Page 158 - Successful Onboarding

Personal Progress and Prospect: Early Career Support • 145

New hires today seek more than just well-paying jobs; they want
meaningful, fulfilling careers. Providing true early career support stands
today as the single most important thing firms can do to energize new
hires and gain their long-term loyalty and enthusiasm, which is why we
label it one of the two power levers. Companies cannot afford to enroll
everybody in an MBA program, but they can and need to incorporate a
vision of the future into the present. They should provide some meas-
ure of assistance—including mentoring, coaching, and counseling—to
help establish goals and measure progress against them. They should
also provide help assessing career paths and creating a personal plan to
all new employees throughout the first year. Every month, your new
employees should believe that you really care about their success and
want nothing more than for them to reach new heights. By acknowl-
edging and supporting new hires in their career aspirations, and by help-
ing them gain a vision of their personal career prospects, companies can
redefine the employer-employee compact in a new, healthier way. This
is not a commitment for lifetime employment; rather, it is a commit-
ment to personal development with the expectation of greater yield in
return. It is a win-win; when new employees make progress, the com-
pany benefits in the form of reduced attrition, and higher productivity
levels and business performance. Once companies create content and
weave it into the fabric of the current business and personnel processes,
the incremental cost of widening the net to additional employees is low.

Early Career Support—Where We Stand Today
Initiatives in career development date to the turn of the 20th century,
when many companies began to establish in-house training programs for
salesmen, engineers, and certain skilled workers. These programs served
as a natural extension of orientation into the firm, and they also served a
career-planning function, since recruits could expect that completion of
training and their standout performance could lead to promotion to the
management track and a chance to climb the corporate ladder. These
early programs were quite limited in scope, focusing primarily on techni-
cal rather than firm-specific information.
During the 1920s, many large companies instituted formal management
training programs that were pretty much restricted to college graduates.