How to create a great career event
A great career event can showcase your career proposition, engage employees, and add value, says Catherine Debray of The Career Innovation Company.
Career events are organised gatherings or initiatives, aimed at showcasing an organisation’s commitment to employee development and career advancement. At their best, they offer employees a chance to explore career growth, acquire new skills, network, connect with leaders and mentors, and align ambitions with strategic goals.
Why do they matter? They matter because they play a crucial role in attracting and retaining talent by demonstrating the organisations investment in its employees’ professional growth.
Our six steps to creating career event success.
From our extensive experience of working on career events with organisations, here is our best-practice guide to creating a great career event.
- Be creative with your career offerings. The best organisations introduce ways to promote their career offerings, including showcasing career stories, investing in skills development, and leveraging talent marketplaces.
- Demonstrate your commitment. Career events serve as tangible evidence of your dedication to fostering a supportive, growth-oriented work environment. The involvement of senior leaders lends vital credibility and demonstrates a genuine commitment.
- Be strategic to gain engagement. For example, it is vital to time events to coincide with milestones like performance reviews to maximise employee engagement and participation.
- Highlight career stories and paths. Powerful and real success stories of internal, diverse and sometimes non-traditional, career progression to inspire employees and demonstrate advancement opportunities.
- Diversify your topics and formats. It is important to feature a range of topics and formats, including employee panels, workshops, and interactive sessions, catering to varying interests.
- Invest in skills and experiences. Companies are investing in training and development programmes to empower employees to manage their careers effectively and equip managers to facilitate career conversations.
Collaborating with a partner on your career event
There are several ways in which we work with organisations to ensure the success of their career event.
- Align with people’s needs. We work with you to identify the right events for your organisation, design content that acts as catalyst for cultural change, and ignite excitement around career growth and mobility for all.
- Topic selection. By using our Career pulse tool to work out career skills gaps across teams and the whole organisation, or by tapping into Employee Resource Groups, we can help your business to listen to employee career needs and identify the topics that resonate.
- Ready-to-go workshops. Interactive workshops and tools should be designed to cover key careers topics such as career skills, role crafting, unlocking potential, identifying transferable skills, and demonstrating career brand.
- Empower employees and managers. Resources should be used to inspire employees to take ownership of their career and help leaders support them through times of change.
- The multiplier effect. A career event can act as a great multiplier on social media where employees of the present and future see the business as a great place to work and progress.
It is important to remember of course that once a career event is over, career development for employees must continue through a well thought-through career strategy and delivery. Nevertheless, career events offer an incredible opportunity to highlight the priority given to development, and the range and quality of resources available to support self-managed careers.
If you want to talk to us more about how to run great careers events, download the guide and please get in touch we’d love to have a conversation.
