Career is a chosen pursuit, a profession or occupation.

Career is a general course or progression of one's working life or one's professional achievements:

Career Activity pursued as a livelihood:

 A field for or pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement especially in public, professional, or business life 

SYNONYMS : art, business, calling, craft, employment, job, line, métier, occupation, profession, pursuit, trade, vocation, work. Slang: racket.

Career is a term defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as an individual's "course or progress through life (or a distinct portion of life)". It usually is considered to pertain to remunerative work (and sometimes also formal education).

A career is traditionally seen as a course of successive situations that make up a person's worklife.

One can have a sporting career or a musical career without being a professional athlete or musician, but most frequently "career" in the 20th century referenced the series of jobs or positions by which one earned one's money.

Career Development Definition:

Career development involves managing your career either within or between organizations. It also includes learning new skills, and making improvements to help you in your career. Career development is an ongoing, lifelong process to help you learn and achieve more in your career.

Whether you are looking at making a career change, or moving up within a company, planning your own career development will help you succeed.

By creating a personal career development plan, you can set goals and objectives for your own personal career growth.

Don't make the mistake of leaving your career development future in the hands of your employer, hoping that you will get the next promotion or pay raise. This misconception can lead to job dissatisfaction and resentment.

You may have already experienced this...

You work for so long for a company, hoping that your hard work and efforts will be rewarded. After a while, you're burned out, and you become disappointed and jaded, not understanding why you can't seem to get ahead. While many employers do have career development programs in place, there is no guarantee that your dream position will be open when you're ready, or that all your efforts will finally be rewarded.

Just realizing that you need to take control of your own career future is the first step to career growth and job satisfaction.

Career Development

When employees ask for career opportunities, they may be looking for more challenge, more meaning, more balance, more development, more recognition — all of which may be achieved without more jobs.

Most employees do not define career goals by traditional notions of advancement.

That’s good news for employers facing workforce reductions and shifting priorities. When individual employees define what career success means to them, they’re better positioned to increase satisfaction and performance in their current jobs or make the lateral moves required by organizational redeployment of talent.

Our research indicates nearly half of all employees are looking for interesting or meaningful work in their next career move. And there’s plenty of work to be done to drive your bottom line. When career development processes address career in the context of organizational priorities, everyone wins.

Employees can’t succeed on their own, however. Therefore career development initiatives need to be employee-driven, not employee-exclusive. Managers are well positioned to support career development because they are familiar with the organization’s changing performance needs and individual team members’ talents and goals. Our experience indicates that they don’t need to have all the answers or be ready to hand over their own job.

How We Can Help

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We work with you where you are – whether you are beginning to focus on career development, have a vast array of career resources for employees to access or are somewhere in between.

Our experienced consultants will determine a custom strategy and choose from a range of processes and tools for:

Helping employees take control of their career to achieve personal success and organizational goals…
Providing insights and tools for managing future career opportunities …
Equipping managers to coach for increased performance, satisfaction and career development…