Basics

Organizations have traditionally supported their employees’ development and career growth. Organizational career management (OCM) is a set of activities organizations carry out to sustain their employees’ career development, helping them to advance (promotions and pay raises), and assisting their transition into leadership positions. A typical OCM toolbox practices such as career counselling, career planning workshops, mentoring, assessment centers, and leadership/expert development programs. These practices are intended to offer employees career-related information, increase their competencies (knowledge, skills, and abilities), and provide them with the support and visibility to their managers and peers.  

In addition to these practices, new ones have recently been added to the toolbox. These approaches explicitly recognize the self-definition and boundarylessness of contemporary careers, particularly talents’ careers, and thus put more emphasis on ensuring employability, external marketability (co-branding) and maximization of mutual value creation during the time when employer and employee share the “journey”. We feature the following approaches: 1) tours of duty, 2) open developmental networks, and 3) alumni and boomerangs. A tour of duty is an ethical commitment of employer and employee to a specific mission, where employee aims to achieve a specific result valuable to the employer and at the same time beneficial for employee‘s personal (career) brand. Open developmental network approach refers to intentional activity where employers systematically assist employees in enhancing and optimizing their developmental networks not only internally but also externally. Alumni and boomerang approach entails a philosophy and set of activities through which an employer develops a sustainable relationship with an employee that lasts beyond employment and remains valuable to both employer and employee. 

Talents are individuals who can make a critical (above proportionate) difference to organizational performance, either through immediate contribution or in the longer-term by demonstrating their full potential. An example of a well-disseminated statement illustrating this is: “The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10 or 100, or even 1,000, but 10,000” by Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft. Retaining talents is important, but it might not be realistic due to talents’ high external mobility and career aspirations that are not bound to a single employer. If organizations effectively combine these traditional and novel approaches, they will be able to create sustainable relationships with their talents and preserve more value in a win-win situation. 

The novel approaches for supporting talents’ growth are particularly relevant when:

• talents are highly mobile in a tight labor market,

• when talents’ contributions to the focal organization can (at least partially) be codified or materialized (i.e., be appropriated and transferred),

• the focal company has exciting, challenging and visible work packages (projects, initiatives) with identifiable results (“missions”) for their employees,

• when focal organization’s ecosystem is so tightly coupled that retaining a sustainable relationship with talents (e.g., company alumni) will results in benefits and spill-overs for the organization even after the focal individual is no longer employed by the organization,

• boomeranging (returning to the previous employer) after certain time is a realistic scenario.