Four Essential Aspects of Employee Development

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Employee Development
To succeed in an increasingly dynamic business landscape, an organization must prioritize employee development. Four key aspects of employee growth and development are understanding the difference between training and development, examining various career management approaches, discussing the role of coaching, and outlining the essential components of a development plan. This paper explores the four essential aspects of employee development.
Training versus Development
Training and development are two interconnected yet distinct aspects of employee learning and growth within an organization. The training describes a specific process that an organization undertakes to equip employees with the specific skills, knowledge, and abilities required to perform their job duties effectively. Thus, training is a short-term undertaking that has the concrete goal of making sure that an employee gains the tools and knowledge required to meet the immediate need and requirements of their roles within the organization. Largely, training is an organizational responsibility and tends to be group focused. Comparatively, development describes an ongoing long-term process that is largely tied to the overall individual progression. That is, development is a long-term undertaking with open-ended and continuing goals. Unlike training that focuses on the job role, development mainly focuses on the person and encompasses largely futuristic activities (Chen and Klimoski 182). Thus, development is largely the responsibility of an individual and tends to be highly personalized to meet the individual’s development plan.
Career Management Approaches
There are multiple approaches to career management in organizations. Notably, traditional career ladders are the most common approach that involves a company proving employees with a clear hierarchy and well-defined paths for promotion within the organization. The organization expects employees to progress through a series of increasingly senior positions as they gain experience, skills, and competencies. Second, the organization can offer a dual career ladder to its employees where separate career paths exist for management positions and individual contributors. The dual career ladder is designed in such a way that it allows an employee to advance within the organization without the requirement that they must take on specialized roles within the organization (Donohue and Tham 55). Third, an organization can achieve career management by offering a boundaryless career approach. Boundaryless career focuses on the flexibility and adaptability of employees, encouraging them to develop a diverse set of skills and experience within the organization. In this approach, an employee is encouraged to develop a diverse set of skills and take an active role in shaping the direction of their careers within the company. The approach is closely related to the protean career approach where an individual is encouraged to develop adaptability and self-management. The protean career approach is largely driven by individual factors as opposed to organizational factors and em...