Career development issues

There is little question who is responsible for assess­ing training needs and planning strategies to meet these needs. Most organizations hold the supervisor responsible for seeing that subordinates are trained to do their jobs. However, assessing career goals and the education and skill development needed to achieve these goals is another matter. Who is responsible for employees’ career development is very often not clear.

In helping employees assess career goals and education and development needs, the supervisor has to decide how far his or her responsibility in career counseling extends and how far he or she is willing to go to provide help.

Most experts on career development believe the employee should have final responsibility for managing and developing his or her own career. The supervisor can help in many ways but should remain a helper–not a decision maker, but a facilitator of decisions. In this role, supervisors should follow good counseling practices:

• Ask questions

• Listen actively

• Provide information

• Help focus ideas

• Give feedback on strengths and weak­nesses as they are perceived

• Refer the employee to other sources of information (and perhaps a professional career counselor if

needed and if avail­able), and

• Assist the employee in developing action plans

A Learning Organization...

· Is not a label but a philosophy to embrace;

· Nurtures new and expansive patterns of thinking;

· Sees reality objectively;

· Has the capacity to multilaterally create and focus upon a shared picture of the future;

· Has the ability for a team to synergistically produce extraordinary results through coordinated action;

· Is a workplace safe for thinking;

LEADERSHIP IN A LEARNING ORGANIZATION

A Learning Organization can be defined as an organization where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together (Senge, 1990).

Learning organizations use shared leadership principles to maximize their resources and develop leadership capacity within individuals. The organization can be described as one that learns continuously and transforms itself. Current literature on leadership development characterizes the leader as a coach, facilitator and guide. Images of leadership have shifted from expert, director, and controller to catalyst, information sharer, and coordinator.

Leadership in learning organizations is based on cooperative and collaborative partnership approaches.

Individuals and their actions are the basis of a learning organization. The culture of the organization, including its history, vision and mission, and both official and informal policies and procedures, forms the

context for individual activities and their impacts.

Senge described five disciplines:

1.) Systems Thinking;

2.) Personal Mastery;

3.) Mental Models;

4.) Building Shared Vision; and

5.) Team Learning as the foundation of a learning organization.