Career Management

In recent times, more organizations have claimed that their greatest assets are their employees (Handy, 1994), but the difference between simply saying it and genuinely showing it will be reflected in how organizations treat and support their employees at all levels (Baruch, 2004).

This paper aims to assess the relevance of career management/development as an aspect that is necessary to make the whole of Human Resource (HR) activities complete from the mutual perspectives of the organisation and individual employees. It then identifies its benefits and barriers that may be faced while equally suggesting how these can be overcome with various interventions. It concludes with the implications for not integrating carrier management/ development in these activities.

It is relevant to add at the stage that for the purpose of this paper, I will be drawing on real life examples from a Nigerian context. However, due to the fact that I do not have as much relevant experience to draw on this topic, I may refer to examples and experiences of other colleagues and friends in various age groups (see appendix A).

Career, career management/development defined

Career in itself is 'the evolving sequence of a person's work experience overtime' (Arthur et al, 1989:8). Thus, the idea that a career must be linked with promotion and achieving a certain high status is restricting as asserted by Walton (1999). Therefore, everyone who works has a career and their lives outside work is intertwined to the career (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996). According to Greenhaus et al, (2000), individuals should be responsible for understanding the kind of career path they want to follow and organizations should engage in effective career management and development to support them.

Career management is the planning and application of organizational practices which enable the careers of individuals to be designed and managed in a way that makes the best use of both organization needs, preferences and potentials of individuals (Mayo, 1991), While career development is the process of measuring, supporting and balancing organizational and individual needs, capacities, prospects and challenges through various approaches. Although Parker and Inkson(1999) argue that individuals career development should be the responsibility of the organization, the fact that its key intervention is self-assessment and development processes that influence individual and organizational abilities to generate the most advantageous matches of people and jobs.(Tracey, 1991) cited in Jackson(2000:17) show that it is a mutual process. By implication, career management and development do not mean the same thing but are similar as they both involve the mutual needs of individuals and organizations (ibid). These two processes will be used interchangeably in this paper.