You won’t find many people disagreeing that employee development is a central concern for HR teams and people managers more broadly. For example, LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report cites career development as a rising priority—and that’s consistent with the previous year’s findings.
Here’s the snag. Recognizing the importance of career development isn’t the same as being able to effectively deliver it. While managers may want to prioritize supporting career development, they won’t all be equipped with the skills they need to help their reports grow their careers. Skills are a good case in point here: according to LinkedIn’s 2023 research, only 35% of employees were encouraged to learn by their manager in the previous six months. If the majority of managers aren’t getting across the value of acquiring new and relevant skills, they’re falling at the first hurdle of supporting meaningful career development.
So, how do you equip managers to help their reports achieve professional growth? Simple: you give them the right tools (and a good process to go with it!). Read on to discover:
- How Bridge’s career drivers cards can help managers kick things off in a way that champions human connection
- How generative AI can be leveraged to turn the resulting insights into skills and learning recommendations
- How managers can then use Bridge’s development planning and performance management capabilities to turn skills requirements into career development realities
Step 1) Encourage Development Conversations via Bridge Career Drivers
Career Drivers by Bridge is a card game that lends managers the structure and vocabulary they need to give employees that all-important push toward learning, skills building, and career development.
Each card represents a career driver—something that might motivate an employee to grow and succeed—and these drivers are separated into six color categories. Employees choose up to three drivers per category, and you can encourage your managers to ask questions about those drivers to help them understand what motivates their people.
With these initial drivers selected, your managers can then help their reports whittle those selections down to five. This involves shuffling the chosen cards, laying out five options, and pulling additional cards from the pile so the employee can choose whether to swap it with one of the top five or discard it. This is another great opportunity for managers to build connections through conversation by encouraging their reports to reflect on why they favor one driver over another.
Once the top five are locked in, your managers will need to determine how well their reports’ needs are being met for each driver. If they’re not being met, they’ll need to figure out why not—and what support they can provide to help raise satisfaction levels for the drivers that count.
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Step 2) Use Generative AI to Suggest Job Roles, Skills, and Learning Activities
Having a list of each employee’s key motivators is a great start—but if your managers are new to the world of development planning, they might be unsure how to turn that information into an actionable development plan. That’s where generative AI comes into play.
We’ve experimented with combining our drivers exercise with ChatGPT to great effect. Here’s how it works: by uploading PDFs detailing what the career drivers game is and what the results were for each employee, you can give ChatGPT all the context it needs. After that, it’s just a case of entering a prompt along these lines:
Attached are instructions for an HR/manager exercise designed to help determine what motivates my employees in their careers. The scores are an indicator of how well these drivers are being met in their roles. Additionally, here are the results of that exercise. The list of drivers that you see are the top options they selected.
Personal info: you know that they are currently a [job title] who works in [industry].
Your task: keeping the drivers in mind, create a table with three columns (job ideas, associated skills, and activities to close the developmental gap).
Formatting: You will need to provide this data in a tabular format.
With the help of this prompt (or something like it), a generative AI tool like ChatGPT will have no problem conjuring up a list of prospective job titles that pair with each employee’s drivers. Better still, it’ll also suggest the skills they’ll need to perform in that role and the activities that will make those skills attainable. These are the building blocks of a career development plan.
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Step 3) Combine AI-Generated Career Insights With Development Planning Software
Your managers can choose to use AI, come up with their own ideas in consultation with their reports, or a little of both. But no matter how they arrive at their list of job roles, skills, and upskilling activities, one thing’s for sure: they’ll need to be able to point employees toward a structured environment that houses their development plans.
In Bridge, that environment takes the form of our development plan feature. Once employees understand the direction they want to go and the skills they need to get there, Bridge’s development plans allow them to select those skills and enroll in relevant courses to help acquire them. And, considering Bridge is an all-in-one learning and development platform, your employees can also fold in any related goals created in our performance management platform.
A Final Word on Career Development Action Plans
For managers who aren’t familiar with development planning, tools and processes like this are a game-changer.
They provide managers with a firm rationale for their reports’ career aspirations and a structured visualization of the skills required to achieve them. By adopting this three-step process, encouraging reports to learn and develop won’t just be the domain of the minority mentioned in LinkedIn’s report—it’ll be something every manager can accomplish with ease and style.
Get Your Free Career Drivers Cards—and Turn Them Into Full-Fledged Development Programs With Bridge
Career Drivers by Bridge is a fast, fun, and free way for your managers to facilitate meaningful and detailed career development programs. When they’re paired with Bridge’s learning, development planning, and AI upskilling capabilities, you’ll quickly turn every manager into a champion of employee growth.
