You updated your old LinkedIn profile and made yourself discoverable to recruiters. Along with effective networking, again using LinkedIn, you found several opportunities that will advance you career.

You won out through multiple rounds of interviews and received several offers. You negotiated them all so you are sure the companies are making the best offers they can.

Now the big question needs to be answered. Which one do you choose?

Use these five criteria to decide and you won’t go wrong!

1. What needs to be accomplished?

Are the functions and responsibilities of the job in your sweet spot?

In other words, does the role play to your strengths? Do you get to use your best qualities most of the time while doing this job?

Why you should care Because playing to strengths is one of the best ways to ensure you will be successful in the new role.

2. Is their why your why?

Does the mission of this business unit, or whole company for that matter, engage you? Do you get excited about what they want to get done in the next two or three years?

Why you should care Because enthusiasm is motivation. Motivation causes you to put extra effort into something. Extra effort that you voluntarily put into to something that plays to your strengths usually results in great success. Strengths + motivation = success. It’s a virtuous circle!

3. Is their how your how?

This company, every company, has a culture. It’s the acceptable way they get things done. The way they have all agreed to behave. Do you generally behave this way as well?

Why you should care Because bad fit is the reason most people either get fired or decide to leave. Even more than poor performance, according to some recruiters.

4. How do they value the role?

This refers to the compensation package you negotiated. Is it fair given the current market? Are they looking for a bargain-priced employee? That may mean they are not looking for a great performer. Are you a better than average performer? Then why would you accept average pay?

Why you should care Especially if you are an early or mid-careerist, more valuable roles generally require more of you! They also provide an opportunity to learn on the job and contribute to the success of the organization, all while expanding your list of professional accomplishments. With big accomplishments under your belt, you become even more valuable to your employer as well as hiring companies in the marketplace.

5. Does accomplishing the things this role requires further your career?

Again, especially if you are an early or mid-careerist, this next role is just a steppingstone. To what though? You do have a career strategy and a career plan for yourself, don’t you? So, which of these opportunities best prepares you for the role after this one?

Why you should care Because you are the only one that does care about your career! Companies focus on their missions and their key stakeholders, including customers and shareholders, as they should. You can bank on it. You are the only one who is responsible for your career strategy and its execution. If you wait for others to notice your work and reward you with promotions you find appealing, then you are probably going to wait a very long time!

Score each of these five attributes for each of your opportunities on a scale from 1 to 10. In each of the 5 “columns” the score should register as an 8, 9, or 10. None should be in the 1 to 5 range and if they all are then keep looking. Unless you desperately need a new job to avoid being evicted or to keep your sanity, avoid ones with 6’s and 7’s as well.

Of the opportunities that score all five attributes in the 8-10 range, pick the one whose mission best aligns with your personal philosophy and priorities. The super enthusiasm and motivation that comes with that opportunity will be contagious to your team, multiplying your value add.

Once executives decide it is more profitable to automate, outsource, or merge a function, a company can make it happen much more quickly than employees can retrain for a different role. It’s not a matter of ability or motivation; it’s a matter of time.

A layoff can go from decision to execution in a few months. Mergers can go from discussion to deal in under a year. After a company decides it no longer needs old skills and positions, employees cannot upskill fast enough to be good at a new job without a significant break in employment.

Author Anders Ericsson explained in his book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, that it takes thousands of hours of deliberate practice to master something complex. Deliberate practice, the kind necessary to improve, is not just a matter of performing easy tasks over and over, but rather, it is a particular method of intensely practicing something in order to get measurably better.

Consider this: there are 2,080 hours in a typical work year, and some, if not most, of that time is probably performing routine work as opposed to practicing the things you want to improve. Clearly, it would take years to get good at a new job that is fairly complex and requires problem solving. Learning agility, problem solving and communication skills are the foundation of the emergent knowledge economy. The more complex the work, the more time it takes to improve.

Add to the equation the fact that most companies don’t want to spend money on training, they would rather buy the experience from the marketplace. They complain that the lack of skilled workers are holding back their expansion but they won’t train to fill the gap. Consequently, companies are asking for significant experience at every level: just above entry level positions sometimes require 2 years’ experience according to the job descriptions, intermediate level positions require 5 years, and senior roles require 10 years or more.

This is why companies recruit new employees through one door while exiting employees out another. There is no time to upskill the displaced employees, as companies move through change faster than employees can adapt.

There is a solution to this problem: employees must stop reacting and start projecting. Yes, I said employees must bring the solution.

Companies control their corporate vision and strategy; therefore, they control the buy-side of employment for their firm. However, what is totally in the employee’s control is employability: the sell-side, it is in the employee’s best interest to always be learning skills that will be needed and wanted in the marketplace of the future.

To protect your career in the current marketplace -and importantly, to stay employable -think of your career holistically:

1. Self-Awareness

Self-awareness starts with the mindset that you are human and therefore you are a continual learner. Keep in mind that you will always be learning at work. This is the very first “skill” you have to learn to stay employable. If you think you are as smart and skilled as you will ever need to be, you will be proven wrong; probably at the most inopportune time possible -when you want a new job.

Regardless of your IQ, how much schooling or experience you already have, you will always have to give examples in an interview that you can adapt and learn new things.

2. Manage Performance and Skill Development

Be clear about your strengths and their increasing or decreasing value to your company, as well as in the marketplace. Then, gather information to make an educated guess as to what the future employment marketplace will want. In other words, make an “As Is and Will Be” chart outlining skills you have that will be in demand vs skills you need to acquire for the future.

To inventory your strengths, look at themes in past performance reviews; ask past and current managers and colleagues; recall what skills are consistently being complimented or rewarded.

The number of job postings for different jobs can give you a rough idea about what jobs are in demand. Review posted job descriptions for a sense of the skills that are repeatedly and increasingly requested. Online job boards offer lots of tools to help with this; as can a Bureau of Labor website called O*NET.

LinkedIn is a treasure trove of this kind of information. Millions of people have their backgrounds online, making it easy for anyone to search skills used in various jobs. Anyone can see and perhaps imitate the path different people took to get their jobs.

After determining what skills are fading and which are on the rise in the market, compare that list with your current strengths and identify what skills need to be acquired.

Next, identify what parts of your job or field are becoming less valuable to your own employer because of impending automation, consolidation, outsourcing, regulation or other governmental action. If you read about competitors merging, outsourcing or automating functions, you have to ask how long it will take before it happens at your workplace.

Sometimes those valuable skills can be used in your current company, and sometimes not. Regardless, developing new and increasingly in demand skills goes a long way toward ensuring displaced employees get re-employed quickly because they are employable.

3. Prepare a Plan and Work It

Create a plan that anticipates the future and take action to stay employable. Since it takes months or years to master the skills necessary to get hired in a job different from the one that was lost, employees must constantly identify and improve skills in demand. That way that employee will always be relevant.

By following the process outlined above, you have should have an idea of what new skills to develop and seek in order to always be wanted in the job market.

Set goals to start learning something new about tasks or skills every 30 days. Consider this as an investment in your career -it is like taking a course towards the PhD of life. First get knowledge about the skill. Find someone who does the skill well, and ask them how they do it. Read a book. Take a course online or at a community college. Online learning platforms including LinkedIn, General Assembly, Coursera, and edX offer a range of no and low cost programs -all the way through advanced learning -that can help you learn the latest skills to enhance your opportunities.

Practice that skill. Volunteer to be on a related project at work. Shift jobs at work. Volunteer in organizations inside the company or in your community. Experience is experience; it doesn’t matter where you get it. If you can use it as an example in an interview it will demonstrate the skill, it will demonstrate you are self -motivated, and it will demonstrate you are a learner.

By following this process, you will always have the skills necessary to be hired for emerging in-demand jobs. You can gain control over your career by striving to be employable. Your current manager may even help get you get the training and practice, if you share your performance, skill development, and holistic career plan even if the company is not totally supportive. After all, it will probably benefit both of you. You becoming more valuable to the company might actually rub off on your manager if they become known as a developer of talent.

1. Work has evolved to become more challenging and less scripted, requiring a much more self-motivated workforce.
2. These days most employees expect workplaces to continually engage their minds and build their skills through compelling projects and stretch assignments. If sharp employees don’t see that happening, they leave € “especially if they are in the early or mid-stages of their career.  According to Deloitte’s report, corporate learning trends, training and development opportunities are the most popular benefits an employer can offer today’s employees.

As a result, HR professionals are in a unique position to promote a culture of engagement, one that supports employees’ desires by taking a proactive stance toward their growth and development. By the nature of their work, HR professionals play a more “whole company” role. They can facilitate top managers’ ability to hold fruitful discussions with their direct reports and on the other side of the coin HR can encourage employees to take more ownership of their careers by talking more openly about their aspirations and career plans.

The Goal is Alignment

Supporting employees to take ownership of their career paths has multiple benefits. Encouraging employees to take a hard look at their skills, motivators, and aspirations challenges both employees and managers to align employees’ career plans to the organization’s future needs and strategic goals. Where are their best skills most valued? What do they need to learn/develop in order to move to the next role in their plan? Are there other parts of the organization where they can transfer their talents to make a bigger impact and experience more satisfaction? Seeking answers to these questions can lead to increased employee engagement, and increased productivity, the classic win-win scenario and HR can lead the way.

To enhance employee engagement in your company, initiate career conversations using the right mindset and the SPUR framework.

Mindset

It’s important to prepare for the conversation believing that:

1. Employees can learn just about anything, but really want to learn and get better at things that they desire to learn and get better at; and
2. It’s the employees’ responsibility to plan their lives and their careers; HR is simply coaching them to be able to do what they want to do so that it is in alignment with future workforce needs.

Uncovering areas where the employee wants to improve, supports the alignment previously noted. In order to coach the employee, HR professionals must play the three roles of a coach in the conversation:

• Expert when you need to give direct knowledge and advice
• Resource when you can point out and connect the employee to others who can provide more information or who would be a good connection
• Facilitator when asking open ended questions intended to get employees to think for themselves and explore options

Insist that the employee bring at least a rudimentary career plan to the conversation so that a discussion ensues with coaching rather than proscriptive direction. Even just a sense of what has been learned so far, what aspects of their work they enjoy, what role they think they would like to do next, and projecting potential roles in their future will start the conversation.

Leveraging the SPUR framework, managers can engage employees in conversations that will spur positive action.

The SPUR Framework

• Self-assessment: Gaining clarity on skills, aspirations, and motivators
• Perceptions: Uncovering and taking more control of personal brand and reputation
• Uncovering connections: Identifying allies and mentors
• Reality testing: Mapping out goals, time frames, and trying out the ideas in the market

During an initial conversation, managers can quickly test for focus with selected diagnostic questions and then listen for how employees identify themselves. This allows managers to offer appropriate insights, point employees to resources, and help the employee create targeted action plans that have the highest potential in moving them forward.

Once you know more about the employee’s triggers for the discussion, pain points, or aspirations, you can decide how to intervene. The questions in the guide below are samples of the kind that can serve as starting points for your SPUR discussions:

Self-assessment -Clarifying skills, aspirations, motivators

• What aspects of your work would you put at the top of the list of things you do well and enjoy? What’s missing/isn’t satisfying?
• What do you want to learn more about? What skills would you like to develop?
• What would career success look like for you now? What do you want to do and achieve in your next role?  How about the one after that?

Insights to offer

• Repeat common themes you hear re: motivators, strengths
• Prepare them to negotiate with their manager to do more of what they need to do to prepare for their projected next role
• Where in the organization their skills could transfer, or what roles use their strengths? How would developing these skills benefit the company and its business objectives?

Perceptions -Understanding how they are perceived; reputation & brand

• What are you known for? What do people rely on you for?
• What feedback have you had from others/your manager?
• What do you want to be known for?

Insights to offer

• Issues/feedback/positive perceptions they should know about
• Gaps you see between where they are now and where they want to be
• Opportunities you see for them to enhance their brand, or gain visibility

Uncovering connections – Building their network, internal connections

• What areas of the business do you want to learn more about?
• Who do you want to meet with to uncover insights? Where are you hitting roadblocks in networking?
• Have you had/do you have mentor(s), people who have advised and assisted you in your career to date?
• How connected are you to others in the field of your next job and the one after? (Professional organizations? Colleagues? Networking groups?)

Insights to offer

• Identify where you think they need to develop relationships and expand their network
• Current or anticipated needs of the organization they should pay attention to
• Assisting them in making connections inside the organization. Who else could you connect them to as they investigate roles they are curious about (other managers? professional organizations? web tools? internal job/career path info?)

Reality testing -Mapping out goals, time frames, and how to try out ideas

• What have you tried already? What happened?
• What have you been trying to achieve?
• What are possible development opportunities?

Insights to offer

• Identifying actions they are willing to commit to in order to work their plan and achieve their goals
• Specifying support they would need from you and others
• Determining specific, measurable goals, checkpoints, and timeframes

The Next Step to Competitive Advantage

In almost every company the increasing implementation of AI, mergers, and offshoring are reducing the number of jobs comprised of more routine, repetitive tasks, to a very small number. In the very near future, the critical work necessary to make companies successful will be more complex, more puzzle-like, more creative, and will change forms even faster than it does today. Organizations will need people who love to do, and are self-motivated by, that kind of work. HR professionals can create a competitive advantage in the marketplace by facilitating employee development and retention as long as it’s a win-win proposition for both parties.

Organizations that adopt a career coaching mindset and process like the one above -moving the right people into the right roles -will be ahead of the pack with significant competitive advantage.

• You want to develop your career toward roles that motivate you and that underpin your ability to keep growing.
• Your company wants to develop you to do the work that helps the business succeed.
• Those two “wants” don’t always align. You may want to develop a capability or get experience in something to help you grow while the company wants you to continue performing in your current role.
• It’s up to the employee to present their career plan in a way that results in manager support.
• The plan might get more support from reluctant managers if it is presented in a business plan format as if you were asking for “funding” by showing a win-win proposition.
• There are remarkable similarities in planning for business success and in planning for your personal career success.
• Consider the parallels between the 10 sections in typical business plans and the elements of your personal career plan as you ask for management support.
• Career plans don’t usually get implemented in isolation. You need your manager’s support. Using a “business plan” format the employee can drive the conversation, taking the load off of the manager and therefore may get better cooperation and support.

Career Plan as Business Plan

It is the employee’s responsibility to create a career plan for themselves that will drive the direction of their development.

It’s the manager’s responsibility to get the work of the company done through the people in the organization.

Unless your ambition is to do the same work for roughly the same pay for the rest of your career, the goals of your manager and your own career goals are not likely to support each other.

You probably think of development as the planned process of learning new things in order to grow into positions you value more. But how does learning new things and moving into new roles help your manager get work out the door? If you leave, the manager has a position to fill and a new person to train. Hiring and training takes time without a guarantee of future results.

Your company, and more directly your manager, would rather direct your development toward getting better at the things you already do well in your current job. At least that effort will have a direct tie to getting more work out the door and it will keep you in the role. But that means the company is setting your career plan. If you are in the first third of your career you may not have any concern that your company is driving your career direction. Almost everything you learn when you are brand new in a career can help you get ahead. If you are a mid- or late career person you know exactly how risky it can be to let the company dictate your development. You have seen, or felt, how being “pigeon-holed” in a role can limit future opportunities -it comes into especially sharp focus when unplanned events like layoffs happen and you want, or are forced to look for, a different type of job because of market conditions.

Is it possible to get your manager to support your growth in the direction you want it to go? A manager can support an employee’s execution of their own career plan where it makes business sense.

Hopefully your manager is not the myopic, people are just cogs in the machine type of manager, as they are hard nuts to crack. But even with more engaging managers, you need to communicate your plan in a convincing manner they can support.

One way to do this is to mimic how founders pitch their business ideas to investors. They walk through a structured business plan to garner the all-important “yes” from the people they are pitching.

Presenting your career plan as a business plan might give even the most task-oriented managers a useful perspective they can endorse.

The Employee’s Pitch

Typical business plans have 10 sections of information in them. When the founders are pitching the plan to investors they are trying to convince them the plan has enough of a chance of being successful that the investor will get a competitive return. The parallel here is that you should be able to present a detailed enough career plan to your manager in order for them to see a return and then “fund” it.

To start with, all business plans begin with a high level vision of the future called the Executive Summary. In your career plan you could give a brief summary of how you currently add value, your current strengths, and your forecast for your future.

The next section in a business plan is the Company Overview; in this section provide a review of your grand plan and progress to date if you have been improving yourself and getting experiences that are the required milestones to your career goal.

An Industry Analysis is the third section of a business plan which can be paralleled in your career plan by discussing the networking and research you have done. This will support your assertion that your future skills and positions you aspire to, and for which you are preparing yourself, are going to be needed in the marketplace and your company if possible. Show that the market for your future self exists, and even better, is growing.

Customer Needs section follows. This is the section that explains why your company should “invest” in your plan. You make the case that your company will have a future need for a person who has had specific experiences in order to satisfy the future demands of clients. You are forecasting this need because competitors are doing it or because the clients are all asking for it. In other words, you are preparing yourself to fill a role your company will very likely need in the future. And while you are preparing you are also, as a proven commodity, providing value to the company in those preparatory roles along the way. A win for them and a win for you.

As an aside, in your career plan this section would identify the best companies for the “future you” by industry, size, mission and culture. Always look to build and maintain relationships with people in these companies in order to keep tabs on their needs. It’s the best way to find out about jobs you might want before they are posted.

Competitive Analysis is next in a business plan. Some businesses use a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of how they compare against direct and indirect competitors. You can do somewhat the same in your career plan by articulating your biggest strengths and forecasting opportunities. Weaknesses and threats could become the developmental focus -or next steps -as you execute your career plan. Analyze the competencies of your competition in aggregate. Do many others vying for your future job have particular experiences that you don’t have yet? Similarly, do you currently have an advantage that you shouldn’t give up by taking a role that doesn’t play to that strength? Continue doing tasks you think will be big parts of your future jobs. Skills are perishable. Just because you programmed some amazing code 10 years ago, then became a manager and haven’t coded since, doesn’t mean you’ll be a viable candidate for a coding job now that you want to go back to it. Why give it up if you think you might want to have a hand in it later?

Sections Six and Seven of a business plan are the Marketing Plan and the Operations Plan. The corollary in your career plan could be your marketing plan and your execution plan.

Both are significant components of a career development plan. Marketing includes your LinkedIn presence, recruiting agencies you have helped, and the network you have developed. Ideally you would like your manager to do some of your marketing within the organization; “showcasing you.” You need to say where you want to go in the next two or three jobs, so your manager can showcase you for those opportunities. That leads to your operations plan. The map of what job two and job three from now are and how to be considered a viable candidate for them.

Your operations plan includes goals and target dates. Articles and whole chapters of self-help books have been dedicated to advice on how to manage your own career development and progression, whereas the focus of this article is on how to communicate your plan to your manager and get them to be an ally. It is worth noting that some companies now offer career coaching as an employee benefit as it is one of the best engagement levers a company can pull.

Management Team is one of the last sections of a business plan and an important part of executing your career plan. These are your mentors. The folks you have asked to answer questions about skills needed for next roles, company cultures that fit you, how to handle the inevitable politics, and how to handle biases that might block you in the workplace. As you progress thorough your career you will need different advisors because you will grapple with different, higher level problems. Over time, you will let some early advisors leave your “personal board of directors” and you will ask new people to join based on your changing needs.

The ninth section is the Financial Plan. For the individual, this section contains the research done on your current value in the market. Specifically, how much others in similar situations are being paid. For certain revenue generating roles it could also contain data on how much value, especially revenue, you have been able to generate in past roles. Everyone wants to be compensated fairly and so you need to know what is in your current market and the current economy, which flex based on demand.

The last section, section ten, called Supporting Documents, is an appendix to most true business plans. Yours might include certifications, awards, patents, and publications that support your claim that you are better than average at what you do! It can include your resume or bio and, importantly, your LinkedIn profile.

Some business plans end with an Exit Strategy. In your case it is a marker or a prompt you put in place to remind you when you have enough experience in one role to start looking around for the next one. This is to prevent becoming too comfortable in a role in a way that slows your march though your career plan or pigeon-holes you.

Following a business plan model is an interesting exercise and one way to build out your own career plan. It also could help your company “buy in” to your personal career plan by communicating it in their language… benefits to the organization and how they can “profit” by supporting you. At minimum you will never respond to someone asking you a career question with “Good question. I have to think about that.” You will have all the data and all the answers thought through and organized so that you are primed to take advantages of opportunities when they arise.

Traditionally, companies have been criticized for not giving timely feedback to candidates regarding the status of applications and interviews. Sometimes they never communicate at all, aka “ghosting”. Adding to the insult, leadership doesn’t seem to care about the criticism, evidenced by the fact that most don’t do anything to change the behavior.

Now, it appears that candidates are ghosting companies, and guess what? The companies are complaining! They are irritated when prospective employees ghost them by failing to show up for an interview or even to work on their start date.

Currently, the state of the job market is such that both employers and new employees are not communicating with each other when they want to stop the relationship.

It is not a good practice when the employers do it. Likewise, it is not a good practice when prospective employees do it.

Many job hunters have never experienced a market like this one, often getting multiple offers. To be clear, you should take the offer that is the best career move for you. If that offer comes in after you accepted a different offer, you still take it. However, you must communicate swiftly and professionally about your decision to reverse an acceptance to another company’s job offer.

You are not in 7th grade anymore so don’t “break up” with a company that made you an offer by not calling anymore, by standing them up on the start date, or by simply sending a text message. Breaking up courteously is not hard to do and it won’t hurt your career as long as it’s handled professionally -over the phone.

Here is some advice to help make decisions and avoid having to renege on an acceptance in the first place, followed by some tips on how to withdraw an acceptance professionally (assuming your offer was in the form of an employee at will offer letter and not a formal contract). About 99.9% of employees are “at will,” however, if you are in a contract situation, please check with an employment attorney.

Career Plans Help with Making Decisions

• First, getting multiple offers, even if the timing is a little off, is great situation to be in! Be happy because you are in control!
• Especially for early and mid-career people, decide which offer to take based on the role that is best for your long term career goals. An opportunity to learn and develop needed skill sets, and subsequently advance because of them, is a better investment in your future than a little more salary today. That begs the question, have you created a career plan to help forecast your future?
• No matter what phase of career you are in, do you have your own personal career plan in place? You should, or how will you determine if a new job will develop you in the right ways? How will you determine if the new role can polish your strengths and develop needed skills if you don’t know what is needed for your career goals? How will you determine if a position provides the right challenges if you don’t know the achievements you need to be a viable candidate for your future roles?

Without an understanding of what the new job will do to advance you through your career plan, a tempting salary offer has a good chance of luring you into a job that doesn’t prepare you well enough for your forecasted roles.

Communication is the Key to Controlling the Process

Syncing up offer timing (trying to get all offers to come in around the same time) depends on how you control communications.

• The first company to make an offer might give you a week to decide, but don’t plan on it! These days they are typically giving much less time. There is little advantage to the first company out with an offer to give you a long leash because they know you will use it as leverage to get other, higher paying offers. Communication is the best way to influence the situation.
• If you sense an offer is close, tell the companies where you are only at the midpoint of their interview process that you are talking with others that are getting close to final interviews. It will give them more time to catch up than if you wait until you take the final interview or have an offer in hand.
• You may also find yourself in a situation where the recruiter or talent acquisition person continually asks you how your search is going. Search and placement recruiters do this routinely. By staying on top of a prospect’s search process, the recruiter can use the information to prod managers to move the hiring process into high gear when needed in order to avoid losing a desirable candidate. So, don’t hide this information from companies bringing up the rear, timing wise. It actually can help you in this kind of market. Share the timing, but not necessarily the company and position details for now.

How to professionally decline a previously accepted offer…because it’s probably not going to be possible to sync all the offers.

• When turning down offers or withdrawing an acceptance, make it a short and professional phone call. You are doing what’s best for your career, hopefully as guided by your career plan, so tell the company that you are sorry but you have accepted another offer that moves you further forward in your career. You are sorry to give them such short notice but it was unavoidable. Mention that you are grateful for the opportunity and learned through the interview process that they are a great company and the position will be a good one for someone else and you wish them luck filling it. Then say goodbye! You are not going to make them feel better about what is happening in the moment. Rip off the Band-Aid directly, professionally, and quickly. As a point of reference, consider how the conversation would go if they were calling you to tell you that you didn’t get the job. They would keep that call short and sweet. They wouldn’t go into detail about how the decision was made and neither should you. Follow the same model they do.
• If your call results in a counteroffer, be aware that studies show that, for a variety of reasons, counteroffers hardly ever work out longer than a year. Besides, unless it is a new role that is offered as part of the counter, the money is likely all that has slightly changed, so the reason to take the new job still stands.

What’s the effect on your reputation if you decline a previously accepted job? None, if you do it professionally.

• If you accept a role and then call back and decline it professionally, the company will not be happy but they will write it off as “just business.” It has happened to them many times before and it will happen many more times in the future. If you do it professionally, to them you will be one of many that got away and will be forgotten . If you do it unprofessionally, for example, if you ghost them, you will be an outlier and risk being remembered for all the wrong reasons.

Learn how to break up professionally. The key is having a career-based reason for the decision and then following that with simple, clear, concise communications.

Step 1: Communicate an understanding of the need and that support is available

Since encouraging employees to participate in the program is itself trying to change behavior, use the why, how, what model to spark the change.

Tell employees that the why is change. They already know, see and feel it. Change is constant, and applies not only to business but to individual careers as well.

For both businesses and employees, change can either force you into a defensive posture or spur you to get ahead of it and drive it.

With regard to employees, how to cope with change by driving it usually means converting it into an opportunity, using it to acquire new, in-demand skills and experiences.

Learning and skill attainment are the motivation of many employees as they work their way through their careers by successfully mastering tasks. Thoughtful career strategizing deliberately and purposefully leverages acquired knowledge.

By supporting employees to create their own career strategies and then execute them, the company takes another step toward creating a culture of collaborative behavior that is contagious. Supporting employees who in turn support customers. Most often resulting employees willingly upgrading themselves in a way that improves collaboration in the firm as well as overall company performance -all in a changing environment.

Although career planning and management are 100% driven by each employee, the company supports the process by sharing the forecasted skills and experiences it thinks will be demanded in the future. This will be gleaned from the business’s strategy, in job postings, and from aggregated performance review metrics.

The what, or action steps, is that the company is now offering professional career coaching to help each employee create a future looking career strategy that will help them learn how to take advantage of change, learn new skills, and gain experiences that will ensure the employee remains employable by successful companies.

Main themes to communicate:

• Building skills the employee wants and the company needs for the future is mutually beneficial.
• Developing employees toward personal career goals ultimately better serve the company’s customer.
• Companies are comprised of employees and employee success yields company success.

From the communication process point of view, a long-term program like career coaching requires a constant drumbeat. Make use of all opportunities and of all channels. In company communications, highlight the mutual benefit it provides the employee and the company. Have managers discuss it with employees. Add it into company newsletter articles, intranet and wiki sites. Put it into the list of all the other training options. Add it to the company benefits list. Promote it!

Step 2: Allow time for repeat conversations

Although the goal is to teach and coach employees to create a career strategy for themselves, it takes more than one session to put the strategy pieces together and develop an action plan that they can execute and perhaps to start developing new habits.

These conversations are generally very personal and specific to the individual and require some introspection, self-assessment, and research on the part of the employee.

That all takes some time.

A coach can talk with about six or seven people each day so if each participant needs six meetings or so to get going, then by estimating how many employees might be interested you can figure out how many coaching days are needed.

Create a scheduling system, reserve an office out of the mainstream of daily operations, and continually publicize the program as a resource integrated with other efforts the firm offers to develop people.

No tucked away office space available? No office at all? Use video conferencing, Skype, or FaceTime, all of which are reliable and allow visual communication which is better than voice alone over the phone.

Step 3: Start with a pilot as long as you start

Like other processes or programs that are to be implemented, sometimes starting with a pilot program to determine the optimal way to do it works well. Pick a level of employees, say entry level employees, or a department that tends to be a feeder group to the rest of the organization, and implement career coaching with them. If engagement increases and customers are treated better than ever, then expand the program.

This is one program that can benefit whole company objectives: employee career objectives, customer satisfaction, and management goals.  It promotes employee engagement, brands your company as a caring employer, and ultimately treats clients well because happy productive behavior is contagious! When employees feel like they are succeeding in their careers then customers will feel the positive impact.

Companies succeed when their employees succeed.

I can summarize my last post, Investing in Onsite Career Coaching, by saying the reason to offer continual career coaching to employees is to foster employee engagement. And alignment of your overarching company values with your clients and your employees, if indeed your business model places a premium on either or both.

In summary, I said, if you want your customers to be treated well, treat your employees well by engaging them in a work-related way, not just an office perks kind of way.  

This is the key to true employee engagement: When employees believe in the company’s mission, and the company believes in each employee’s mission, the result is strong employee engagement. Both parties will want to do the work. And it is not that hard to achieve this state of affairs.

You probably already have a clear mission for your company. Hopefully it is stated clearly, regularly, and reinforces in all manner of ways including through action. Likewise, all employees have a personal mission. Employees’ missions are their career goals. The short -and long-term goals they have for themselves that will support the life they want to lead. Career goals are usually built on current strengths, motives, stage of life, stage of career, time, dedication, and whether or not the person has a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.

If engagement is still not at the level you want in your company, it is probably because your employees have either no career plan or an ineffective one -comprised of very fuzzy end result type goals and no process. This is especially true for employees in the early stages of their careers.  

Career coaching will result in personal career plans and a process that will complete the engagement link between your company and your employees. Through action, employees will understand that the company is concerned about them growing and being challenged. Showing that kind of concern for them will prompt them to be more concerned about the customers. 

So, by helping employees gain some clarity around their own career plans you will end up improving engagement. and thereby helping the business consistently accomplish its mission.

Three Steps to Jumpstart this Achievement Cycle

1. Bring in Specialists

Bring in an independent career coach on a regular basis, say a day a month to begin with. How does this help with engagement?

1. 1. They can develop self-motivated employees.

Independent coaches work best because their coaching is unbiased and focused on the employee, the establishment of the employee’s career plan, and the associated process plan. This is largely the employee’s work, although it’s supported by a coach who provides some structure and who is a great listener.  It exposes the employee a bit, is somewhat personal, and is the core part of managing their career.  Employees who take the lead on creating career plans are developing themselves and developing the sense that they are in control. The feeling of control over their careers is a huge part of employee self-motivation. Most companies want to have self-motivated employees.

1. 2. Experienced career coaches can work with an employee in any stage of their career and will not be biased. It’s a perfect capability to outsource.

Career coaching can help employees at every career stage establish a plan and the coach should be experienced enough to have credibility with all levels of employees in your firm. Early stage career employees a few years out of school probably have different career goals and are in a different stage of life from mid-careerists, and mid-career folks may have different career and life goals from those of late career stage employees.

An experienced career coach deals with these dynamics all the time and is effective with any age employee and with employees at any stage in their career. For this narrow topic, a seasoned career coach has an advantage over a company manager, especially a busy one who doesn’t see their primary role as a coach or mentor. That’s one reason why companies often hire coaches for their high potential executives rather than imposing on internal executives to be mentors. Lastly, a manager is inherently biased toward doing a good job as a manager. The metrics for that evaluation rarely include a count of how many employees the manager developed and helped move into more responsible positions. Quite the contrary, sometimes the loss of an employee to another department is considered turnover and for a variety of reasons is undesirable to the manager.

Using specialists to help employees develop a career plan is a more effective choice. And, because it takes the deep, focused skill set of an experienced specialist, it is a prime capability to outsource.  

1. 3. Career coaches teach agility and adaptability, traits that are directly linked to the success of fast-moving companies.

Finally, the process work a career coach can do with individual clients not only involves mission planning but also execution process planning. How to get from where they are now to what they want to be in the future, and where. This usually involves dealing with change and developing adaptability because unexpected options will undoubtedly present themselves along the way. 

This work inherently promotes what Carol Dweck calls the “learners mindset” in order to learn, improve and successfully move forward. Adaptability, perseverance, and continual learning that underpin the learners mindset are also hallmarks of the kind of employees most employers want. Employees exercise those skills as they execute their plan and those skills are easily transferred to the workplace. As an additional bonus, this attitude is increasingly necessary for companies that are fast-paced and in very competitive climates to prevent stagnation.  Not everyone has the learners mindset but it is a trainable and transferable skill; once someone has it they use it in all aspects of their life. 

2. Promote to Employees

Allow employees to schedule one-hour individual coaching meetings during the work day. These are private sessions where the employee and the coach discuss career planning given the strengths and interests of the employee.

Career coaching isn’t all vision and strategy. It can also include the tactics and tools needed to execute the plan. Skills such as how to: network, find a mentor, interview, and negotiate. So, all employees can find natural starting point to start a discussion. 

Continuous promotion demonstrates belief in the process and helps the program build momentum and produce results quickly. 

Provide the time and the space. Allow your employees to book and keep appointments. 

3. Provide Data to the Career Coach

Providing the Career  Coach with data on formal or informal career paths that already exist is helpful when tying the employee’s plans to company reality.

Although the employee/coach sessions are confidential, in order for the coach to help the employee advance within the company, the company can provide career maps of past employee promotion history (employee to job) or feeder job history (what jobs prepare people for what other jobs within the organization).  

One goal of career coaching is to have the employee formulate a plan for their career and then talk with their managers and mentors inside the company for help integrating their plan into the company’s business strategies.  Giving the coach data on possibilities from the company’s perspective will help the coach support the employee to conduct thoughtful conversations with their manager. 

Expected Results

If you encourage career planning, people will talk about it! It says something positive about the company, and over time it can be incorporated into employment branding.

Employees who are coached to put a career plan together will want to develop mentors within the company to help refine their plans. In all likelihood, this already happens to some degree in the company. Now, however,  the employee will likely drive the agenda, which is usually considered a good thing by most mentors.

Employees will want to talk with their managers about collaborating in a way that helps both the company and the employee. And, those managers who sign up for their own career coaching will be more receptive in most cases.

Finally, your employees will develop new skills, experiences and ways to add value. And they will be doing it a way that intrinsically interests them. Having the employee drive the process removes the responsibility from the employer and puts it where it belongs, with the employee, but facilitated by the company which also benefits.

Counterpoint

There is an argument against encouraging employees to develop their own career plans.  

It’s not cost. These programs are relatively inexpensive compared to other trainings, culture building events, or engagement efforts available.

Rather, the company may lose people. Some employees might be in the wrong company and/or the wrong role for them. They may have been hired in that way by mistake, or the situation may have changed over time as the business evolved. Through career coaching they will plan a way to get a job that is a better fit and is more inspiring. If that role doesn’t exist in your company they will leave. 

A rebuttal to this argument is that if employees leave because they are not truly engaged, then that is good for both parties. By definition, employee engagement has to be a win-win proposition. It is in the company’s best interest to support employee goals and aspirations where possible, and where it supports the company’s mission. An unmotivated, unengaged employee in a role, especially a critical role, is at best distracting to teammates and at worst could actually reduce the productivity of the whole team.

Employees that are self-motivated to learn and develop themselves in ways that align with the company’s goals will continually perform at their best, which makes both parties successful.

Career coaching is about developing strengths, clarifying motivators, and then aligning them to the needs of the organization. 

Career coaching is positive, future oriented, and inspiring. It is neither remedial nor required, and does not have a weakness-fixing orientation. 

Net Net

This is a trade. When organizations care about what employees care about, in this case desired career development, then employees will care about the business. It is an obvious thing to do to reinforce a “customer first” business model. 

Career coaching is one of the most effective employee engagement tools that provides real and lasting benefits for both the company and the employee. It demands little from busy managers because it is employee-driven, allowing managers to focus on being leaders and facilitators, not career experts.