More important than a company having well-defined goals, is knowing how to execute them along the way. It is not just a question of moving from point A to point B but understanding how the process is coordenated.
Furthermore, it is essential to match the wishes and goals of those who will help you make it happen: your collaborators. Therefore, understanding how career planning works and knowing how to implement it has become crucial.
Offering a good salary with benefits is fundamental, but that’s not the only thing that helps companies keep good employees. Nowadays people seek a better quality of life in many areas, including the professional one.
Contributing to employee success through a career plan not only ensures better results, but also leads them to reflect and decide where they will want to be in the future for their professional journey.
However, despite being a relatively common theme, not many companies have it implemented or a correct view of how career planning works. For this reason, we prepared this content to help clarify some questions about the subject.
Want to know more? Enjoy reading!
What is career planning?
We can describe career planning as a strategy that unites the objectives of the company and its employees for medium and long term goals.
That happens through the analysis of the skills of employees that will be a guide to show the path each will have to follow to achieve new positions in the company.
Important points to be analyzed during this process are:
- Academic background: what is the graduation level (college degree, postgraduate, master’s, doctorate, or MBA)
- Professional skills: what are the main skills and how those best can be explored.
- Personal skills: personal behavior will also help determine which future position is best suited in the career plan. For example, if the person is outgoing and has great communication skills, they could have a position that has direct contact with the public or require travel and meetings
- Work tenure: This can be an important point to define whether a particular employee is already at a higher hierarchical level by how long they work for the company and level of experience in it.
A good way to gather this information is through feedback, a tool that, if used correctly, is extremely helpful to identify positive and negative points in the relationship between employee and employer, in addition to possible improvements.
Types of career plans
There are two types that are commonly used:
1. Career Plan in “Y”
In this type, as the letter suggests, companies provide employees with a growth that, at a given time of the career, the employee will have two options: to become an expert or a manager.
Experts are known for deep technical knowledge in the area they work. Managers, on the other hand, have other skills focused on communication, oratory, or emotional intelligence.
In general, the Career Plan Y is most used by companies, since it offers many opportunities for growth, because there are different fields of activity, both as specialist and manager.
2. Career Plan in “W”
This second model has a mixture of two options, the employee can be the leader manager of a project, but also an expert for a specific area. This allows the professional to develop different skills and work dynamically on a daily basis.
Note: Remember that the leadership here is not as traditional as in the career planning un “Y”, since the manager will only overview the team’s performance in specific projects.
How does a career plan for developers work?
Because it is a very technical area, the most common way for developers is the “Y” career planning, usually as an expert. For this profession the most common hierarchy is:
- Junior – up to 2 years of experience
- Full – from 2 to 4 years of experience
- Senior — 4 to 6 years of experience
- Master — 6 years or more of experience
However, the work tenure is not always the only factor considered when defining a developer’s hierarchical level.
Those who are seniors, for example, they should at least master more than one programming language, and be able to participate in the complete project development (from conception, implementation, operation and even maintenance).
What is the importance of the career plan in the IT industry?
For the technology field and IT professionals, the biggest enemy of companies can be the turnover rate since it is a volatile market.
This happens because, as mentioned above, the new generation is more concerned about quality of life and professional growth. Although many companies pay these experts well, if they realize they will have no growth prospect, they will soon find opportunity somewhere else due to high demand in the market.
Retention rate in numbers
Finally, to get an idea of this market is, according to a recent survey conducted by Robert Half, for Exame Magazine, 89% of company managers are concerned about talent retention, highlighting 4 main reasons:
- Professional seeking better life quality
- Aggressive approach from competitors
- Non-competitive salaries and benefits
- Discouraged employee.
For those reasons, career planning is not only an option but almost a must have, since it can be crucial for the organization’s health, especially for the IT division, which is constantly changing.
Would you like to understand a little more about the importance of career planning in business?
