Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. There’s something about this time of year when so many people are focused on gratitude that makes the world a bit softer, kinder, and warmer. And from this warm place, I find myself reflecting on the enormous gifts in my life – family, friends, meaningful work, and you – the generous people who allow me into your lives a couple of times each month, who read my thoughts and share your own, who inspire and motivate me to do what I do. I am grateful for you.
I’m also grateful that as a result of current employment challenges, career development is getting the attention it deserves. So, this month, I thought I’d offer a curated compilation of my best career development advice. Whether you’re looking to invest in your own careers or want to help others develop theirs, these short articles may help you get greater results from your efforts. Happy Thanksgiving!
The Great Re-Evaluation
Photo by Daniel Salgado on Unsplash
There’s no argument that today’s workplace is in tremendous flux. We now see the consequences of all this in the form of what’s become commonly referred to as ‘the great resignation.” How ‘great’ the exodus of workers will actually be, depends upon whom you ask, the data they draw upon, and the comparisons being made. But what’s certain is that ‘great resignation’ or not, the events we’ve all shared over the past year and a half have sparked if nothing else a ‘great re-evaluation’.
Why We Still Can’t Get Career Development Right
Yet again, organizations, talent professionals, and leaders have to face the hard data and hard reality that we’ve still not cracked the code on what matters most to employees: career opportunities. It’s not for lack of effort. Companies are investing extraordinary resources in skills training, portals, online systems, and processes designed to make this happen. And it all falls short. Here’s why.
How Do Your Employees Define Success
3 Career Development Questions to Stop Asking Employees
This time of transition and today’s tighter labor market have also inspired many organizations to reconceive the employee experience — everything from where and when work gets done to a range of innovative benefits to meet the needs of the current talent pool.
So this is an ideal time to also consider making the changes required to one of the most fundamental and intimate dimensions of the employee/employer relationship: career development. For many organizations, career development has been frozen in time.
Want Employees to Own Their Own Career Development Try these 2 Things
Employees universally agree that “one of a manager’s fundamental roles is to support his/her employees’ career development.” And yet, many leaders struggle. Some burn themselves out, trying to do too much of the heavy lifting on behalf of their employees. They think it’s their job to find the opportunities, engineer the development activities, scour for the classes, and more. While others lean into the idea of employee owning their development. They abdicate all responsibility, leaving it to employees to figure out alone.
Measuring Career Development Success
Why wait to look backward at your efforts when you can explore real-time factors that will predict the trajectory of career development today? Leading indicators allow you to more proactively address this pressing priority. The indicators you choose depend upon your organization and the data that’s available, but choose something. What gets measured gets managed. And career development is clearly worthy of management.
As an American Indian/Alaska Native, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning.
I see it as a holiday that took advantage of our gratefulness as our country’s first citizens and in turn were rewarded with land theft, extermination from disease, violence and near total destruction through forced assimilation from the very white people who we welcomed by extending the right hand of friendship and community.
For my people, Thanksgiving is a day to:
• Pray that the Creator will help people understand the reality about a holiday that does not contain one ounce of truthfulness and historical accuracy.
• Protest the commercialization of a holiday supposedly based on being thankful.
• Help those who like Native people have fallen like the homeless, the hungry, the orphan, the prisoner, the refugee and the forgotten.
• Honor the ancestors of Chief Massasoit and the Wampanoag Indians whose right hand of fellowship to a group of visitors was met with distrust and suspicion.
You will have to give me some space to not be thankful for the lingering effects of broken treaties, boarding schools, stolen land, cultural trauma and almost complete invisibility in the USA at the hands of white people.
Thank you, Richard, for sharing. Your points are very well taken. For me, Thanksgiving hasn’t been about Pilgrims and Native Americans since I was a child; but I can certainly appreciate how the remnants and representations of that would be incredibly painful. How do we evolve this holiday in a way that promotes gratitude and reflection on the errors (too gentle a word, but I hope you understand the sentiment) of the past? I sincerely look forward to learning from you around this topic.
I think the problem is mobility and information that empowers us sometimes to think what we have is not good enough. What I really think is behind it is that we were educated to be uniform and do what others do when our hearts might have wanted to be and work at something entirely different. When the educational system supports developing the individual and their innate gifts, people will find their own path and be fulfilled. They will not rely on employers, they will be solopreneurs of their own career and perhaps ask for and find exactly what they need to process in their work.
Just top of mind…
Great points, Diana. Trying to play by others’ rules and the comparisons associated with tracking progress toward goals that might not be ours is exhausting and debilitating. It seems to me that growing people as individuals, helping them tap and enhance their native skills, and discover what they really want to do is something that both the education system and leaders can do. Thanks so much for commenting.