CAREER AND SUCCESSION PLANNING PROCESS

Career and Succession Planning Process

Career and Succession Planning Process

To discover how people learned to have career development a series of questions were asked related to how people 1) think about career development, 2) how they know they are having career development, and 3) what they do to ensure they continue to have career development.

People in this report conveyed that they learned to have career development through a process of informal learning. Informal learning as described as being experienced based, non-routine and tacit. Informal learning is primarily learning that results from experience. Related to informal learning is incidental learning. Incidental learning is never planned or intentional, whereas informal learning can be. Examples of incidental learning include learning from involvement, learning from mistakes, trial and error, assumptions, beliefs, values, hidden agendas, and the actions of others (Ganzach, 2003).

Having a personal vision of career development.

Having passion for the work that they do.

Developing connected relationships with the people they work with and with those who support their career

Periodically stepping back to review their progress against their vision for career development and adjusting their course of action

Learning from experience played an important role in how the people in this report learned to have career development. Learning from experience is learning that occurs as a result of how people make sense of situations that they encounter in their daily lives. Learning from experience is how a person extracts the lessons form each experience to add to their knowledge instead of repeating the same mistakes.

“You know, career development, here's a strategy. You find something you're interested in, jump in it. Jump in it, don't worry about whether it's going to pay you what you need. I mean jump in it and see where it leads you. I want to add all this comment to the public discourse in this topic, to say there are many ways you experience success. And by the way success is a very personal thing, it's not defined by some external force or external group of people saying this is what it is.”

In addition to learning from experience, the people in this reported that they critically reflected on how they were progressing towards their vision of career development, whether what they were doing in the organization fit with their vision and then decided on a course of action to bring them back in line with their vision.

Critical reflection is essential to learning from experience because it relates to the ability of a person to extract lessons from their day-to-day experiences. Without reflection, one may be left to repeat the mistakes that they have made in the past.

The people in this report described how they continually examined how well their unique skills and abilities meshed with what they were currently doing in the organization. The reason for this is because from experience they knew that if they were doing something that did not allow them to utilize their unique skills and abilities or was not something ...