Research

What’s really going on with careers and development in your organisation?

In a nutshell, we don’t believe there is enough understanding about what today’s workforce is really looking for in relation to their careers and development, and therefore how organisations can best use career development support as a lever to drive employee engagement and retention of top talent. Recently we’ve been thinking about what is going on at a macro level in this area.

Most company-wide employee engagement surveys ask a couple of questions about career development, but most do not explore the detail, and it’s hard to take specific actions if scores are low, or even to know specifically what you’re doing right if scores are high. We therefore have decided to conduct a research project to delve deeper, to explore the trends more specifically about careers and development. Many of us HR, OD and Learning & Development professionals have hypotheses on what people think and what needs to be done, unless we look at it objectively, we will be leaping to conclusions, often based on limited evidence or personal opinion.

We are looking for a diverse range of organisations to take part.

If you are interested in getting a better understanding of your own organisation’s position on this topic (for free), and in being the first to know about what our research concludes, then please read on!

Some of the macro research questions we want to explore are:

Do different talent segments (technical experts, leadership potential, sustaining) have different levels of engagement with their career development? Are perceived top talent more or less engaged with their careers?
Are different groups more or less satisfied with their careers than others – does gender, length of service, caring responsibilities, age, geographic mobility etc. make any difference?
Are different groups more or less satisfied with their careers than others – does gender, length of service, caring responsibilities, age, geographic mobility etc. make any difference?

What types of organisations are we looking for to participate in the research?

First and foremost, we want you to be interested in the results of the research – if you wouldn’t consider doing anything about your results (sharing the great or addressing issues emerging), it’s just an intellectual exercise and is unlikely to be of much benefit to you. We are looking for organisations across any sector, and any geography to take part. It’ll be interesting to understand any differences between these factors.
We need a reasonable number of responses from each organisation in order to ensure that results are meaningful and useful (both to you and to us). We’re looking for between 30-200 responses per organisation. This could be the entire workforce (for SMEs), a random sample (for larger companies) or specific functions or departments (for interested groups within larger companies).
When the research is completed, along with an organisation specific report, you’ll also receive a benchmark report with all the findings explored.

If there’s some research that you’re interested in conducting in your own organisation, we’d be happy to talk to you about how we can support you with it. Do get in touch and we can talk it through.

Research

What’s really going on with careers and development in your organisation?

What types of organisations are we looking for to participate in the research?

Looking for a people development partner?