Career Navigator: A Manager's Guide to Career Development

Navigating your career can be tough, and helping your employees navigate their careers can be even tougher. However, employees are much more likely to leave their jobs if not given an opportunity to talk about their careers, so as a manager it’s imperative that you learn how to do this. In this course, you will learn a three step method for talking to your employees about their career development, involving introspection, goal setting, and mentorship. You will also learn how to use coaching and mentorship to guide your employees and colleagues through the activities from the course to help them develop their careers.

This course is designed for people managers who have one or more direct reports, to help you learn how to coach and mentor your employees through conversations about their career, identify their values, and set goals. To do this, you will first reflect on your own values, set your career goals, and identify a mentor to help you achieve those goals. By completing these activities for yourself first, you will build empathy with your employees and be better prepared to coach them through the activities.

We’ll start the course by talking about career development today, how the idea of career development has changed over time, and types of career moves. Next, we’ll go into introspection, where you’ll complete an activity called Peak Experiences to reflect on the times in your career when you felt most engaged and identify career values. From there, we’ll work through a goal setting method called GROW to set career goals that align with your values and peak experiences. Finally, we’ll talk about mentorship, why it’s important to helping you achieve your goals, and how you can identify a mentor for yourself and act as a mentor for your employees.

By taking this course you are taking a meaningful step in navigating your career in a positive direction that engages you and makes you feel excited about your work. The tools and methods for reflecting on your career that are presented in this course will be useful to you for a long time, and are meant to be revisited continuously as you grow and develop your career.  So what are you waiting for? Let’s get started!