Research

• Retention rates rise 30-50% for companies with strong learning cultures.
• 34% of employees who left their previous jobs were motivated by more career development opportunities.
• 87% of millennials believe learning and development in the workplace are important.
• 74% of surveyed employees feel they aren't reaching their full potential due to a lack of development opportunities.

Statement

Enhancers of this driver

• Taking time to hold career conversations with talented employees allows managers to acknowledge their value to the organisation and helps to map out future career goals and objectives.
• Nurturing growth in employees' strength areas.
• Recognising, nurturing and growing employees existing premium skills. Offering opportunity to gain new skills.
• Companies that nurture growth gain a competitive advantage.

Detractors of this driver

• Sporadic and uncoordinated training opportunities that focus on the skills and capabilities the organisation needs, rather than aligning individuals' goals and motivations with the requirements of the organisation.

Individual

• Consider your strengths and where they help you at work.
• Undertake a Strengths survey - what are could your "go-to" strengths? Which strengths do you bring to the fore more often?
• Evaluate where you find satisfaction in your work. Think about how your role could evolve to do more of that kind of work.
• Build your self-knowledge and self-awareness - notice when you are thriving and excelling.
• Strong self-awareness is key to growth.
• Use these insights to inform your preferred pathways at work.
• Communicate your ambitions to your managers and others.

Leaders

• Get to know the strengths of individuals in your team/s.
• Encourage and sponsor Strengths surveys to develop a shared language and shared understanding of Strengths.
• Lean into Strengths-based leadership - where possible, enable employees to build their roles around their strengths.
• Discuss contexts in which individuals can best use their strengths.
• Help employees to identify their strengths and passions. First, have employees identify their strengths and passions and help them define growth opportunities based on what they are great at. Next, focus on helping them build their inner capabilities, such as compassion, courage, authenticity, collaboration and humility, and their external capabilities, such as their leadership skills and professional capabilities. Strong self-awareness is key to growth.

Organisation

• Invest in and promote a Strengths-based culture.
• Celebrate a diversity of strengths by providing career pathways suitable to employees with a range of different strengths.
• Encourage Senior Leadership to share their Signature Strengths and their strengths to bring forward more.

• Continue learning. Whether you choose on-the-job training or take an independent online course, it is essential to continue sharpening your skills. Show your employer how invested you are in learning new skills.

• Understand employee aspirations.
• Take a personal interest in employee career goals.
• Help employees outline a potential career path to visualise their future better and identify fields where they could develop their knowledge and skills.
• Collaborate with your employees. Together create a detailed and transparent development plan that matches their existing skills, experience and capability.
• Recording and checking in on this plan will increase each employee's accountability.

• Offer employees time and space to upskill. Research into employee attitudes to skill-building highlights that 96% of professionals rate upskilling as 'important' or 'very important' to them and their career. 84% aren't interested in roles with no skills development, and almost half (47%) won't work for an organisation that offers no formal training opportunities.
• A strong training program bolsters retention and cost savings in hiring, recruitment and onboarding.

• Find a mentor. A good mentor can help you clarify your career direction, develop new skills and overcome challenging obstacles.
• A mentor with years of experience in your field can help guide you in your career advancement. A sponsor will speak for you, but a mentor will give you good advice about your options and how to best approach your goals.

• Check-in routinely with your reports on how their mentoring partnerships are going.
• Assist in introductions to suitable mentors.
• Help clarify the mentoring that would most benefit your team members.
• Allow others to "job-shadow" you in your role - this builds both trust and opportunity to share insights and sound out novel approaches.

• Establish and encourage a mentoring program. One paper released by the Association for Talent Development found that organisations with mentoring programs enjoy many benefits. These include higher employee engagement and retention (50%), career growth for high-potential employees (46%), intra-organisational relationship building (37%) and the transfer and management of knowledge (37%).
• Encourage both mentoring and job shadowing. Job shadowing provides context for learning and often has payoffs for both parties in shared approaches and new insights. Often seen as a one-way transfer of knowledge from experienced to less seasoned employees, job-shadowing and mentoring is really a two-way street.

• Employees who embrace stretch opportunities are challenged in a conducive way to learning and development. In turn, by offering appropriate stretch opportunities to support your employees' career progression, your organisation can deliver better results.
• Volunteer for other departments. You can also choose to volunteer to help other teams or departments in the organisation. Volunteering is an excellent way to raise your profile in the company and prove your dedication to the organisation. In volunteering for other departments, you also learn how different parts of the company work.

• Identify mutually beneficial solutions. Create a space where employees can imagine what their careers will look like in five to 10 years, ask the question and then be quiet. Now, it's your turn to listen and identify mutually beneficial solutions to advance the business and meet their career goals.
• Help employees outline a potential career path to better visualise their future at the company.

• Rotate employee roles to add variety, improve skill sets and effectively increase cross-departmental collaboration.
• Create a succession planning program. Succession planning can demonstrate to high-potential employees that you want to invest in their professional development and see them evolving into future leaders for the business.

• Ask for what you want. Speak Up. Be clear about your goals for career advancement, whether in an interview or in a job you already have.
• Be both respectfully curious and assertive when you speak up.
• Ask for feedback - often, others can help you identify your positive qualities and contributions and your blind spots.
• Be mindful that feedback is always a little personal and can be a tough ask for both parties. Work on building trust.
• Consider the perspective of your advisors. Evaluate incoming information against your take on things and their particular areas of interest.
• Become a pro at networking. Having great people skills will give you better opportunities to advance in your career.

• Paint the big picture. Reminding employees of their unique contributions to the company's mission adds meaning to their role. It can also increase their motivation to expand their responsibilities and advance in the organisation.
• Accept feedback to give feedback. Career goals are a challenge to achieve unless one is willing to grow - a great way is to provide and ask for feedback regularly.
• Don't defer feedback to annual performance evaluations, as these don't provide opportunities to understand what inspires people.
• When you, as a manager, sincerely request feedback on your actions and decisions, you make it easier for others to share their own aspirations and areas of improvement.

• Organise networking events - create opportunities for people to witness what potential career advancement can look like.
• Publicise the strategic direction of your organisation.
• Show how the various sections and departments have ongoing relevance.
• Investigate new technologies and other cutting-edge advances to improve communications.
• Create focus groups focussed on the company's advancement in various areas.

• Create a vision. Besides the actionable steps to further your career, you must also be mentally focused on where you want your career to take you. You can do this by creating a vision board or a plan with steps to get to your goal.
• Build in and communicate time requirements for personal and professional development.
• Look after your sleep and your physical health.

• Role model a balanced approach to work and time commitments.
• Avoid placing pressure on your team members to overwork.
• If pressure points occur, encourage and model deliberate recovery to prevent burnout.
• Monitor workload requirements routinely to allow time for personal and professional advancement.
• Recognise development achievements - be curious about the journey as well as the outcome.

• Promote work-life balance genuinely. While hard work is a prerequisite for advancement, well-being is critical to sustainable performance.
• It is critical for organisations to have agreed performance requirements, encourage and train employees to work efficiently and leave time and energy for pursuits outside of work.

• Consider alternative approaches to both standard methods and "tricky" problems.
• Look into methodologies of colleagues and competitors and consider applicability for your role.
• Get an ideas buddy or two and schedule some creative time.

• Check-in for new ideas in your team and individual check-ins.
• Build experimentation and "what if" time into your discussions.
• Model "out of the box" thinking.
• Make it safe to share ideas. Suspend judgement when new thinking is proffered.

• Recognise and celebrate novel thinking, promote healthy conflict and challenge the status quo - The light of good ideas is often hidden under the bushel of habitual thinking and approaches.
• Build-in Disruption.
• Fund research and investigation into new approaches and technology.