When should you have career discussions with employees?

So at what point do you have the career discussions with your employees. Ideally, this discussion happens with your employee as part of them being incorporated into your company right after they are hired. From there the discussion should happen on a regular basis where you are checking in with your employee to see where they are in their development plan. So you could have regular check-in’s on a monthly basis, and then move it to once a quarter-the most important thing is that you actually check in with your employee on a consistent basis.

Keep in mind that it’s not just going to be this one meeting and then your job is done. This will be the first of a few meetings because once you know what their career aspirations are, how they relate to the company’s goals, you need to create a development plan of how your employee will reach that goal and see if they are on track.

The goal of the first meeting is to let the employee know, that as their manager, you are invested in them growing with the company and in their career and you want to help as much as you can.

In order to give that help, it’s the employee’s responsibility to communicate with you what they want their career to look like.
What areas are they interested in?
What are their strengths? What are some areas, they need to grow their skills and expertise in?
Once you both have that laid out, create their development plan, the action items needed to execute the plan, milestones they need to hit and by what date, and of course regular check-in’s to see the progress they are making.