The arena of Careers have undergone a lot of transformation in the recent years, especially the way it is perceived by millennials. It is important to build a compelling career proposition in order to create a better employee value proposition. If companies are not talking to their employees about careers, it’s more likely that someone else is talking to them… it could be a competitor or headhunter or career coach. The war for talent continues to be key challenge across industries.
In today’s VUCA world, people are always open to exploring better career opportunities and more often without ditching their current employers. Companies need to leverage on the agile workforce who are open to switch career tracks irrespective of their background and experience. It has become very common for someone who started his/her career in engineering/R&D switching their careers to sales or marketing with the support of experiential and social learning platforms. Companies should be willing to take the risk with people in providing career opportunities across functions. If someone has the right career motive, the competencies for a particular role can be developed over time. Job Stability is taking a back seat and people are looking for opportunities that provides exploratory content and adding value to their careers. Employers need to sell the “Career Proposition” and not the “Jobs” to attract and retain the right talent.
An in-depth understanding of Why people work? and How people work? helps to create a career value proposition. People don’t make career decisions based on just monetary benefits. A job is very different from a career! What motivates people to choose/change a career is their career anchors/values. Some of the top career anchors/values among the current workforce are autonomy, creativity, entrepreneurship, specialization, exploratory content, competition, challenge and work life balance. Companies need to co-create the job design to meet the career values of people for better engagement and long-term commitment.
At times, companies need to be prepared to facilitate employees to pursue their careers elsewhere if there isn’t match for their career values within. This could help in building a good Alumni network for the organization!
Gone are the days when performance discussion doubles up for the career discussion. People are looking for maximising the career experience and just not getting promotions and job titles. Packaging the career proposition may need a different approach for different companies depending upon the nature of business & workforce, leadership, culture and regional talent landscape.