Career Development Report on Strategic Human Resource Development

Career Development Report
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Career Development Report
1. Introduction
1.1 Purpose
The purpose of this report is to explore strategic human resource development practices at Mercy Hospital with an emphasis on addressing its present struggle with high employee turnover rates. The reliance on people and their skills for businesses mean that such businesses must find avenues to achieve the optimum outcomes from their employees. Part of the strategies includes understanding the employee's needs and addressing those needs efficiently. Unfortunately, all business organizations cannot afford all the needs of their employees. Organizations that are incapable of developing their employees to perform optimally are likely to lose those employees to rival organizations.
1.2 Background of the Organization
In this report, emphasis is put on strategic human resource development within Mercy Hospital, Springfield-Missouri. Mercy is one of the largest hospitals in Missouri with a total of 886 bed spaces. The healthcare facility has seen achievements as one of the best healthcare facilities in the country. However, the facility is facing a range of human resource challenges that will require immediate interventions to address if it is to maintain its position. Over the past 3 years, Mercy Hospital has been faced with increasing employee turnover rates, something that is poised to soil its reputation.
1.3 Scope
The scope of the report is limited to HR strategies within the organization with the support of the facility’s operational reports and published peer-reviewed journals. Mercy Hospital is a recognisable in Missouri. In the past 3 years, the facility has been facing a high employee turnover rate, reaching 22% in 2021. While every department faces the same challenge, the oncology department is largely affected with employee turnover rates eclipsing the organizational numbers. In this study, emphasis will be put on assessing HR challenges at Mercy Hospital with emphasis put on finding solutions, especially to the most affected oncology department.
1.4 Limitations
This report faces a few limitations in its exploration of high employee turnover rates at Mercy Hospital. Primary among the lack of access to primary data. The lack of access to staff documents makes it impossible to reach conclusive findings for the analysis.
1.5 Organization of the Report
The report constitutes five sections. Apart from the introduction, the other sections that this report will cover a critical understanding of career development issues and challenges, career development for the organization, development strategy recommendations, and the implementation plan. Each section constitutes the developmental prospects that Mercy Hospital could adopt to address its high turnover rates. The last section is the conclusion in which the report summarizes details of the findings before emphasizing recommendations that would warrant improvements in the organization.
2. Critical Understanding of Career Development, Issues, and Challenges
2.1 Career Development
Career development is among the critical issues affecting business organizations presently. Definitively, career development is the process that a person undergoes to improve and evolve his/her occupational status (Choate et al., 2016). Individuals who focus on career development understand that they need to grow within their careers by gaining more skills and knowledge relevant to solving more problems in their workplaces. At Mercy hospital, some of the aspects of career development include mentorship and participation in team and individual assignments. The organization also has a career development initiative whose implementation is anchored at the HR division. Notably, career development begins with self-assessment in which an individual understands his/her abilities. The self-assessment extends to understanding one’s strengths and weaknesses as well as how to match those strengths and weaknesses to achieve the best outcomes in his/her career. People who pursue career development understand that no career is static. As such, individuals need environments in which they can grow and advance to match the corresponding changes in the operational environment. Notably, people who do not show any intention to advance their careers are eventually rendered unnecessary in their workplaces. Remarkably, career development begins when one is young and beginning to understand their career and grows deep when one has retired from a career.
Multiple factors influence career development worth considering when one intends to advance in his/her career that an organization such as Mercy Hospital should understand. Primary among the influencers are personal characteristics. As noted, careers are anchored on individual attributes. People depend on attributes such as work-related values, aptitudes, interests, and personality types to understand what they want to achieve in their careers (Choate et al., 2016). Personal characteristics are vital in career development as they outline the careers that individuals find satisfying as well as the types of work environments that they believe can steer them toward achieving their career goals. The other factor that is important in career development is finances. It is costly to pursue any career. Some careers are costlier than others. Hence, while considering developing various career aspects, individuals need to plan how they will achieve the finances needed to meet the developmental plans (Choate et al., 2016). Both organizations and individuals must plan careers through financial abilities. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, Mercy had a career development strategy in which it bore a kitty geared towards supporting careers and talents. The kitty is non-existent presently, which has demotivated some employees. More factors can influence people’s careers and the ensuing plans of development including age, and family obligations. In some cases, individuals need to assess their emotional, mental, or physical impairments before deciding to advance their careers as some careers befit certain characteristics more than others. In whatever career an individual chooses, it remains necessary to find avenues of development.
2.2 Issues and Challenges in Career development
There are issues that individuals must consider amidst their motivation to develop their careers. Notably, the issues are encountered right at the beginning, at the middle, or even at the end of one’s career (Widana, 2020). One of the issues in career development is making career choices. It takes an insightful analysis of oneself to make choices that are true to the individual. People who rush in making career choices are always stuck in finding what makes them happy. An individual should take time to conduct a self-assessment and settle on careers that he/she believes to be suitable. The second issue is career transitions. Throughout one’s career, there is a growing need to transition. Often, one needs to transition from school to work or work to school.
One of the challenges that both individuals and people face in career development is transition. At Mercy hospital, for instance, there are no clear insights on how they can accommodate transitions from school to work or vice-versa. Without insights into the transition from an organization’s point of view, it becomes impossible to support people intending to advance their careers. Transitions are challenging because they bear financial obligations. Transitioning from work to an advanced career through education, for instance, can be challenging as some cases involve individuals needing alternative sources of income to advance. The other aspects of transition include midlife change as well as work to retirement that people must incorporate into their career development plans. The final issue in career development is the career/work-life balance. While people can be motivated to achieve success in their careers, they also have other issues to address including family, friends, pleasure, and other personal ambitions. One must strike a balance between career and life to stay stable in both prospects.
Having understood the issues in career development, the focus must be drawn to the associated challenges. The first challenge with which people must contend in their careers is qualifications. Every step made towards career development demands qualifications. Prospects such as educational requirements or skills are always needed in career development even though they are not easy to achieve. One needs to spend time and resources to acquire the qualifications necessary for particular careers. The other challenge is the need for experience. Career development does not require only skills learned in schools. Instead, people need to showcase on-job experience to advance their careers. Those who cannot gain the experiences, possibly through a lack of jobs, are sometimes forced to change their careers. The other challenge is self-doubt (Widana, 2020). Individuals intending to advance their careers must be confident in their abilities. Doubting oneself renders one unable to achieve the goals that one sets to pursue. Individuals also need to contend with changes in the industry.
Presently, the operational environment is changing fast and people can barely tell the skills that will be needed at some point in their careers. While making career choices, people must understand the possible changes that their careers may encounter as they develop (Jiang, 2016). The other challenge worth considering is the support system. Organizations in which individuals pursue their careers are critical to the career achievements that people realize. As such, it is necessary to join organizations that are ready to allow their employees to advance their careers. Over the past decade, an organization such as Mercy hospital has changed in terms of technological advancements, something that has demanded correspondence from employees. Part of the reason why organizations keep experiencing high turnover rates is that such entities have failed to support their employees to advance their careers efficiently (Rodrigues, Butler, and Guest, 2020). Other challenges to consider in career development can be time, fear, financial obligations, uncertainty about goals, and burnout. All the above challenges must be assessed and explored efficiently for individuals intending to advance their careers.
3. Career Development Strategy for the Organization
3.1 Strategy for the Organization
Organizations bear the strategic obligation to steer their employees toward career development. Having a career development strategy, for organizations, means creating a platform in which employees are supported to advance in their careers. For an entity such as Mercy Hospital, the career development strategy should foster moves that will impede high employee turnover rates. The 5Ps strategy is one of the most explorative strategies for businesses. The 5Ps exploit career development for employees through the lenses of possibility,...