Part 5 of a 5-Part Series:

• Part 1: Does your organization have the strategic essentials in place for high-performance career development?
• Part 2: Enabling high-performance career development with technology
• Part 3: The Importance of Aligning Career Paths and Competencies
• Part 4: Flexible career development: why it’s the best option for your organization
• Part 5: Coach your employees to career success

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been reviewing Brandon Hall Group’s ‘Five Essentials for High-Performance Career Development’, designed to help organizations realize their career development potential. If you missed the beginning of this series, you can read the first article here.

This week we’ll be ending the series by talking about career coaching, which has significant benefits for career development. However, not all career coaching is created equal.

According to research by Brandon Hall Group, 32% of organizations do not provide any career coaching. As you can see from the below graphic, of the organizations that do provide career coaching the majority only provide informal career coaching.

Informal career coaching refers to in-the-moment coaching and feedback, while formal coaching refers to targeted career development meetings with trained career counselors. 

As with the other previously discussed career development essentials, organizations that use career coaching are likely to see increased business metrics. 

The most dramatic increase lies in employee engagement, but you can see impressive results in a variety of areas. Since career coaching shows a strong organizational interest in employee development, it also has significant results on how long an employee stays with the organization. According to Brandon Hall Group, organizations that offer career coaching are twice as likely to have an employee stay for seven years or more.

If your organization currently isn’t using any form of career coaching, you can get started by holding more frequent career development discussions with your employees. From there you can either have an internal or external career coach hold targeted meetings with employees to help them realize their career aspirations.

We hope you’ve found this series on career development useful. When used correctly, career development is an invaluable tool that has an immensely positive impact on employee engagement, retention, and a variety of other business metrics.

By making sure you include the five essentials we’ve covered in this series, you can ensure that you implement a career development process that is equally beneficial for the employee and the organization.