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Employee Expectationsabout Career Development

BPHR– D.Famà, September 2015

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Regarding this topic of career development opportunities, today many organizations share the same situation (*):• “downsizing ….. have reduced the possibility to attaining of some traditional objective indicant of career

success”;• due to the changes in the lifestyle of individuals and families, “the needs of employees have shifted

dramatically. Employees today juggle both work and personal life on a regular basis”, arousing a new emphasis on work-life balance;

• the business strategy (du to the post 2008 crisis level of risk appetite) limits the possibilities for additional organizational growth

“To create effective career management systems, organizations need to understand how individuals define career success”. Otherwise, high is the risk of expectations misalignment with consequent frustrations, lack of engagement / performance and retention risks (*).

To this purpose, we analyzed the results coming from one of items of the employees’ meeting agenda for the Internal Know Your Customer Program we run for our employees, specifically addressing the topic of the employees expectations about their career development opportunities.

These results had been classified into 3 groups (*):- Traditional career view, where career success is defined through indicators like: title, money, power;- Contemporary career view, where the success is defined through indicators more aligned to a sense of

satisfaction for the job done: being challenged, being able to use one’s skills, having impact, etc.;- Combo, where the success is defined through a mix of the above indicators.

(*) Reference: “The Changing Tide of Careers””, E.L.Goldberg, 2012, into People & Strategy, pg 53, Volume 35/ Issue 4

Employee Career Development Expectations: General Framework

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Career Expectations: Analysis

To the purpose of the career expectations analysis, we gathered into two main groups the different jobs:- Sales roles (overall 60% of the analyzed unit headcount);- Admin roles (non sales roles: the remaining 40%).

Similarly for the seniority:- Senior gathers people with age > 35y overall 78% of the HC);- Junior gathers people with age < 35y (22%).

The raw results are highlighted in Table 1 and 2:

Sales of which: Admin of which:Jr Sr Jr Sr

Contemporary 36% 100% 18% 56% 50% 57%Traditional 36% - 45% 33% - 43%Combo 29% - 36% 11% 50% -

Jr SrContemporary 80% 33%Traditional - 44%Combo 20% 22%

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Career Expectations: Interpretation

From Table 1 and 2, it appears that:1. Admin roles, no matters the Seniority, tend to be more aligned with a Contemporary approach to the career expectations than the

Sales roles (56% vs 36%)2. Sales roles show a quite homogeneous distribution along the 3 groups: Contemporary, Traditional and Combo3. This seems due to the main attitude of Senior Sale roles (quite half of them have a Traditional approach to the career expectations)4. At the opposite, the Junior employees, no matter their role, generally show a preference for a Contemporary approach (80% in

Table 2)

The done One2One interviews (the core of the Internal KYC program) help to highlight what is following:5. Admin roles tend to have expectations similar to the Junior employees, but due to different motivations:

– Juniors are mainly motivated by their career phase, having clear the need to learn more from enlarged/ varied experiences;– Admin (no matter the seniority) seems to be more conscious of the constraints that the analyzed organization/ strategy and

current market situation generate for traditional careers. As a reaction, they seems to have understood that the adequate (more realistic) answer is to be focused on the variety of experiences and to the learning opportunities made available by the same business factors (tasks continuous change, performance challenges, organizational and technical innovation, etc.)

6. Senior Sales share the same consciousness of the consequences of the mentioned career constraints, but seems culturally less ready to accept them. As a consequence, Sales Senior roles shows to be less coherent than Admin roles, continuing to prefer a Traditional approach to the career expectations.

As interim conclusion, we can say that:i) We have a buffer for organizational flexibility in the two populations : Junior employees and Admin rolesii) We already have a set of Sales people for whom it’s expected a good level of match between company offer and employee

expectations (see next slide: 64% of sales people) (*);iii) For the remaining people (36% of Sales in particular), we have to Identify possible margins for a cultural change, than assure a

mentoring for the most promising

Note: the above interim conclusions are of general value. Each specific people management decision/ action must be checked against the specific candidate/s and the possible evolution of their attitudes (on a yearly basis)

(*) See also: “Employee Value Proposition and Organizational Culture”, july 2015, D.Famà (slideshare)

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Career Expectations: Segmentation for Action

Area of max potential fororganizational flexibilityArea of greater alignment between

Employee expectations and company offer (*)

Area to check for “cultural evolution”

(*) Here is located the majority of the unit’s A-people, as emerging from the Potential – Performance grid.

Sales of which: Admin of which:Jr Sr Jr Sr

Contemporary 36% 21% 14% 56% 11% 44%

Combo 29% - 29% 11% 11% -

Traditional 36% - 36% 33% - 33%