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Unit 11: Performance Appraisal and Career Strategy

11.9 Objectives of Career Development Notes

The objectives of a career development programme, therefore, can be listed as below:
1. To attract and retain effective persons in an organisation.

2. To utilize human resources optimally.
3. To improve morale and motivation level of employees.
4. To reduce employee turnover.
5. To practise a balanced ‘promotion from within’ policy.
6. To make employees adaptable to changes.

7. To increase employees’ loyalty and commitment to the organisations.
8. To maintain harmonious industrial relations.
9. To inculcate equitable employment practices providing equal career progression
opportunities to women and minorities.

11.10 Types of Career Development Programmes

In an organisation, there are different types of development programmes to enrich different
skills of human resources. These include organisation development, employee development,
management development and career development. Organisational development programmes
are planned and managed from the top to bring about planned organisational changes for
increasing the organisational effectiveness. Management development is concerned with
upgrading the manager’s skills, knowledge and ability of the employees to enable them to
accomplish the additional process of guiding the movement of human resources through different
hierarchical levels. Whatever may be the differences, career development is interrelated with
other human resource development functions.

11.11 Different Stages or Cycles of Career Development Process

In order to design a suitable career development programme it is necessary to understand the
different career stages or development cycles of an individual employee. Actual stages differ
from individual to individual due to obvious differences in perceived internal career. However,
career development cycle or stages, keeping in view the general requirements of people at
different hierarchical stages, may be grouped under the following four categories:
1. Exploratory Stage: This stage starts when a new employee joins an organisation. An
employee with his qualification and knowledge joins an organisation and finds himself in
an apparent mismatch condition which cannot be set right with the induction programme
of the organisation. It takes quite some time for him after thorough training to adapt to
the organisation and more particularly to his job assignment.
Therefore, it is essential for the organisation to sustain the behavioural as well as operational
deficiencies to help him to develop in the course of time. The best solution at this stage is
to allow the new entrant to perform some specific job and to confer freedom in functioning.
This will help the new entrant to gradually develop according to the requirements of the
organisation. Some companies even allow the new entrant to undergo a compulsory job
rotation for a reasonable time period. The purpose of such job rotation is to allow the
employee to select his preferred job from a wide range of available jobs in the organisation.
However, due to obvious functional specialities and different educational requirements,
such a scheme is not quite successful in Indian organisations.

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