Government Executive - Authors - Nicole Benn

5 Practical Ways to Develop Your Own Career

Jacob Flinck and Nicole Benn, Federal Management Partners — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 17:19:00 -0400

Career development helps ensure the goals of an organization are achieved efficiently and effectively, especially in a tight budget environment. However, career development isn’t just about the performance of the organization. It is first and foremost a process that helps employees establish short and long range goals leading to a fulfilling and enriching career path.

Studies show that employees who understand their career path have increased job satisfaction, decreased stress, and a much easier time adapting to change. Whether you are an entry level employee, a seasoned executive, or somewhere in-between, having a well-defined career development plan will lead to a greater sense of clarity regarding your strengths, values, and interests. It will also help you recognize when opportunities present themselves at key points in your career.

Now that you have this vital information, here are five practical tips to help get you on your way.

1. Take Action!

Take an active role in developing your career. Remember, career development is a two-way street. Organizations need to support their employees by providing resources, training and development opportunities, and general guidance. However, your career is still your career. Only you can determine where you want to be in three, five, or ten years and then develop plans to get there. If you take action, you are more likely to find yourself in a job you love – leading to higher job satisfaction and lower stress levels. Take action today by:

Reflecting on your experiences. Are you utilizing your talent and expertise in an engaging manner? Are your career aspirations aligned with your current experiences?
Mapping your expectations to your dream job. Do your current talents match with the skills and abilities you need to get there?
If not, identifying ways to meet your goals. Consider classes, training, mentoring, or other learning opportunities.

2. Develop an Individual Development Plan (IDP) that is tied to your organization’s mission.

IDPs allow you to identify the steps needed to follow your career path. To be the most successful, your IDP should:

Connect your goals to your organization’s needs. By tying your development to your agency’s goals you show your organization that you are a key employee and are dedicated to self-improvement.
Focus on both your current job and the areas you want to develop.
Create SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic and Time-bound) so that you can measure your success.
For any formal training, show how the training will meet your development goals and then list the specific course(s) you’d like to take along with the dates and the cost.

3. Set up career development conversations with your supervisor.

Once you’ve established your plan, involve your supervisor in the process by sharing your goals and objectives. Based on the 2012 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey results, if you are one of the 67% who responded that your supervisor supports employee development, then you should expect engaging and supportive discussions. If not, you should still share your aspirations with your supervisor; who knows, you may be surprised at the amount of help you’ll get if you ask them about their own career trajectory. Perhaps they’d even be willing to refer you to one of their colleagues whose career interests align with your own. In these meetings you can also:

Ask for feedback on your skill and talent levels.
Seek advice on how you might develop further.
Make changes to your plan.
Set up ongoing conversations to update him/her on your progress.

4. Make time for training and development.

Have you been planning to sign up for a course or training, but one year later, you still haven’t? We have all been there – work and life seem to get in the way. However, to ensure you are being successful, make sure you are getting the training you need. In your conversation with your supervisor:

Lay out your training goals.
Get approval for requested trainings.
Immediately sign up for training. Just pick a date and register. Something is bound to come up during this time, so discuss your strategy for handling these situations in advance.

5. Find a mentor

If your organization already has a mentoring program, sign up! If no formal program exists, leverage your relationships to find a mentor you respect and trust. Your mentor can be inside or outside your organization and the relationship can be long term or short term. To be successful:

Find a mentor in the career field you are interested in.
Talk about the steps your mentor took to get to his/her position.
Have clearly defined goals so you both benefit from the relationship.

Career development is a long term, ongoing investment. To be effective, it must be supported by managers and the organization. However, employees must ultimately own the process. Creating a career development vision and strategy with a well-defined path will put you on the road to success!

Nicole Benn and Jacob Flinck are Senior Consultants at Federal Management Partners. This is their third article in a series on career development. They previously wrote Five Reasons to Emphasize Career Development during Sequestration and 6 Ways You Can Develop Your Team Even on a Shoestring Budget.

Image via Creativa/Shutterstock.com

]]>

6 Ways You Can Develop Your Team Even on a Shoestring Budget

Jacob Flinck and Nicole Benn — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:41:00 -0400

In our last article, Five Reasons to Emphasize Career Development during Sequestration, we painted a picture of a federal executive who looked to career development to retain employees to meet the agency mission. Now, imagine you are a supervisor in the same agency. Like your leadership, you recognize the devastating impact of critical vacancies and skill gaps and the importance of implementing career development programs for your employees. But what can you do with your very tight budget?

First, as a supervisor, be intentional about career development and find ways to align your employee’s goals to your organization’s mission to achieve results. Start with individual development plans (IDP) and help your employees map a comprehensive training program to develop specific competencies. Aligning these resources is an important and effective way to link an employee’s career goals and the skills your agency needs. To help get this process started, here are six inexpensive actions you can take to leverage resources and strategically focus on career development.

1. Talk to your employees: Don’t let the yearly performance review be the only time you have an in-depth conversation. Have frequent career development conversations and focus on developing skills and career advancement. Spend a few minutes talking to your employees each week. Periodically make time to have targeted, thoughtful conversations around their skills and aspirations. Understand their goals and think about how to align them with your organization’s needs. Then identify opportunities where they can develop in ways that satisfy both of you.

2. Develop effective plans: Creating developmental plans is one of the easiest ways you can build engagement, increase performance, and improve dedication among your employees. When your employees focus on development, they grow their skills. This allows them to support your mission more effectively. What’s more, when your employees feel they have development opportunities, they are more likely to feel engaged and motivated. Using the IDP process to guide career development is both cost effective and high impact.

3. Leverage what you have: First, take stock of your agency’s training and development resources so that you don’t have to recreate the wheel. Sharing information and materials across divisions is a really effective way to save time, energy, and precious resources. If your agency has a mentoring program, encourage your employees to use it. If not, help them reach out to someone with strong skills in an area they would like to develop.

Then, go beyond your agency and consider the career development tools and resources other federal agencies use. Explore agency websites; look for free or low cost training opportunities; don’t be afraid to ask folks on the bus or in your carpool for suggestions. Identify free online events or webinars that multiple employees can join. The bottom line: explore what other agencies are doing and see what might work for you. While there is no “one size fits all” approach, there certainly are pieces you can leverage across agencies.

4. Share information: If you do send employees to a course, have them share what they learned with the rest of your group. This not only maximizes your “bang for the buck,” but also helps reinforce what the employee learned, giving them a chance to enhance their development. Similarly, maybe you can host a brownbag lunch series where agency experts share their knowledge and train others.

Developing accessible web resources is another cost effective strategy for sharing and retaining knowledge. Explore whether there are forums that might be helpful or consider starting your own. Encourage employees to share relevant articles and research. Some say information is power. Find ways to share it!

5. Look for allies: As you pay closer attention to career development, you will likely run into big needs that may be difficult for you to address on your own – for example, defining career paths and competencies, developing new training or creating tools and systems to support employees. Rather than trying to address these expensive needs in isolation, find allies across your agency and possibly across government. Collaboratively and systematically pool your scare resources to address larger needs.

6. Take your time: Remember the old adage “time is money”? With career development, taking your time can actually save money. An effective career development program won’t happen overnight and rushing it will likely end up costing more money (for example, think about the cost of revising courses not designed well or rushing someone off to “training” without determining whether the training really meets their needs or yours). Spend some time identifying your workforce needs and planning the best strategy. Identify courses known to be effective and tailor other developmental opportunities to your workforce. Design a solid plan; then move full steam ahead!

Career development is a powerful – and affordable – way to engage your workforce and deliver results especially in tough times. When agencies are facing severe budget cuts, it is more important than ever to have a well-trained, high-performing workforce. Finding ways to maximize available funding, while at the same time leveraging free resources are effective steps you can take to enhance career development, even with a limited budget.

Jacob Flinck and Nicole Benn are Senior Consultants specializing in career development and talent management at Federal Management Partners, Inc.

Image via Panpote/Shutterstock.com

]]>

5 Reasons to Emphasize Career Development During Sequestration

Jacob Flinck and Nicole Benn — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:41:00 -0500

Picture this. You’re a Federal executive, responsible for an important mission critical program with national significance. You have 500 employees that haven’t received a pay raise for three years. Frustrations are high and they are leaving in droves – 25 in the last six months alone. And now you’re under a hiring freeze. When you think about your organization in a year or two, you can imagine a workforce below 400, with critical vacancies and skill gaps across the board impacting the ability to provide vital services to our Nation. You don’t want to panic, but what other option do you have?

How about career development? Career development is the intentional and deliberate process of growing your staff to support your business needs. When done well, it aligns individual career aspirations with the organization’s vision and mission and results in increased satisfaction, decreased turnover and higher productivity.

Some say that in today’s budget environment, they can’t afford to train and develop employees. Though this might meet your short term budget needs, it undercuts your longer term human capital development needs. Career development can be a powerful – and affordable – way to engage your workforce and deliver results especially in tough times. Consider these five reasons to develop your employees now:

1. Workforce planning. Having a strategic approach to career development allows organizations to identify and allocate resources according to an employee’s skills within their respective career path, while also planning for future organizational needs. In effect, this lets you be proactive in workforce planning through prescriptive career development maps that account for and are aligned with organizational needs.

2. Recruiting. Career development will not only help improve your current workforce, but will position you to attract top talent when the time comes to hire new employees. Agencies with career development programs are more attractive to prospective employees because it sends a clear message that the organization is invested in them. For example, based on our research, once job seekers became aware of an agency’s career development tools, they were more likely to identify the organization as forward thinking and results oriented. As a result, the awareness of an agency’s career development program led to a 30% increase in the applicant’s likelihood of applying for a job. Prospective applicants were also more likely to indicate that the organization cares about its employees and that the agency is a place to pursue a long-term career.

3. Engagement. Research tells us that investing in an employee’s career increases engagement and job satisfaction, which in turn has a direct link to better performance, higher productivity and reduced turnover. Developing career paths and linking training to career development and organizational goals allows agency leaders to send a clear message that employees matter. Strategically aligned career development lets organizations benefit from employees’ higher competency and skill levels along with the resulting improved productivity across the organization. What could be more important today than improved productivity?

4. Retention. Years of studies have shown that employees stay in jobs that give them opportunities. Organizations need to think about this and offer developmental opportunities that support career aspirations, give employees opportunities to develop their skills, and help them understand the path to other positions. Employees who don’t understand their career paths are less satisfied and more likely to leave. As most agencies know, turnover is incredibly costly. In difficult times, agencies need to do everything they can to retain employees!

5. It’s the law. A recent report issued by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), Managing Public Employees in the Public Interest: Employee Perspectives on Merit Principles in Federal Workplaces, documents the need for Federal agencies to improve their stewardship of the Federal workforce. The Report reminds us that the Merit System Principles require not only the efficient and effective use of the Federal workforce but also that “employees should be provided effective education and training” to improve organizational and individual performance.

Strategic career development is an extremely effective tool for creating an efficient and effective workforce. By aligning employees’ career goals with the organization’s mission, you can ensure your agency has a solid, high-performing workforce!

Jacob Flinck and Nicole Benn are Senior Consultants specializing in career development and talent management at Federal Management Partners, Inc.

Image via IdeaStepConceptStock/Shutterstock.com

]]>