Performance Appraisal and Career Strategy

Introduction

Performance evaluation is another key management function. It is required for all essential personnel choices, such as transfer and promotion, salary, reward, training and development, long-term manpower planning, and organisational development. A well-documented performance appraisal system aids in understanding staff characteristics and behaviours. It is also required for motivation, communication, developing superior-subordinate relationships, goal setting (key performance areas/key result areas), job planning, and overall organisational performance improvement.

A career is a series of attitudes and behaviours linked with a person’s lifetime of job and work-related activities. In another sense, it can be defined as a series of related positions ordered in hierarchical order through which a person progresses within an organisation.

Concept and Functions of Performance Appraisal

The degree or amount to which an employee applies his ability, knowledge, and efforts to a job allocated to him and the outcome of that application is referred to as performance. Performance appraisal refers to analysing, reviewing, or evaluating an employee’s performance or behaviour. It might be official or casual, oral or written, public or private. However, in organisations, the formal appraisal procedure is documented. As a result, it is a formal method for evaluating employee performance in accomplishing organisational goals.

The primary functions of performance evaluation are as follows:

1. To identify and establish the job criteria. Based on joint conversations, many organisations set vital performance areas (KPS) or key result areas (KRAs) for employees at the start of the year.
2. KRAs and KPAs are also meant to help measure and compare job performance in quantitative or qualitative terms in terms of the stated job criteria.
3. Create and justify a reward system that links rewards to employee performance.
4. Determine the strengths and weaknesses of personnel to determine optimal placement and promotion.
5. Create appropriate training and development programmes to improve staff performance.
6. Planned for long-term workforce requirements and decided on organisational development programmes, identifying change areas as needed (for overall improvement of the organisation).
7. Identifying motivators, developing communication mechanisms, and strengthening superior-subordinate relationships.

Objectives of Performance Appraisal

A performance appraisal system attempts to fulfil several purposes and achieve several goals. Its primary goals might be remedial, developmental, inventive, or motivational.

1. Developmental objectives encourage employees’ advancement in their current and future jobs. As a result, they identify training and development needs, ensure placement and advancement, and so on.
2. Innovative objectives include identifying and developing better ways to manage new jobs and existing occupations.
3. Motivational objectives include rewards, motivation, efficient communication, and improved interpersonal relationships.

Traditional Methods of Performance Appraisal

Different performance appraisal methodologies are used in other organisations to attain the aforementioned goals. Because some methods of performance review are complicated and necessitate significant knowledge in quantitative procedures, many organisations use conventional methods of appraisal. Still, others use modern approaches as the foundation for evaluating employee work performance. Traditional techniques of performance evaluation are addressed in the following subsections.

Straight Ranking Method

This is the most basic and oldest technique of performance evaluation, in which personnel are tested in order of merit, assigned a number rank, and placed in a simple grouping. Employees are divided into groups based on their level of efficiency, which can range from most efficient to least efficient. It does not account for behavioural characteristics and solely analyses an individual employee’s efficiency level compared to others because it is a stark performance assessment. Because of this clear flaw, this system does not provide a scientific basis for employee performance evaluation.

Paired Comparison Techniques

This is a slightly superior technique of performance evaluation because each employee is compared to others in pairs at a time. For each performance trait, an individual employee’s performance is tallied with others in pairs, and then a rank order is determined. This technique is also unsuitable when the number of employees is typically high.

Man-to-Man Comparison

Certain elements, such as leadership, initiative, interpersonal relationships, and so on, are chosen for examination using this method, and a rater for each such factor establishes a scale. The aggregate performance of an individual employee is decided after ranking such aspects individually and adequately, and such aggregative performance is likewise given a scale. Similarly, an individual employee is weighed against others. Similar to the factor comparison method, this method is commonly used in job evaluation. Because constructing a universal rating scale is complex, organisations rarely use this component for employee performance reviews.

Grading Method

This method identifies specific characteristics that help understand an employee’s performance. These characteristics include leadership, communication ability, analytic capacity, job expertise, and so on. The raters mark/rate such qualities on a scale and compare an employee’s performance to his own defined grade criteria.

A rater may establish A, B, C, D, and E grade definitions for each aspect to indicate: A = Very Significant, B = Significant, C = Moderate, D = Average, and E = Poor. Such grading is useful for selecting employees or grading them in written examinations.

Graphic or Linear Rating Scale

A rating scale of this type is typically continuous, allowing a rater to mark someplace along a continuum. Typically, a rater is provided with a printed form and the factors to be rated, with a continuous scale against each component. As a result, this method allows for quantifying performance ratings and statistical analysis of their importance. Because it is challenging to create a rating cluster for apparent differences in particular characteristics of each work, this technique may not always assure objective appraisal.

Forced Choice Description Method

It is a mix of objective and subjective evaluations of an employee’s performance against each rating aspect. Positive and negative phrases are presented to the rater, who is asked to determine the relevance of such phrases as objectives in describing the employee whose performance is being evaluated. This system is not often used due to its apparent complexity.

Forced Distribution Method

It is a method of assessing employee performance using a predetermined distribution scale.

For example, under this system, the rater must allocate 5% of the total employees at the top of the scale, indicating excellent performance and future promotability; 10% may be placed immediately below this level, indicating good performance and future promotability. This system is simple to understand and may be easily implemented in organisations.

Checklist Method

It is simply a method of reporting employee performance and collecting yes/no responses. Based on such reports, personnel assign final ratings to the HRD department. This evaluation approach is biased because it is not objective.

Free Essay Method

It is an open-ended qualitative evaluation of an employee’s performance that allows the rater to record his thoughts on essential employment elements. Because it is descriptive and essay-style, it is likely to be biased and may contain judgmental errors.

Critical Incident Method

This strategy assesses employees’ performance regarding specific ‘events’ or ‘critical occurrences’ important to job success or failure. The rater identifies such significant instances after conducting an in-depth examination of the employees’ work. As negative episodes become more targeted and recording such incidents requires extreme caution, it is not without flaws.

Group Appraisal Method

It is a multi-judge evaluation of an employee. The employee’s immediate supervisor and a few others review the performance requirements and then evaluate the employee’s performance. The most significant advantage of this method is that it is reasonably free of prejudice, although it is time-intensive.

Field Review Method

The HR department conducts this assessment by interviewing an employee’s boss to understand the subordinate employee’s performance.

Typically, for this type of evaluation, the appraiser, i.e., a representative of the human resource department, is prepared with questions and, in the form of an informal interview, asks those questions about the employees whose performance is to be appraised to their respective supervisors. Because this assessment procedure is an indirect technique of evaluating performance, it may not necessarily reflect the genuine performance level of junior staff. An interview of this nature always sensitises the interviewee, whose comments may be opinionated generalisations. Furthermore, this strategy keeps important managerial staff constantly busy with appraisals. Despite these flaws, the centralised method is simple to run, and most organisations prefer to use it for lower-level personnel.

Modern Methods of Performance Appraisal

As stated above, traditional methods of performance appraisal have a significant drawback due to their clear concentration on judging individual performance or job as an isolated component. To avoid such a limited and partial approach, innovative performance appraisal approaches have been created and are widely used by organisations, particularly for managerial and supervisory staff. Some modern strategies are detailed in the subsections that follow.

Management By Objectives

Management by Objectives (MBO) is a comprehensive management method for performance evaluation and organisational development. When MBO is used solely for performance appraisal, it primarily focuses on defining objective criteria for evaluating individuals’ performance. An organization’s superior and subordinate managers work together to identify common goals. Following this identification, each individual’s primary area of responsibility is specified. Such specified responsibility is the foundation for evaluating an employee’s performance.

Most organisations place a premium on generating KRAs through the MBO process, as this technique demands a combined meeting of the supervisor and the employee to define, establish, and set goals or objectives that the individual employees must complete within a specified time frame (mostly it is in the form of early targets). A similar activity provides approaches and procedures for measuring performance. The majority of goals are work-related and career-oriented, and they are interwoven with broader organisational objectives.

Employee performance is evaluated regularly based on goals, which may be updated as needed. MBO also asks for superior-subordinate interaction and the supervisor’s supportive role (which includes counselling/coaching).

However, because the MBO method places more emphasis on visible goals, intangible goals such as morale, excellent interpersonal relationships, job commitment, and so on are sometimes overlooked. Furthermore, the MBO exercise takes far too much time and money.

Assessment Center Method

This method involves testing candidates in a social setting by a group of assessors using a range of criteria (a paper-pencil test, interviews, in-basket exercise, business game, role-playing incident or a leaderless discussion). The assessors or evaluators are recruited from a pool of experienced executives at various levels of management. Employee performance is evaluated both individually and collectively using this method. This method effectively assesses interpersonal skills, organisational and planning capacity, creativity, stress tolerance, work motivation, decision-making capability, etc.

Human Asset Accounting Method

This method assigns monetary estimations to an organization’s personnel value. The technique is similar to assessing the goodwill value and can be appraised by building a procedure for measuring key variables regularly. These variables are classified as either essential or intervening variables. Key variables include an organization’s rules and decisions, leadership techniques, employee abilities and behaviour, etc. Loyalty, attitudes, motivations, interpersonal relationships, communication, and decision-making are all intervening variables. Measuring such variables over time and quantifying human assets is challenging due to the evident difficulty in constructing the accounting system. It is not a widely used approach to performance evaluation.

This technique, however, is better suited for evaluating an organization’s collective performance than individual employee evaluation. This strategy is important for organizational growth since it is more scientific than any other way of detecting changed areas. This approach is covered in a separate chapter.

Behaviourally Anchored Rating Scales (BARS)

This strategy aids in more accurately measuring and improving job performance. Some standard statements are supplied for each performance category. These are then placed on the BARS scales. Group talks are held to develop such BARS to highlight crucial job dimensions that must be reviewed. BARS can be of several types depending on the work dimensions. BARS are often displayed vertically, with scale points ranging from five to nine. It is regarded as the most helpful performance appraisal tool due to its behavioural emphasis. Furthermore, this approach allows both appraisees and appraisers to communicate and participate in developing standards for each performance area. Despite its benefits, organisations tend to avoid this approach because it is time-consuming and labour-intensive.

360 Degree Appraisals

This evaluation method is currently widely used worldwide. It necessitates performance input from all key organizational stakeholders, including the rate, supervisors, peers, other team members, customers, and suppliers. This strategy promotes total employee involvement (TEI) and employee empowerment and is effective in reporting performance. It also decreases an organization’s subjective evaluation system.

Potential Appraisal

Potential appraisal is a comprehensive way to examine the overall attributes of an individual with a specific intellect, personality, and character. For potential appraisal, industry practises employing two frequently used methodologies: helicopter and whole-person attributes. The helicopter technique assesses a person’s potential on broad and specialised topics. The whole person qualities technique assesses a person’s wholesome qualities/potentialities using a predetermined set of variables, as indicated above. Potential assessment data is particularly beneficial for career planning since it captures and matches an individual’s latent qualities with the future position and responsibilities. However, there are no recorded practices on prospective appraisal in the corporate world in India.

Steps in Performance Appraisal

Regardless of the method used for performance evaluation, the steps follow a fairly consistent pattern, which is outlined below:

1. Establishment of performance criteria. This is mainly done while creating job descriptions.
2. Communicating standards to employees
3. Performance evaluation.
4. Evaluation of performance about job standards.
5. Discussing the evaluation results with workers
6. Taking corrective action if necessary.

Concept and Elements of Career

Because the precise definition of career focuses on an individually perceived sequence, a career can be individual- or organization-centered. As a result, a career is sometimes divided into two categories: outward career and internal career. External career refers to the objective categories society and organisations use to characterise the development of steps through a given occupation. In contrast, internal career refers to the individual’s understanding of career growth within an occupation. In an organisational environment, a career can be defined as an integrated speed of vertical and lateral movement in an individual’s occupation during his employment. Such an integrated strategy is aimed at reducing the diversity of employees’ ambitions and expectations by connecting individually perceived careers with organisation-centred careers.

Analyzing the definitional context reveals that a career includes the following crucial elements:

1. It is the correct order of job-related activities. Job-related activities regarding experience include role experiences at various hierarchical levels of an individual, which lead to an increasing number of responsibilities, positions, authority, accomplishments, and rewards.
2. It might be either individual or organisational. An individual-centred (internal) career is a series of professional growth within an occupation that each individual experiences differently.

In the medical field, for example, there are clearly defined stages of school, internship, residency, institutional affiliation, or private practice. Similarly, there are stages in college teaching, such as lecturership, readership, and professorship. Those who enter the Indian Administrative and Allied Services have similar well-defined career stages as those in industrial occupations.

In Indian Ordnance Factories, for example, Class-I officers begin as Assistant Works Managers and progress to Works Managers, Deputy General Managers, Additional General Managers, General Managers, and so on. Because a profession has clearly defined stages, an individual can envision his career advancement before joining such services. However, in both the public and private sectors, such clearly defined stages of career progression are not available for all occupations or job titles. In such instances, individuals foster their own perceived stages of career advancement.

3. It is better characterised as an individual’s integrated pace of lateral movement during an occupation. Individual-centred careers, because they are not an objective or even realistic description of career phases in a given occupation, frequently contradict employees’ goals and expectations, as organisations may have a different perceived career plan. As a result, an integrated approach minimises such dissonance and ensures mutually acceptable and gratifying career advancement.

Overview of Career Development

Career development is the process of boosting an employee’s prospects for progression and changing careers. In other words, it is preparing a sequence of prospective occupations that an employee might take in the organisation through time and devising ways to offer relevant work skills when opportunities emerge.

As a result, career development refers to an individual’s preparation for advancement via several positions over his or her professional life. Career development should be distinguished from career planning and management. Career development is a systematic process of guiding the movement of an enterprise’s human resources through different hierarchical positions. In contrast, career planning is establishing career objectives for an employee (or by the person himself) and developing planned strategies to achieve them, which includes activities that aid in making choices about occupations, organisational job assignments, and self-development measures. On the other hand, career management refers to specific human resource management operations that assist career growth, such as recruiting, selection, placement, and appraisal.

Every organisation must create opportunities for people to advance in their careers. The Indian corporate sector is currently undergoing major restructuring to keep up with the country’s economic restructuring programme.

Market globalisation, technological advancement, import liberalisation, delicensing, and increasing rivalry have all driven Indian firms to restructure their production in terms of organisation. Redeploying workers in restructured occupations through practical training is a key priority for organisations, particularly those at the lower levels. On the other hand, employees with comparable skills and knowledge now have a stronger negotiating position due to increasing job mobility. Most global and multinational corporations are increasingly luring employees with matching skills and knowledge away from Indian organisations with more excellent compensation and career opportunities. As a result, a poor career development programme can have at least two consequences for an organisation:

1. High staff turnover, particularly among those just starting in their careers.
2. Reduced employment participation.

Recruitment, training, and reduced performance during orientation (loss of productivity, higher waste, etc.) increase employee turnover costs.

Reduced employee involvement has an impact on staff functional efficiency and productivity. Other key motivations for job advancement include the following:

1. As the environment changes, jobs become more complex. A proper career development programme prepares people for future jobs in the organisation and allows for the identification of potential managers from the inside. Filling gaps from within is both cost-effective and motivating for staff.
2. An appropriate career development programme enables the organisation to get the most out of its personnel. By enabling people to improve their abilities for higher-level roles, underutilization of potential work energy and underemployment can be avoided.
3. Career development makes people more adaptive to changing organisational requirements. New technology [Computer Numerically Controlled Technology (CNC), Numerically Controlled Technology (NCT), Direct Numerically Controlled Technology (DNCT), and Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS)] or a new management philosophy and style may cause changes in needs (like just-in-time manufacturing, total quality management, etc.).
4. It gives an objective basis for describing the phases of progression in an organisation, minimising unfair promotion practices and eliminating the possibility of ‘promotion by discretion.’ As a result, an appropriate career development programme avoids employee discontent over promotion concerns, which has now become a major cause of industrial disputes in India.
5. Women and other minority groups are now represented in the majority of organisations. A career development programme assures that these employees have equal opportunities for advancement. As a result, it satisfies the criterion of equitable job opportunities for everybody.
6. A career development programme allows employees to gain new skills, obtain desired jobs, share increased responsibility, enjoy increased job mobility, and experience increased job satisfaction.

The Importance and Benefits of Career Development

The significance and benefits of career development can be summarised as follows, both from the perspective of organisations and employees:

1. It decreases staff turnover by increasing promotional opportunities.
2. It boosts staff motivation and morale.
3. It enables organisations to fill promotional vacancies internally, reducing the cost of managerial recruitment.
4. It enables more significant usage of employees’ skills and increases job satisfaction.
5. It makes personnel adaptive to changing organisational requirements.
6. It eliminates industrial disputes over promotional issues, allowing the organisation to maintain healthy industrial relations.
7. Staff loyalty and dedication to the organisation can be significantly boosted, benefiting organisations from greater employee productivity.
8. As an objective definition of career growth, career development programmes ensure equitable promoting decisions in an organisation, even for women and minorities.

Objectives of Career Development

As a result, the following are the objectives of a career development programme:

1. To attract and retain effective employees in a company.
2. To make the best use of human resources.
3. Increasing employee morale and motivation.
4. To decrease employee turnover.
5. Adopt a balanced “promotion from within” philosophy.
6. Make staff more flexible to change.
7. Increasing employee loyalty and commitment to organisations.
8. To preserve amicable labour relations.
9. To instil equitable workplace policies that provide equal career advancement chances for women and minorities.

Types of Career Development Programmes

There are various types of development programmes in an organisation that enhance various human resource competencies. Organizational development, staff development, management development, and career development are examples of these. Organizational development programmes are designed and managed from the top to bring about intended organizational changes to increase organizational effectiveness. Management development is concerned with improving managers’ skills, knowledge, and abilities to guide the movement of human resources across different organizational levels. Whatever the distinctions, career development is inextricably linked to other human resource development activities.

Different Stages or Cycles of Career Development Process

Understanding the various career stages or development cycles of an individual employee is required to construct an effective career development programme. Actual stages range from person to person due to apparent disparities in internal career perception. However, career development cycles or stages can be classified into four groups based on the general needs of people at various hierarchical levels:

1. Exploratory Stage: This stage begins when a new employee joins a company. An employee with his qualifications and knowledge joins an organisation and finds himself in an apparent mismatch situation that the organization’s induction programme cannot correct. After extensive training, it takes quite some time for him to adapt to the organisation and, more notably, to his job assignment. As a result, the organisation must maintain behavioural and operational deficiencies to assist it in developing over time. At this point, the best strategy is to assign a specific task to the newcomer while granting flexibility of operation. This will allow the new entrant to develop by the organisation’s needs progressively. Some organisations even require new employees to complete a work rotation for a fair period. The goal of such job rotation is to allow the employee to choose his or her chosen position from among those offered in the organisation. However, due to evident functional specialisations and varying educational requirements, such a strategy has not succeeded in Indian organisations.
2. Establishment Stage: After a new entrant selects a professional path from various accessible possibilities (where such options are available), he must receive regular feedback on his performance. Such performance feedback allows the new employee to comprehend his performance’s effectiveness while initiating the necessary remedial action to address functional inadequacies. Performance appraisal and feedback also have motivational values because the new employee feels a sense of accomplishment when he receives feedback on his assignment from management, especially when he understands that his promotion decision was made based on his performance. Therefore, a good career development process at the setup stage is critical for retaining personnel while developing a sense of loyalty and dedication to the organisation.
3. Maintenance Stage: This is a mid-career stage for employees who work hard to keep their well-known name and fame. As a result, at this stage, employees must make consistent efforts toward self-development. To help employees overcome their mid-career crises, an organization’s career development approach now calls for renewing and updating employees’ abilities, particularly in a changing environment. Employees in this stage of their careers are more likely to move jobs in many organisations due to a lack of career development programmes. As a result, this stage is critical, and unless the organisation implements appropriate career development programmes, it may risk substantial employee turnover.
4. Stage of Decline: Employees preparing to retire are concerned about the possibility of a reduced role or responsibilities in the organisation. Such complexity is behaviorally connected with employee ageing, which, if not addressed through a good career development programme, may render such people inefficient or misfits for the organisation. At this time, the career development process should try to help employees mentally prepare for retirement rites, mainly to accept a decreased role and duties to accommodate their family and society later in their lives.

Career Anchors

A career anchor is a set of talents, motivations, and values that provide stability and direction to a person’s career. Such abilities, motivations, and values shape specific characteristics that an individual derives from his early experiences and that aid him in conceptualising his own perceived career. As a result, this perceived career anchor frequently contradicts organisational career plans, and employees develop a sense of dissonance or incongruity about their career ambitions. As a result, many organisations attempt to identify perceived career anchors for their employees to develop matching career development programmes. Many empirical studies have been conducted to date to identify the perceived career-anchor of various types of employees. In summarising the outcomes of an empirical study on management graduates, Edgar H. Schein identified five career anchors for employees.

Managerial Competence

This ability is essential for those who prefer to climb the corporate ladder. These employees were discovered to be competent in the following three areas:

1. Interpersonal Competence: They are able and willing to deal with a wide range of interpersonal and group situations. They can provide leadership, resolve group conflicts, and feel at ease when dealing with unfavourable situations.
2. Analytic Competence: This ability enables such employees to identify problems, analyse them, and create situations to solve them. Analytical ability being a crucial prerequisite for managerial success, such competence automatically qualifies such people for managerial jobs.
3. Emotional Competence: Employees with this ability can bear excellent levels of responsibility and even afford to remain calm in tough situations, allowing them to exercise leadership responsibilities easily. Such competence fosters sympathetic abilities in employees, resulting in mature decision-making power even in times of crisis.

When combined, these qualities produce mature people who are qualified for managerial positions in an organisation.

Technical/Functional Competence

Individuals with such expertise tend to stay in technically satisfying positions rather than advance to higher managerial levels. Such technically gratifying positions could be in engineering, systems analysis, or even various functional management areas such as finance, personnel, marketing, etc. Some executives in manufacturing units always want to stay on the shop floor because they find more enjoyment there than in general managerial duties at the higher echelons of management. Such individuals are dedicated to their careers and prioritise their work over the advantages and/or future opportunities.

Security and Stability

Employees who are grounded in this competency will always be motivated to pursue a career that provides job security and/or long-term stability through strong retirement plans. Such people are driven only when they are assured of a secure employment situation, which may not always be appropriate for their level of knowledge and skills, and they may sacrifice some personal requirements (for example, accepting lower income and fewer benefits) to fulfil their perceived security. Transferring and promoting this type of employee is extremely difficult. Most personnel in this category are in Government and Public Sector Undertakings.

Creativity and Challenge

People with this syndrome are extremely rare. They become entrepreneurs for the sake of creating something new and having their individuality rather than for the goal of getting money. When employed in an organisation, such people constantly desire to be functionally autonomous to exercise their unique talents. They yearn for autonomy. Employees anchored for creativity and generating something new should be provided with demanding job tasks and opportunities for identification through unique product designs.

Freedom and Autonomy

Some employees in the organisation want to work at their own pace. Organizational restraints, such as regular working hours, a lack of variation in work, clearly defined working conditions, and so on, prohibit people from being functionally autonomous and independent. Due to lacking freedom or independence, such persons frequently leave their jobs to create consulting and freelancing businesses. This category includes teachers, professors, advertising professionals such as artists and copywriters, management consultants, etc.

Other Anchors

The intricacy of behavioural factors has recently uncovered some more career anchors that we find are closely associated to various vocations. A distinct group of people may have a strong desire for identification.

For example, those in military organisations obtain such identities through their occupational title, which they use as a prefix to their names, such as Major, Colonel, Brigadier, etc. Such identification is so evident that they are given unique uniforms corresponding to their organisational rank.

Another anchor we detect in some people is their affiliate needs and interpersonal talents to work for a cause. Other professional anchors that people aim to reach in their vocational responsibilities include the desire for power, influence, control, and employment variety. Organisations must know these career anchors to plan for career progression. Each employee who cultivates specific career anchors (internal reasons and values) should make it clear to the organisation to discover suitable occupational roles with minimal cognitive dissonance. As a result, the primary objective of career development planning is this matching procedure.

Steps in the Career Planning Process

In an organisation, the career planning process includes the following activities or steps:

Preparing Personnel Skills Inventories

The first step is creating personnel skills inventories containing information about employees’ skills and career objectives. There are also mandatory data banks that provide the following information.

1. The organisational structure and the people who hold various positions within the organisation, including their age, education, experience, training, and career goals, as well as their status, duties, and responsibilities.
2. The employees’ performance record, ratings, and interpersonal abilities.
3. Their chosen location, as well as their desires and limits.
4. Whether current strength is short or surplus to requirements; if short, the size of the shortage at various levels; and the organisational resources available to make up for such shortages in the future. If there is a surplus, there are methods to redeploy them through effective restructuring.
5. Future workforce requirements for firm expansion, diversification, or natural wastes include death, disability, retirement, discharge and dismissal, resignation, etc.

In most organisations, such information is computerised, examined, and updated regularly. Employee career routes must be developed following personnel skill inventories and supplementary data preparation.

Developing Career Pathways

Career routes are logical job mappings that depict a prospective advancement track that an employee may pursue over time. Job progressions are mapped as career ladders by grouping related lines of jobs in job families. Job families are sets of jobs that are homogeneous or have similar features.

However, career paths are not always so straightforward. For example, career paths in manufacturing jobs with multiple feeder posts down the level are more complex than the previous one. The figure above depicts an illustrative model of career paths for a manufacturing unit’s production department. To successfully map out career paths, it is necessary first to identify job families. Following such identification, the necessary skills for all positions along these paths must be determined. This aids in developing such skills in employees where they are lacking and in selecting individuals with such skills for various positions within the organization. However, the most distinguishing feature of career paths is that they do not always have to be linear or straight. Likewise, it does not always indicate upward movement in the organization’s hierarchy. Some organisations frequently reassign employees to lower-level positions to prepare them for advancement.

In a manufacturing organization, for example, highly skilled workers may be reclassified as master craftsmen without affecting their pay, only to be gradually promoted to supervisory positions later. As a result, lateral movement within levels is a distinguishing feature of the career paths.

Put the Right Man in the Right Place

The third step in career planning is identifying appropriate employees with the ability, potential, and willingness to take on greater responsibilities and advance up the organisational ladder. Most organisations have a performance appraisal and merit rating system to help with this. This system enables organisations to compare the performance measures of different individuals in terms of job requirements and helps identify training requirements, select promotions, provide financial rewards, etc.

Impart Training

The next step in career planning is formulating and implementing training and development programmes. Such courses should be structured so that they can increase the technical and conceptual abilities of employees, particularly in areas identified as inadequate through the performance appraisal system. For continual change in the environment, it is also vital to regularly renew and update the knowledge and abilities of the personnel to make them adapt to the changing requirements. Most Indian firms currently provide training to their staff on quality circles (small group activities), value engineering techniques, total quality management concepts, ISO:9000, etc.

Review and Counselling

In addition to the foregoing, the career planning process is also concerned with designing proper promotion and transfer policies, periodic assessment of career development plans and career counselling. Career Counselling provides counselling to the employees on professional training, education and career aspirations.