Rajesh joined his current organization 18 months ago, and has now settled down in his role, created a good rapport with his Manager and has also made some new friends at work. However, he is already getting worried about his career. While his organisation claims to provide good career opportunities, Rajesh has been unable to get clarity on what his potential roles could be, or how he can transition to a new role. His Manager has advised him to focus on his current job for the next couple of years till his “turn” comes. Feeling frustrated, Rajesh starts exploring roles outside, lands up a good role at a competitor and moves to the new organisation. Does this sound familiar? As HR professionals, we have all been witness to such stories played out regularly in our organisations, and most of us have even been in the shoes of Rajesh in our own careers.

During the course of my interactions with HR professionals across organisations, career management is increasingly coming up as a major challenge area. With slowing growth and accelerating change in business environment, organisations and HR teams no longer have the luxury of offering very structured and almost guaranteed career progress to employees. On the other hand, millennials joining the workforce are bringing with them a different set of expectations regarding careers. Security, stability and brand are giving way to flexibility, choice, passion and autonomy as drivers of career choices. Attrition is not the only consequent challenge – carefully created succession planning and leadership pipelines processes, which have been designed and institutionalized by HR teams over years, are fast becoming redundant.

So, what is the solution? I, for one, still believe that building an emotional connect with employees and improving workplace culture will continue to be critical if an organization has to attract the “right” people. However, retaining these people will take more than just “emotional connect”. In order to improve retention and improve engagement, career management frameworks and even the learning frameworks have to be re-imagined and re-framed.