close

How to Support Employee Career Development

Career progression is one of the most common reasons for someone leaving their role. Last year, CharityJob’s pay and retention report found that 65% of candidates wanted to look for a new job to advance their career opportunities. Charities need ambitious people, but there just isn’t enough budget or scope to promote every employee who deserves it. So, how can you support employee career development, so you can hold on to people that little bit longer?  Here’s how a career planning exercise helped young employees at the Alzheimer’s Society and some top tips on how to support employee career development.

Bridging the career gap

Many people just fall into jobs, and they don’t give any thought to: is this on the critical path of my optimum career? So, we ran an exercise to get our people thinking about their optimum career and then how to bridge the gap to it from where they are now.

Most staff at the Alzheimer’s Society are home or community-based, so we got all the youngest employees together to give them the opportunity to network and get to know each other. We ran a two-day event in Leamington Spa, with a number of developmental sessions. I’ve done a fair bit of talking to people about their careers over the years, so I was asked to run a session on career development.

We had a really mixed bag of people across all the different functions. The only common denominator was that they were all under 25 and fairly new to the Alzheimer’s Society.

We started by asking them about where they are in their career right now, what they like and what frustrates them about their jobs, what makes them happy and where they’d like to see their career go. Then we asked them to project that into the future and, considering their personal circumstances, list everything they wanted to be doing in five years’ time. Where did they want to be living? What did they want to be earning? What job did they want to be doing?

We then asked them to think about the gap between the two. What skills would a person doing their five-years’-time role have that they didn’t have yet? How might they acquire them and how could the Alzheimer’s Society help?
charity salaries compared with uk overall

A longer-term view of talent

It might be that someone was working in care but wanted to get a bit more involved in fundraising. Or maybe they had a maths degree that they wanted to use more. It was about trying to understand their skills versus their aptitudes and ambitions and how they could maximise their potential.

The young people got a lot out of the sessions, especially from networking and talking about things cross-functionally, which is a huge benefit to any organisation and can be lost with so much remote working these days.

The exercise led to a number of initiatives to support the young people working towards their goals, including work shadowing and mentoring. We wanted to take a longer-term view of talent, as, yes, schemes like this will sometimes lead to people leaving to pursue a new role if your charity can’t provide it. This is obviously frustrating in the short term. But that person might go and develop their skills and experience elsewhere, then come back to you in a more senior position in three years’ time, because they love your charity and the support you offer.

Top Tips on how to support employee career development

1. Provide opportunities to network cross-functionally

Give your employees the chance to talk to each other across functions, even if their roles don’t normally interact. A lot of the, “We do this, but I think that might work better for you,” type of conversations tends to fall by the wayside when you’re all working from home. The organisations that are really doing well are very good at talking to others in the sector and working cross-functionally.

If you’re a small charity and there aren’t many other people around, you can encourage your employees to look for external opportunities to network. CharityConnect run virtual Connections events that offer the chance to meet other charity professionals in the same specialism.

2. Set up or join a mentoring scheme

Similarly, mentoring can go a long way in how to support employee career development. Just having confidential sessions where you can thrash out ideas and say, “Well, actually, is that the best approach to that? Have you thought about doing it this way?” Larger charities can do this between departments, but you can also look for external opportunities or even partner up with other local charities to run a mentoring scheme to gain contacts and different perspectives across a wider network.
employee and manager having an honest conversation

3. Run developmental sessions

We ran other developmental sessions at our residential event, including sessions on skills, how to manage people and how to manage upwards and downwards. Regardless of the job they did, these were useful in helping everyone to do their jobs better and expand their experience.

The young people were all incredibly motivated by these sessions – studies have shown the increased importance of learning and development to young people since the Covid-19 pandemic. And, especially in charities, the day job can be so all encompassing that we can forget how valuable it is to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, both for the charity itself and for supporting employees’ career development.

4. Encourage work shadowing and learning across departments

In smaller charities in particular, there’s just not the facility to say, “Oh, you want to work in fundraising? No problem, we have four vacancies there.” That can be tricky, but what you can do is encourage someone to sit in fundraising on a Friday afternoon for a couple of hours, to at least see what goes on. Facilitate your employees spending a bit of time in other parts of the charity, even if just attending other teams’ meetings. Then you’re starting to allow people to gain wider skillsets.

During our exercise, one young person said she wanted to become CEO of the Alzheimer’s Society, so she spent a day shadowing the CEO to find out more about what she does.

5. Ringfence time for training

There isn’t always a lot of budget for training in charities, but there’s a lot of free training courses out there that can be really useful. It relies on people being motived to actually do them, rather than just talk about it, but what you can do is sanction the time needed. Normalise setting time aside for training every week, or month, so your employees don’t feel guilty about taking the time out of their everyday work, especially if they have a heavy workload.

Let them take responsibility for their own career

Ultimately, each person is responsible for their own development. However, you can give your employees the time, tools and opportunities to take control of their own career. Make it clear that it’s okay to talk about it and that you support them – within reason of course, the day job still has to be done. But if you can give your employees the support they need to explore their career options, then they’re more likely to stay a bit longer to do that.

Tags: employee development, staff retention

Read more posts like this

About the author

Vincent Bowen

Vincent Bowen is an Accountant and PWC London Alumni, with significant experience in recruiting and transforming teams and processes.