Career development is often at the heart of employee retention, recruitment, and performance. However, most of today’s employers are failing to keep up with the employee demand for development opportunities.

Why aren’t organizations having better success in this area?
 

One reason is that career development is difficult to do well. Organizations must balance the need to derive maximum value from work assignments with the imperative to ensure that employees leave those positions more skilled than when they arrived.

Another factor is that direct managers are often key to career development. Not only do they lack skills in this area, but they sometimes actively discourage the internal mobility of talented employees they wish to keep on their team too.

HR plays a critical role in developing and implementing employee development practices. After all, HR alone has a comprehensive perspective on the entire organization – not to mention the responsibility to drive employee development in the aggregate. Solving this strategic puzzle is at the heart of HR’s charter.

HR.com’s latest ‘Future of Career Development and Mobility 2023-24’ report examines the practices that organizations adopt to overcome employees' career development challenges.

Here are the major findings from the report:

Career Development Effectiveness and Maturity

Finding: Only about two-fifths believe they are managing career development and internal mobility well in their organizations

We wanted to know how well the organizations are managing their career development and internal mobility processes. We asked the respondents to rate their organizations on the effectiveness of these two aspects on a five-point Likert scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree).

The results show that about the same percentage of organizations (42%) are doing well (agree/strongly agree) on both career development and internal mobility. It is surprising to see a similar trend (32% on internal mobility and 31% on career development) among those who responded the opposite way (disagree/strongly disagree).

Internal Mobility Enablers and Obstacles

Finding: A majority of organizations look at internal candidates first when filling open positions

Internal mobility is often key to career development and there is both good news and bad news in this area. One positive sign is that most organizations are looking to internal candidates when filling open positions (57%). Similarly, 56% say employees are easily able to find out about job postings. We believe this improves the employee experience as employees potentially move into roles that align more with their interests and skill sets.

Career Development Opportunities

Finding: Just 29% agree they have enough career development opportunities to keep up with employee demand

Another way to gauge the quality of career development approaches is to determine whether there are enough opportunities to keep up with employee demand. We found that just 29% agree/strongly agree that they have enough of those opportunities.

During the great resignation of 2021, the lack of advance opportunities was cited as one of the major reasons for employee turnover. Fast forward two years, this important aspect is still not addressed in most organizations.
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