Career Development

In our complex and dynamic world, knowledge workers are constantly confronted with new challenges that require innovative solutions.

To achieve this, companies need people who operate from the centre of their personal competence and achieve personal mastery in it. Every person is born with a special set of talents and inclinations that make them effective. This individual "entrepreneurial drive" determines which professional situations trigger interest and how successfully people then deal with these situations. Using this "drive" is essential for finding new creative solutions again and again and for staying motivated and productive long-term.

For companies, the question must be where this capital, that employees bring with them, bears the richest fruits. How can this "entrepreneurial drive", how can the talents of employees be discovered, described, developed, and effectively aligned with a specific position? 

We call this development process the "matching process". Performance, in this context, cannot be understood independently of the alignment between the personal competence profile and the core business or requirement profile of the job. If the alignment is low, employees can contribute only a small part of their natural "drive" to their work, resulting in low performance. By qualifying for jobs where there is no alignment, the most that can be expected is average performance. The task of employees, management, and HR is to continually assess this alignment and work towards increased alignment. However, in traditional employee development processes, tools that facilitate the description of competencies or personal "drive" are often lacking, both from the employees' perspective and from the perspective of managers and HR professionals. These tools are essential for successful alignment dialogues between the parties involved.

1. Employee level

In particular, employees who should take responsibility for their own career development instead of waiting to be discovered by managers need support in describing their competence profile. Useful are descriptions that help others develop ideas about what would be a suitable career development step or job in the future. We support employees in personal profiling. That means to develop competence profiles and strategies for independently pursuing their career paths. 

2. Management level

For managers, it is helpful and important to learn about approaches that support them in recognizing the competence profiles of their employees and providing qualified feedback to employees or engaging in development dialogues.

3. HR level

Tools and models are also helpful for HR managers to support them in coaching employees in their career development and also to support managers in difficult situations in the matching process. 

Companies do not manage the careers of their employees. However, it is the responsibility of the company to provide processes that enable individual employees to work out their career profile and to increase permeability in the organisation enabling job changes.

In the future, career paths will be less and less oriented towards traditional career models. Multiple job changes and lateral career steps are likely to become more common as future career development forms and should be actively shaped by HR as well.