First step to democratizing Employee Learning & Development!
Yesterday, I met with Joe and the rest of the engineering team to look at the new Career Path functionality for SkillsMapper. Currently in beta, I watched a demonstration and thought to myself – “this is Win – Win for both HR and employees.” Finally, HR has a tool that aligns employee development with strategic organizational needs. Let me explain.
On one side, you have employees growing disengaged with their jobs, feeling trapped, isolated and unable to move up. On the other side, you have HR who feels pressure from senior management to put more emphasis on programs designed to develop and retain their existing talent, but when these programs fall short of expectations HR is often to blame. The fact is, employees don’t care about HR programs, they hate performance reviews and they despise the e-learning courses made available to them. What they want is instant feedback and visibility into where they stand in the organization and what it will take to advance in their company. And this is what Career Path does.
This new release gives HR the ability to input the desired skills and experiences required for key positions. They convert these into “career paths” and make them public to the workforce. Once an employee selects a career path from their talent profile; they are given instant feedback and comparisons highlighting gaps in skills, education, experience and much more. Career Path takes it one step further providing employees with a series of actionable steps on how to address gaps. These steps include recommended learning, connections with other people in the company, and discussions or interactions where those skills have been associated (ie “tagged”).
This is a win-win….it gives HR the ability to align employee development with strategic organizational needs. It gives employees instant and actionable feedback on how to advance, and those who don’t openly participate in career path should be questioned on commitment. So the next time the CEO wants to know what HR is doing to develop and retain the workforce, put their Zapoint talent profile through a career path.
