Who has an interest in a worker’s career growth? Turns out, everyone involved. Workers want to make sure their future roles are satisfying and rewarding. Employers, for their part, want to make sure that workers will have the right skills for future competitive demands. According to a Pew Research survey, 63% of people who left jobs in 2021 cited a lack of advancement opportunities as a reason for leaving.

“We spend a lot of time and energy focusing on what an employee really wants,” said Joji Gill, VP of HR at Applied Materials, which provides key ingredients for the semiconductor industry. “We realized, as our demographics have changed, that we actually did not understand–and we were making assumptions of what an employee wanted in terms of their career growth.”

Gill’s team learned to enable supervisors as career coaches for their workers. “In the end, we think an employee really owns their careers,” Gill said, “but we facilitate it for them through their managers and through the opportunities we provide in terms of roles that are available, but also in terms of learning and development.” 

How can companies meet business needs, as well as the needs of their people, while boosting productivity, retention, and general happiness in the workplace? Dan Ashley, anchor and reporter for ABC7 KGO-TV Bay Area, asked HR leaders how they’re facing the challenge in a panel titled, “How Career Growth Can Be a Part of Employee Experience from the Beginning,” part of From Day One’s recent San Francisco conference.

The disruptions of the pandemic, and new attitudes about work, have inspired employees to be more demanding when it comes to opportunity. “There’s a shift from this mindset of ‘What can I do for the company?’ to ‘What can the company do for me?’” said Sid Prashar, director of executive recruiting for global functions at Google. “This is as true for early-career professionals as executives.” A new employee’s role is understood to be merely a starting point. “And the conversation already is evolving into ‘What's next for me? How is the company going to support me?’”

Leaders are expressing more enthusiasm for coaching skills to help their employees in their career paths and identify areas where they can grow within the organization. “Another skill of a leader is not just putting it all on the employee,” said Tim Davisson, director of business development at Stewart Leadership, a talent management and leadership development firm, “but finding opportunities for your employees to grow and expand their skills.”

The best approach may be to foster more of a dynamic dialogue between workers and employers about what they both need. “We saw this shift from a more traditional model of career pathway that was very focused on a top-down approach where the company said, ‘Here's what we need within the next year or five years—how do we find the people within our organization and put them into boxes that they may or may not want to be put into?’” said Elan Kawesch, chief product officer for Claira, an AI-powered workforce-management platform. 

“What we’re seeing with the most successful organizations is what we’re calling this ‘edges-in’ model approach that takes this hybrid between the top-down and saying, ‘What does the firm need in the next few years?,’ but also taking an ear to what the employee is looking for and making sure that we’re promoting the best interest of both parties.” 

As new generations of workers arrive with fresh expectations, notably Gen Z, businesses are challenged to identify potential leaders earlier in their careers. Managers must spend time understanding and guiding these future stars within their organization.

“We put them on very complicated projects,” said Gill. “We test them, we rotate them, and we evaluate them. Then also we track their careers for the next five, 10, 20 years because we're hoping to find our next CEO out of our younger engineers that we’ve just hired.”

“This is a really great opportunity for us as the younger generation to step up and do some reverse mentoring,” said Davisson. “Because I don't think it's about upskilling the younger generation–it’s the other way around.”

Kawesch and his team recognized a post-pandemic age divide between three main employee groups: workers motivated by financial reward, others seeking career growth, and still others craving social interaction. 

“We saw this large shift, especially among younger employees, who were saying the most important thing that they were looking for is a social outlet,” said Kawesch. “In the age of Zoom, where we’re not necessarily going into the office every day, where we can’t build the same kind of interpersonal relationships that we used to be able to, face-to-face, employees might only get their social needs out in the workforce.”

“We have to understand and know our people,” said Davisson. “It’s about thinking about the person and their career path, and how can you help support that person.”

It’s a vast change from decades past, noted Ashley, “of what it meant to work and how corporations approach their employees. Where companies were not worried about meeting the needs of the employee. They were solely interested in how the employee could meet the needs of the corporation.”

Speaking directly with younger talent can help leaders better understand their motivations and increase engagement. After having some of these conversations, Gill was struck by the shift in workers’ values. “What was strikingly interesting was that what was not top-of-mind to them was compensation or career,” she said. “Those they take as basic needs. But what was important to them was equality issues, race relations, sustainability, connectedness.” 

“Leaders no longer have the luxury of choice,” said Prashar. “We used to learn in business schools about profit maximization as the goal of the enterprise. That is no longer the case. All these different stakeholders have to be optimized or harmonized and balanced. [Making money] is something you do in the process of not doing harm. And how much good you do is really where you optimize.”

“It's really about having an employee base that you truly understand,” said Gill, “that you engage [and] motivate, which then results in higher productivity, higher engagement, higher innovation, and high results.” 

Samantha Campos is a freelance journalist who has written for regional publications in Hawaii and California, with forays into medical cannabis and food justice nonprofits. She currently resides in Oakland, Calif.