TM - August 2007 - (Page 47) ested, engaged and retained — and that provide qualified candidates for crucial midlevel management and director jobs. The Pinball Approach to Career Development Deterministic Approaches to Career Planning The pinball approach is one of the two philosophies of career development. If companies take this approach, employees are expected to manage their own careers. Although they might have vast learning resources at their disposal, employees often receive little or no direction beyond the specifics required to do their jobs. In such environments, most employees bounce from job to job like pinballs. One senior vice president of HR said employees sometimes bounce into the right job. But more frequently, employees drop through to the bottom of the machine and leave the company. The pinball approach is based on a belief in rugged individualism — employees who work hard will intuitively know how to develop themselves and seek out appropriate career opportunities. The approach is based on these assumptions: • The organization has a continuous stream of new people joining the company. The approach also assumes employees will naturally and successfully seek out better jobs on their own. • Those employees who are not selected for promotion will find rewarding positions that yield enough satisfaction to ensure retention. • Managers naturally will act on behalf of employees and support their search for better positions that leverage their strengths. • Managers will spend time trying to develop employees for future roles and not just coach and manage them to drive performance in their current job. The alternative to the pinball approach is deterministic career planning. Deterministic approaches take a more formal approach to employee development and incorporate methods to move employees into the most business-critical and appropriate positions. For instance, when a company foresees shortages in engineers or nurses, it develops specific careerplanning programs to fill these talent gaps. Deterministic approaches can be implemented at the managerial, business-unit or enterprise level. Programs can be quite complex, and at higher levels, they can take several years to fully implement. They typically include the following elements: • A ladder of potential positions for both management and technical career paths over many years. • A set of competencies and skills required for each position. Such information helps condition employees to look for the right positions, and it provides a coaching foundation for them to move up. • Defined training and development programs to help employees prepare themselves for various positions in the career path. • Self-assessments and job descriptions to help employees understand whether they are qualified or suited to the positions available. The Business Impact of Career Planning Data from the recently published study “HighImpact Talent Management” proves the pinball approach is failing. Figure 1 compares the pinball approach (labeled “individual career planning”) with three levels of deterministic career planning: manager, business unit and enterprise. The chart has two important takeaways. The first is We all probably have worked in environments with that the data clearly show organizations using the pina pinball approach to career development. For ball approach actually show negative returns — this instance, I once had a manager who was an excellent approach is worse than no career development proleader but offered no advice about career opportunigram at all. ties — any information I could find was through my When individuals are expected to manage their own own contacts. After nearly 10 years of work in sales and technical service, I finally decided that company was not for me. Figure 1: Need for Career Development Companies can get by with the pinball approach in times of workAverage of All Impact Measures 25% Impact of Career Planning force surpluses or in economic Engagement and Retention downturns, when unemployment 15% rates are high. In current conditions, however, where skilled 5% workers are scarce, and businesses Business Manager are growing, companies that conIndividually -5% Enterprise level Unit level level tinue to use this strategy (if you can call it a strategy) will find -15% themselves increasingly comproHow career development is managed -25% mised by a lack of skilled employees and managers. % improvement in business impact talent management magazine www.TalentMgt.com 47 August 2007 http://www.TalentMgt.com
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