How Career Development Contributes to Employee Retention - Interview with Luca Galati
Published
28th June, 2023
Taking the time to develop the skills and knowledge of your employees directly impacts their motivation and makes them feel much more fulfilled in their careers. This also benefits the organization as when organizations invest in development employees are 2x more likely to stay.
Today we have Luca Galati, Founder of Beaux.
An Italian company dedicated to offering HR managers, coaches, trainers, and HR experts unique tools for measuring human potential.
We at Beaconforce are very proud to have Luca share his insights and expertise on not only the importance of Career Development but the best strategies to make this a core part of any organizational company culture and most importantly its impact on Employee Retention as a whole.
What are the first steps you would recommend for those who need to develop a professional development strategy?
The key element, in my opinion, in developing a professional development strategy is undoubtedly conducting an analysis.
Preparing an initial assessment is an excellent starting point. Photographing, with greater precision, the key elements from which one can start to structure a coherent professional development path.
It would be ideal to be able to map 3 areas that are really relevant today for people's growth:
- Hard Skills
- Soft Skills
- Behavioral Aptitudes
so as to have a complete 360° profile and understand exactly where to start and what to focus on.
How can employers benefit from the professional development of their employees and, more specifically, their soft skills?
With careful analysis, the 3 elements described above become strategic and represent the "assets" of the resource that, when well trained, allow for real growth within the organization.
Training is increasingly in demand by the younger generation and, when contexts are found where it is present and well organized, it becomes a very important retention element.
If I train my people, they will tend to generate value within my organization by turning that acquired know-how into ideas for the organization itself.
The more mature the organization, the more relevant soft skills also become, which are essential especially in managing and motivating people.
Among the most useful ones today I certainly point out:
- Emotional Intelligence and Stress Management
- Feedback Improvement
- Effective Communication
- Management and Organization
A key, really interesting element is the opportunity to also map the attitude of the people involved; understanding how much resources are more or less inclined and willing to learn new skills becomes essential in measuring the ROI of training.
If the person is unwilling today, it is certainly more useful to propose a different path (e.g., coaching) where to work on issues related to beliefs and ideas. Once the learning space is "freed up," it will then be possible to transfer and add new skills with greater ease of learning and concrete use.
What are the top career development initiatives that you would always recommend?
Undoubtedly a circular model with clear and structured steps:
1) Analysis/Assessment
2) Creation of training and development projects
3) Execution in hybrid mode, with micro-learning or live depending on the expected goals and targets involved
4) Feedback that enables mapping of goals achieved and evaluation of possible additions and/or revisions of pathways
Very functional today, in life-long learning, to have formats available that allow us to train and educate ourselves consistently even according to external changes in organizations.
The person and his or her impact become increasingly central to the ecosystems he or she attends; his or her continuous improvement as an individual, both inside and outside the organizations with which he or she collaborates, will generate a different impact based on how his or her development and training are experienced and organized.
How close is the link between professional development and employee retention?
Could you provide examples in evidence of this relationship?
Could you provide examples in evidence of this relationship?
It is an increasingly relevant topic, not yet mandatory, but soon to become so with the entry of new generations.
Data says that generations Z, X, Alpha are increasingly focused on acquiring useful and current skills and require ecosystems that are ready and proactive on issues of personal and professional growth but increasingly holistic, global, and on the individual
The focus and my suggestion is to do this as soon as possible, to invest in HR departments that are becoming profit centers and not cost centers, and to have people trained and ready to put talent management and development projects into practice already.
Let's avoid doing what happened with smart working, which was talked about for years but which, only for a few realities, was real and properly organized. We don't have to wait for something extraordinary to happen to intervene but, we can systematize it, get it into corporate cultures, and implement it.
Set up shared and motivating training programs for resources who, already today, are in the selection stages also check and choose based on the quality of these proposals.
It will become an increasingly strategic element, which is why it must be implemented now to meet the needs that are coming.
Over the course of your career, what would you say has been the biggest mistake made by employers with respect to the professional development of their employees?
The poor attitude to listening to the real needs of one's resources.
Not listening and not asking, generates the risk, very high, of doing things that the entrepreneur perceived as useful and important but, only based on his vision, often more dictated by business and earnings.
The training was often, even for me, a waste of time because goals and opportunities were not shared. Even today, many people still do not totally understand the benefit and advantages that coaching, training, and change management, led by HR professionals, are of great value for both professional and personal growth.
There is still too often a lack of this link between real need and opportunity for growth, which can arise through a systematic discussion between managers and employees where we can see how much and how training is increasingly a strategic asset.
Luca, as you know, Beaconforce is a deep listening tool, based on sound science, that helps companies translate people's voices into information and predictive analytics, creating more engaging, sustainable, and high-performing work environments. The companies that choose us are innovative and forward-thinking, they care about the well-being and mental health of their people.
In conclusion, what role do you think software such as Beaconforce plays in assisting and enhancing employee professional development, particularly with regard to the role and impact of people's feedback?
Having tools that facilitate and simplify these processes is critical.
Data accuracy is part of the people analytics trend, which is already mainstream given the need for consistent and up-to-date data. Having software that supports these processes is most useful on the one hand to prevent problems and critical issues and, on the other hand, to facilitate the building of increasingly collaborative and welcoming work environments.
Data must be current, organized and of quality so that synergy is created with the people who populate work environments.
Above all, the younger generation expects to find maximum congruence with respect to the feedback provided, an alignment useful for generating engagement in the day-to-day and increasing loyalty with respect to the brand with a strategic impact on employability and talent retention.
A supporting strategic role that organizations can play to generate the holistic well-being that comes precisely from the quality of the information and data we can intercept.
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