Before embarking on implementing career development/planning functionality with your Talent Management system, you should be asking the HR team a few critical questions to baseline the design. Some of these important questions include:
- Do you currently have a competency framework? Do you currently have a skills framework? If not, are you planning to introduce either a competency or skills catalog as part of the implementation?
- Does your organization have a development plan (for tracking development goals)? If so, do you link your development goals to competencies (if you maintain them)? Do you link goals to learning activities (within your LMS)?
- Do you currently manage career paths within your organization? If not, is this something you would like to do? Do you use career ladders and/or career lattices?
- Is a mentoring program currently available for your employees? If so, what kind of mentoring programs do you offer (e.g. supervised, unsupervised, administratively setup, etc)
- Do your current job catalog and architecture support the needs for your career planning processes (stated above)? If not, during the project you will need to ensure that the job architecture has career and development planning considerations.
Providing answers to these fundamental questions will provide your internal or external consulting partner with the necessary (broad) direction on moving forward with career planning and development functionality.