leverage to help their people understand their skills, aspirations, and potential and guide them through their career growth.
Organizations and people teams can use them to create, manage, streamline, facilitate, and track employee training strategies, programs, and processes to maximize performance, engagement, and success.
According to Sarah Watson, Chief Operating Officer at BPTLAB, "A well-rounded application of career development tools establishes a robust framework that facilitates a growth mindset, encourages wholesome employee development, and drives organizational success."
In her experience, implementing talent development methods such as coaching, personality tests, and peer mentoring has yielded inspiring results for her organization:
"Employees are more engaged. There's an increase in productivity, and most importantly, they feel supported and empowered in their career pathways. It's a win-win situation; employees' growth fuels the organization's progress, and in turn, the organization's progress ensures sustained avenues for talent growth."
You can use numerous methods and tools to drive employee development, which all serve different purposes. Understanding your options will allow you to choose suitable learning instruments to address your organization's needs and engage and motivate your workers to level up their skills.
Every employee has unique strengths, aspirations, reasons for doing their work, and work styles or environments that bring out their best. But often, these details are unknown even by the employees, so they're not being taken full advantage of.
Personality assessment tools help uncover where each employee's strengths, motivations, and untapped potential lie. Why? So you can help them realize and harness these talents to progress faster and become a more valuable asset to your company.
MBTI provides developmental insights for individuals and teams by helping people gain a more vital awareness of what makes them tick, where they shine, and who they are. It uses responses from employees to a series of standard questions to group them into one of 16 personality types.
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CliftonStrengths uses a 177-question test to help companies comprehensively understand their people's natural strengths, growth potential, and unique capabilities.
People teams can use the insights from the test to map out highly personalized career paths and employee development plans.
Are your talent development resources being allocated efficiently? Do your employees know what skill gaps they have or what training they require to stay sharp and competitive in their respective fields?
Do you struggle with figuring out the skill competencies for everyone on your team or grooming employees for roles matching their skills and potential?
These are the problems that skill management platforms aim to solve. Their typical features include career development plans, competency assessments, skills matrices, career frameworks, and succession planning.
MuchSkills gives you the tools you need to visualize and manage your organization's skills and build an agile, engaged workforce by focusing on identifying and nurturing opportunities for talent growth and development.
TalentGuard can help you make talent development a part of your company culture by crafting smart upskilling and reskilling strategies to enable employees to excel in their roles or reach the next rung on their career ladder.
You can also use the tool to track progress and performance, distribute responsibilities fairly, and fill open positions quickly.
Think of online learning platforms as a marketplace where you can find multiple courses from subject matter experts and reputable institutions. They make it convenient for your employees to access relevant learning content and materials that can advance their knowledge and skills whenever they want, wherever they are.
Learning tools vary in cost, course diversity, quality of presentations, depth of curriculum, content formats available, and type of qualifications or certifications they offer. The right option for your business will depend on your specific needs and learning criteria.
LinkedIn Learning gives organizations access to 21,000+ courses across the business, marketing, technology, and creative fields taught by carefully vetted industry experts. The platform offers an interactive learning experience via short videos, quizzes, and practice exercises.
Coursera houses over 5,800 courses from hundreds of world-renowned higher-learning institutions like Duke, Princeton, and Stanford and organizations like Google and PWC.
Coursera's courses cater to all experience levels and cover different specializations, from UX design to digital marketing and accountancy. It also offers personal development courses, completion certificates, professional certifications, and academic degrees from accredited universities.
Mentoring and coaching are some of the most potent and preferred career development tools: they utilize a hands-on approach to fast-track the acquisition of specific knowledge and skills and provide employees with dedicated support and encouragement.
You can create informal coaching and mentoring structures within your organization by matching lower-level employees with senior talent who can help them develop the technical or soft skills they lack.
The time commitment required to set up and run such a program may burden some teams too much. In this case, you can always rely on external coaching and mentorship platforms to automate and facilitate the process. All of these happen via online courses.
⚠️ Check out out complete competency framework template with 135 core, functional, and technical competencies, curated for 10 departments.
Qooper is a platform that helps companies match their employees with mentors and coaches who can teach them new skills, offer personalized career guidance, and prepare them to successfully tackle future challenges specific to their roles or the workplace.
CoachHub offers comprehensive coaching services comprised of step-by-step guidance, personalized feedback and support, and suggested exercises and strategies for all career levels, from entry to executive.
It brings you lessons from a global pool of 3,500 top coaches with over 60 languages to choose from, so you don't have to worry about leaving behind any team members.
It will sap morale if your workers have to come to you in person, send multiple emails to request training, or jump from platform to platform every time they need to learn something. Or if they have to wait weeks or months for you to roll out new training courses.
Consequently, they won't be motivated to take steps to develop their skills and advance their careers.
Learning experience platforms (LXP) work to eliminate these hiccups by enabling you to design and launch training programs, assign content to users, track learner progress, and organize all your courses and materials under one roof in a fraction of the time it'd usually take.
iSpring Learn is a great LMS option for organizations wanting to create blended and interactive learning experiences easily. It has a text-to-speech feature that can translate your courses into 42 languages.
iSpring also provides a content library full of pre-built templates, so you don't have to start your course creation process from scratch.
360Learning's cloud-based portal helps companies automate their entire learning and development workflows. It lets you create, manage, edit, and deliver training resources, course materials, and other content that can aid your employee's career progression.
360Learning provides assessment tools such as exams, quizzes, and surveys to make it easy to measure your training programs' effectiveness.
🛠️ Want to explore more learning experience platforms? Then, check out our analysis of the 15 best learning experience platforms.
All-in-one platforms offer the resources, features, and capabilities of multiple career development tools—all under one roof.
Rather than racking up huge costs to buy or implement different tools and strategies for your talent development process, you can save money by investing in a single tool that can address all or most of your needs.
This way, your employees won't have to learn to use multiple programs or deal with the demotivation and workflow disruption that jumping back and forth between platforms can cause.
Zavvy provides a robust suite of tools to help you launch and manage effective learning and development measures and restructure existing processes to promote better outcomes.
It has a career mapping software that you can use to define the competencies for each role, so employees understand what they need to do to excel in their current positions and where to improve to progress to a higher level.
With our 360 feedback assessments, you can schedule ongoing career development conversations and collaborate with employees to construct actionable growth plans to address skill gaps and help them reach their potential.
Zavvy allows you to create specialized training courses or unlock access to thousands of ready-made courses curated by business and learning experts using Zavvy's learning experience platform.
Creating career frameworks, running immersive training programs, and arranging coaching sessions can go from taking forever to getting completed within mere minutes or hours, thanks to Zavvy AI and the power of automation.
The exposure, interactions, and networking opportunities that workshops, seminars, and conferences bring can go a long way in helping employees develop soft and hard skills. And in motivating them to explore career paths they may not have considered before.
Many people within and outside your organization are doing amazing work and towing career paths that your employees aspire to. They have a wealth of knowledge, experience, and unique insights to share. You just have to help your employees tap into it.
One of the ways you can do this is by organizing workplace seminars and workshops and inviting experts to come and teach specific topics to team members who can benefit from the session.
Alternatively, you can offer to sponsor employees to attend professional conferences and workshops they are interested in. Or create a fixed budget and roster for these activities and make it mandatory for employees.
The beauty of job shadowing and task rotations is that they are considerably less cost-intensive than formal career development tools. They're easy to implement and happen in the natural flow of work, so they feel less disruptive.
All you have to do is leverage tools like performance reviews, skills assessments, career mapping, and competency frameworks to determine what areas employees need or wish to improve.
Then you can find opportunities and assignments within your organization to help them develop those areas.
For example, suppose an employee desires to progress to a management role. In that case, you can have them shadow a manager to refine their leadership skills and better understand what the position entails.
By taking on tasks outside the scope of their existing role, employees can diversify their knowledge and skillset, practice concepts they've recently learned, and gain ample work experience in a shorter time frame.
Your employees have different learning needs, objectives, and preferences, so they will likely require different resources and activities to help them reach those goals and become proficient in their areas of interest.
Choosing an online career development tool with personalized learning paths will give individuals greater control over their learning process.
If you want to boost employee participation and engagement, opt for tools that offer or allow you to weave interactive content like quizzes, infographics, surveys, polls, rewards, and gamification into courses and training sessions.
At the completion of a course or training program, you need to know what your employees think of the experience so you can make adjustments where necessary to improve learning outcomes.
If the tool you choose doesn't allow people to leave feedback, you'll miss out on valuable insights.
Performing skill gap analysis is usually the first step in employee development. Without identifying individual and organizational skill gaps, your skill and career development strategies may fail to impact overall productivity and business growth positively.
Ideally, a career development tool should give you the ability to assess employees' training needs, professional strengths, and growth potential via self-evaluations, peer reviews, performance appraisals, and 1:1 check-ins.
Your career development tool should enable you to map out potential career progression directions—lateral, vertical, and crossfunctional—for employees based on their current skills and interest, development goals, and the talent opportunities within your organization.
"Growth cannot be achieved through a one-off training session. It's an ongoing journey that requires a strategic mix of learning methods and resources." David Bitton, Cofounder and CMO at Doorloop.
The best way to nurture career development and keep employees motivated throughout the process is by utilizing tools that accommodate different learning methodologies, such as the 70-20-10 model, social learning, and peer-to-peer learning.
By prioritizing talent development and adopting the right tools to aid your goal, your business can unlock the following perks.
Career development tools can help employees stay on top of industry developments and pinpoint the skills they lack and the competencies to develop to live up to the demands of their jobs or become top experts in their areas of specialization.
Employees who feel encouraged to increase their skills and knowledge and are supported with tools and opportunities to help them grow professionally and personally will experience greater job satisfaction.
As a result, they'll become more invested in their work and loyal to your business, so they'll be less likely to quit.
Visualizing the actions they need to take to get from where they currently are to where they want to be will make it easier for employees to optimize their learning and seek out activities that further their career plans.
It'll also empower managers to align employee and company goals better and deliver targeted, well-timed support to help their direct reports thrive.
With career development tools, it'll be easy to identify workers' natural abilities and where you can put their talents to better use. As a result, you can help them refine those skills and improve their overall work performance.
Doing so, you'll upskill employees to fill positions in your organization instead of constantly hiring from the outside.
To stay agile and competitive, your organization must make it an ongoing practice to find new and exciting ways to get your employees to unlock their full potential and ascend the professional ladder.
Zavvy is an all-in-one employee enablement platform that can help your business streamline your training efforts to ensure your team constantly acquires and polishes the skills they need to be outstanding in their jobs.
With Zavvy, you can diagnose skill gaps, create detailed career frameworks, design training materials, deliver personalized coaching and learning content, and track employee progress without breaking a sweat.
📅 Schedule a demo today to see how Zavvy can support your people and company growth.
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