How do RGF, Hunkemöller and BLOS tackle their bottlenecks in career development?

“The world is changing very fast right now and how people look at work is also changing. But one thing is clear, people are always looking for jobs that will make them happy and will help them learn and grow.  

We are an organization in the staffing industry, so we ensure that employers have access to talent at very short notice. But if you look at the positions we have in our company, we don't offer dream jobs. If you ask kids what they want to be later, no one will say, ‘I want to be a recruiter’ or ‘I want to be a sales consultant’. Many people see the work we offer as a steppingstone to something else. I think that's one of the biggest obstacles we have." 

“We realized that we need to find a solution by looking at this challenge from a different perspective. If we don’t offer dream jobs, then let’s invest in people’s competencies. In the end, you want to make talented people competent people and talent requires training as well. We currently use an online academy to provide an immersive and fun learning experience through competency-based games and training. 

We particularly focus on career development and skills because as a company we attract many young people who are on a self-discovery journey. We want to help them discover their strengths and offer them a job that they will love. If not within our company, we can help them find their dream job, perhaps with one of our clients. It’s important to keep the young people interested, engaged and inspired by creating a good learning pathway that makes learning fun, accessible, effective, and short.”

“I think there is no perfect career path. I would say that everything starts with yourself. It all starts with 'me'. Who am I? What do I like? What do I want to do? What am I good at?

Self-reflection is so fundamental to understanding your path. This is always the advice I give to the people I work with: You have to figure out what makes you happy, because only then you’ll figure out what your career path could be. You should always be in the drivers seat of your own life and therefore your career.”

“It’s all about employee’s engagement. Employees want to feel that they have opportunities to develop their careers because that essentially makes them feel motivated. It makes them feel like they have a purpose and are working toward something.

People always want to keep growing. Ultimately, that results in a happier and healthier employee who is more productive, creative and stays with the company longer.”

“In my experience, there are two main challenges: creating development opportunities in a flat structure and constantly changing functions and required skills.  

In a flat structure, there isn’t always room to step in, because the higher you get in the hierarchy, the fewer positions there are. As an employee, you also have to be open to lateral movement, which many people now seem open to. As an L&D, you have to look at what career path is available and support the employee in making that lateral step. But before that, organizations need to decide what places they can get to and what they need to get there. 

The second challenge is about designing growth paths that are flexible and can keep up with the fast changes in roles and required skills. In the past, there was this very specific hierarchical organization, and it was easy to say what you wanted from someone who's in HR. Then we built this big, complicated competency framework and had a whole piece of career development alongside it. It was interesting and exciting, but it was tremendously hard work. It took you 3-6 months to put this together and by the time you were done, it was outdated. Often there were new positions and even the skills you thought you needed for a position were constantly changing.”

“I think there’s something to be said about having different paths available that people can follow to develop certain competencies, regardless of the career in which they will use them. The reality is that many of these competencies can be used in different careers. The challenge is to structure it so that the employee feels like (s)he’s moving towards her/his goal.  

And one thing that always needs to happen more is management involvement. This should never be left to HR. Constant conversations are needed between managers and their team members.” 

“Because employees care about them. And it also makes them stay in the organization. I think internal mobility makes an organization strong. You can hire new managers, and sometimes that's good, but usually it's a better idea to create opportunities for your existing employees.”

“I would say employee engagement. We have multiple career development opportunities but most of our employees don’t complete the training. This is mainly because they don't have time. When they’re at work, they’re responsible for a full class of preschoolers, so their attention is 100% on the children. This means they can’t complete the training during working hours. 

So now our challenge is how do we create a learning environment where people want to develop in their own time and how do we tailor the training to each person's needs? Currently, our employees' intrinsic motivation for development is not that high. Usually, we have to put considerable pressure on them to take the training. What we are trying to do now is make it easy for them to take the training by keeping it short, accessible and to the point. We also try to involve them in our development by asking them for input, insights and feedback on the things we do.”

“Oh, good question. I would say long e-learnings with lots of text, topics that are uninspiring because they aren’t relevant to their daily work, and making the training mandatory. After a long day at work, they don’t want to spend too much time on training, especially if they feel it isn’t relevant to them.

It’s also important to think from the perspective of the people for whom you are developing the training. What are their challenges? What do they need? Employees should feel heard.”