Want To Help Your Employee Advance In Their Careers? Here Are Some Ways You Can Contribute

29 Mar Want To Help Your Employee Advance In Their Careers? Here Are Some Ways You Can Contribute

Good leaders, and good managers, want to see their employees thrive and succeed. The strongest managers will work with their employees to help them advance their careers. 

Employees who feel as though there’s no opportunity for growth, advancement and learning new skills will eventually think the only way to challenge themselves is to take a new job at another company, taking their knowledge and expertise with them. 

If you want to keep your top employees with you, and cultivate your company’s next generation of leaders, here’s how to help your employees advance their careers. 

•  Encourage them to assess their abilities.  Whether it’s part of the normal review process or in one-on-one conversations throughout the year, get to know how your employees perceive their strengths by asking them, flat-out, how they feel they’re doing on their current projects. What do they like about their jobs? What do they feel they’re doing really well, or are there areas in which they’re struggling? Get a sense of their strengths and then ask how they’d like to build on that information. If you agree with their assessment, tell them! Talk about the areas in which they’ve impressed you, or where they’re a go-to person for a task because of their skills. Help them see what abilities and talents they bring to your team and build the confidence they’ll need to continue in their careers. 

• Encourage learning and skills development.  Learning is one of those things we do a lot of as kids but it gets harder as we’re adults because we don’t flex those muscles in our brains as often. People who are naturally curious are eager to learn; they’ll want to continue to understand concepts and push themselves to grow and add to their skill sets. Make your company one in which employees have access to workshops, training, educational opportunities and other outlets for either building on their existing skills or learning new ones. If education, in all its forms, is a core value of your company, your employees will take to heart that this is something that should be important to them as well. This can help improve a team’s problem-solving abilities, expand the tools available on a given team and might even make your employees more efficient. 

• Offer other career development opportunities. Depending on the kind of work your company does, it might be possible to cross-train employees to do a few different kinds of jobs. Encourage those who are interested in learning new skills to buddy up with a mentor and do a little job shadowing, in which they’ll spend a day or a week working with someone else, learning what they do and trying it out first-hand. Employees might find out some great talent they have for a skill utilized by a different team in your company, allowing them to add more value to your organization while inspiring the employee to build on their talent. 

• Offer career coaching. We can all use a little advice from time to time. Offering your employees access to career coaching sessions can help everyone determine their best path forward while finding ways to be engaged and energized at work right now. The more people understand their abilities, skills and interests, the more they can see how those things apply to their current jobs and how those skills can be utilized in new and exciting ways within your company. Sometimes people just need an outside perspective to find a reason to be excited about coming to work! 

• Ask about their goals, then help make them happen. It’s an idea so simple it might just work wonders! Ask your employee what they’d like to do at work. Find out what topics they’re interested in and what projects they like to work on. Are there ways for them to spend more of their time, either immediately or over a set timeline for adjustment, on those very things? Empower your employees to help guide and direct their careers; work with them to tap into their passions and find ways to utilize those interests within your company. Your employees will be happier; you’ll have a more engaged workforce and turnover that might otherwise have happened will be stopped in its tracks. It’s a win for everyone. 

Sometimes it just takes a few conversations to help find someone’s passion and interests. That investment of time can result in a powerful transformation within your employees, helping them stay engaged and under your roof while adding to your team’s productivity. 

If you’re looking for additional guidance on how to help your employees build their own career success, or if you need to add to your team due to internal promotions creating new openings, call LeadingEdge Personnel. We have great candidates just looking for the right opportunity to bring their talents to a company — they could be a wonderful fit for your team! Call LeadingEdge today and let’s get to work.