Managers: Talk To Your Employees About Career Development

Why Companies Need to Make Career Development a Priority

A cool thing with LinkedIn is the polling feature. It’s been a great way to get a pulse on answers to key questions and a feeder for some of my writing topics. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been running various polls related to career development in the workplace.

My working hypothesis is that when it comes to career development:

1. We’re not talking enough about it in the workplace
2. Leaders aren’t driving the right incentives and as a result are not seeing the right behaviors
3. Managers are not taking as much of a role as they could
4. People aren’t learning or getting coached how to A) talk about their careers and B) navigate their careers in a meaningful way

To test this hypothesis, I’ve been running various polls on LinkedIn related to career development in the workplace and trying to gain insights from the polls. I’ve been supplanting it through qualitative feedback by following up directly with people who answer or leave comments to get more granular insights. I wanted to share a few things that I find interesting.

The first poll that I asked was how often do you talk to your direct manager about career development. You can see the results below, but it looks like the majority of folks talk to their manager at least once a quarter or once every six months