Name your career development intervention

The first section of the article provides readers with an overview of the most widely used career development interventions including alternative career paths, assessment centers, career coaching/counseling, cross-training, flexitime, job enlargement, job enrichment,job rotation, job sharing, phased retirement, sabbaticals,and temporary assignments. Each intervention is described and accompanied with an example. The second section of the article presents three case studies: When woodworkers won't; How do we keep going from here? and Opportunity in scarce resources. Each case is accompanied with a series of discussion questions and answers. Managers, trainers, and/or consultants can use the article and its case studies to facilitate discussions among employees regarding the potential benefits and drawbacks of various career development interventions.

Has your organization seriously considered implementing a career development program? If not, perhaps this is a good time to do so. The following description of several, widelyused career development interventions and case studies can be used to stimulate discussion on various career development practices. From these discussions human resource professionals can get a preliminary sense of felt career development needs in their organization. They may even get an idea of what interventions might work and what interventions might fail. Career development can be described as a process for achieving specific employee andorganization goals, including providing career information to employees, helping employees identify advancement opportunities, promoting job satisfaction, and improving employee productivity (Bernes and Magnusson, 1996). Career development activities can help employees identify and understand their vocational interests and strengths, plan and implement career goals, and develop themselves. They help employees answer such questions as; ``Who am I?'', ``How am I seen by my superiors?'', ``What are my career alternatives and goals?'' and``How can I achieve my goals?'' Career development can help companiesattract the best employees, as well as motivate, develop, and retain the best workers over time. The benefits of a carefully crafted organization career development system can be a better employee-organization fit, a better employee-job fit, better communications between employees and managers and increased employee loyalty.

Because individual employee career development needs differ and organizations vary in the career development resources available to them, organization career development systems make use of a variety of career development interventions (Schlossberg, 1997). Listed below are some of the most widely used interventions (see Table I). Each intervention is briefly described and potential uses of the interventions are discussed. Finally, three case studies are offered. Readers are asked to identify the intervention(s) they believe to be the most appropriate for resolving the case.