Fostering a career development culture: reflections on the roles of managers, employees and supervisors

The culture of an organization can be positive and supportive, or threatening and destructive. A career development culture helps address productivity, competitiveness, affirmative action, and succession planning. It helps people redefine their talents to realize the full potential of their jobs. Supervisors should play a key role in creating a career development culture, but many feel their careers are going nowhere and see career development efforts to be an added burden. Supervisors seldom do performance appraisals properly because they are afraid of their workers and the workers are virtually paranoid about the slightest negative note on their files. A better way is to organize a system of mentorship. Evaluation of initiatives can be calculated on the basis of savings that can be attributed to the program and its actual costs. A managed career development culture can pay great rewards to an organization and the people working in it.