Career development is equally important whether you are an employee, or an employer. So, are there any career development tools that will help you excel your career? Or help employers to achieve company goals?
Guess what? We do have! Developing a career development plan for its employees is highly important as any organization.
And placing a career development plan for employees helps them to improve knowledge and skills which in turn helps organizations to achieve their goals easily.
To make it easier, in this article we are going to touch upon 8 development tools for a career that helps you place yourself in the right path. These development tools are not only effective but also help employers to build an engaging workplace.
This article will cover the following:
- Highlight the most effective career development tools available today.
- Examine tools that focus on real employee growth and engagement, not just checking boxes.
- Explore AI-driven assessment platforms, mentorship networks, micro-learning opportunities, and more.
Let’s be honest: in today’s fast-changing work environment, a one-size-fits-all approach to career development just doesn’t work anymore.
Your team?
They’re a mix of dreams, skills, and motivations.
Traditional career ladders?
They’ve turned into complex, interconnected paths.
And everyone on your team wants to feel like they’re moving forward, growing, and, most importantly, valued.
If you don’t provide that, they’ll leave.
But how do you offer personalized career development in a world full of different professional goals?
Let’s figure it out together.
What Are Career Development Tools?
Career development tools are resources, assessments, techniques, and software that organizations use to help their employees understand their skills, goals, and potential, guiding them through their career growth.
These tools help organizations and HR teams create, manage, streamline, facilitate, and track employee training strategies, programs, and processes to boost performance, engagement, and success.
Sarah Watson, Chief Operating Officer at BPTLAB, says, “Using a variety of career development tools creates a strong framework that promotes a growth mindset, supports overall employee development, and drives organizational success.”
She has found that using methods like coaching, personality tests, and peer mentoring has brought great results to her organization:
“Employees are more engaged. There’s an increase in productivity, and most importantly, they feel supported and empowered in their career paths. It’s a win-win situation; employees’ growth drives the organization’s progress, and the organization’s progress ensures continued opportunities for talent growth.”
8 Best Career Development Tools [Examples, and Comparison]
There are many methods and tools available to boost employee development, each serving a different purpose. By understanding your options, you can choose the right tools to meet your organization’s needs and inspire your employees to enhance their skills.
Here are 8 best development tools for career growth:
- Personality Assessment Tools
- Skill Management Platforms
- Online Learning Platforms
- Mentoring and Coaching Platforms
- Learning Experience Platforms
- All-in-One Platforms
- Seminars, Workshops, and Conferences
- Job Shadowing and Task Rotations
1. Personality Assessment Tools
Every employee has their own strengths, goals, motivations, and preferred work styles that help them perform at their best. However, these details are often unknown, even to the employees themselves, and as a result, they aren’t fully utilized.
Personality assessment tools can reveal each employee’s strengths, motivations, and hidden potential.
This insight allows you to help them recognize and use these talents, enabling them to progress more quickly and become more valuable to your company.
Here are two examples of personality assessment tools:
- Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
- CliftonStrengths
Let us understand both tools in brief with pros, and cons.
1. Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
The MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) helps individuals and teams grow by providing insights into their personalities. It helps people understand what motivates them, where their strengths lie, and who they are.
By answering a series of standard questions, employees are categorized into one of 16 personality types.
Pros:
- Allows organizations to offer each team member specific support and development opportunities tailored to their strengths and preferences
- Encourages employees to take more ownership of their roles and pursue career paths that align with their strengths
Cons:
- Results can sometimes be oversimplified or misused, leading to people being labeled or stereotyped
Related: How to change careers at 30?
2. CliftonStrengths
CliftonStrengths uses a 177-question test to help companies fully understand their employees’ natural strengths, growth potential, and unique abilities.
HR teams can use the insights from the test to create highly personalized career paths and development plans for employees.
Pros:
- The assessment results include actionable feedback and recommendations
- You can use the CliftonStrengths test on your own as a career tool, or you can hire their consultants to implement it, review your results, and provide tailored solutions for your workplace
Cons:
- Getting access to all the services or reports can be expensive
2. Skill Management Platforms
Are you using your talent development resources wisely? Do your employees know what skills they need to improve or what training they need to stay sharp in their jobs?
Are you finding it hard to figure out what skills everyone on your team has or how to prepare employees for roles that match their skills and potential?
These are the issues that skill management platforms try to solve.
They usually include features like career development plans, assessments to measure skills, charts showing who has which skills, career structures, and planning for future roles.
Here are two examples of skill management platforms:
- MuchSkills
- TalentGuard
Let us understand both tools in brief with pros, and cons.
1. MuchSkills
MuchSkills provides you with the tools to see and control the skills in your organization. It helps you create a flexible, motivated team by finding and supporting chances for talent to grow and improve.
Pros:
- MuchSkills is easy to set up and use right away
It has a big library of skills, over 20,000, so you can create charts for your organization and maps of individual skills quickly
Cons:
- There isn’t a mobile app available
2. TalentGuard
TalentGuard can assist you in integrating talent development into your company’s culture. It helps create clever strategies for improving and learning new skills so employees can do better in their jobs or move up in their careers.
You can also use the tool to follow how employees are doing, divide tasks fairly, and fill open positions fast.
Pros:
- The tool lets you make personalized learning plans for each employee
It gives you access to lots of learning materials to keep improving professionally
Cons:
- The way you interact with the tool could be better organized
3. Online Learning Platforms
Think about online learning platforms like a big store where you can find lots of courses from experts and good schools. They make it easy for your employees to learn stuff that can help them get better at their jobs whenever they have time and wherever they are.
These learning tools can cost different amounts, have different types of courses, be better or worse quality, have more or less stuff to learn, offer different kinds of content, and give different qualifications or certificates when you finish. The best one for your business will depend on what you need and how you want to learn.
Here are two examples of online learning platforms:
- LinkedIn Learning
Coursera
Let us understand both tools in brief with pros, and cons.
1. LinkedIn Learning
LinkedIn Learning gives companies access to over 21,000 courses in business, marketing, technology, and creative subjects.
These courses are taught by experts who have been checked out to make sure they know their stuff. The platform lets you learn interactively through short videos, quizzes, and practice exercises.
Pros:
- The platform provides written transcripts, closed captions, or subtitles with videos to help different learning styles and needs
LinkedIn Learning can suggest courses based on data about what your employees do and what they’re interested in
Cons:
- People using the platform can’t talk to their classmates or teachers while they’re learning
2. Coursera
Coursera has more than 5,800 courses from lots of famous universities and big companies like Google and PWC.
Their courses are for all skill levels and cover lots of different subjects, like design, marketing, and accounting. They also have courses to help you grow personally.
Plus, you can get certificates when you finish courses, or even get certified by professionals or get degrees from real universities.
Pros:
- There are more than 2500 courses that your employees can take for free
The platform is easy to use, and the courses are well-organized and detailed
Cons:
- While you can usually adjust courses to fit each learner’s schedule, some programs have strict deadlines
4. Mentoring and Coaching Platforms
Mentoring and coaching are really effective ways to help people grow in their careers. They’re hands-on, meaning someone more experienced helps you learn faster and gives you support.
You can make informal coaching and mentoring systems in your company by pairing less experienced employees with senior ones. The seniors can help with technical or people skills.
Setting up and running these programs can take a lot of time for some teams. If that’s the case, you can use outside coaching and mentorship platforms to make things easier. These often happen online.
Here are two examples of mentoring, and coaching platforms:
- Qooper
CoachHub
Let us understand both tools in brief with pros, and cons.
1. Qooper
Qooper is a platform that pairs employees with mentors and coaches to teach them new skills, give personalized career advice, and get them ready for future challenges at work.
Pros:
- It’s easy to set up, and the platform is easy to use
Companies can use Qooper starting from when employees first join
Cons:
- You can’t make phone or video calls within the platform
2. CoachHub
CoachHub provides coaching services that include clear guidance, personalized feedback, and suggested exercises and strategies for everyone in their career journey, from beginners to executives.
It offers lessons from a worldwide network of 3,500 top coaches, covering over 60 languages, so all team members can benefit.
Pros:
- Lots of short learning resources to keep people interested between coaching sessions
Detailed reports to track progress and see how things are going
Cons:
- The coaching focuses only on work-related topics
5. Learning Experience Platforms
If your employees have to keep asking you in person or send lots of emails just to get training, or if they have to switch between different platforms to learn new things, it can really bring down their motivation.
And if they have to wait ages for new training courses, they might not bother trying to improve their skills or move up in their careers.
Learning experience platforms (LXP) fix these problems by helping you create and start training programs quickly, give out courses to people, see how they’re doing, and keep all your training stuff in one place, way faster than usual.
Here are two examples of learning experience platforms:
- iSpring Learn
360Learning
Let us understand both tools in brief with pros, and cons.
1. iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn is a good choice for organizations that want to make learning experiences that mix online and in-person stuff and are easy to use. It has a feature that reads text out loud and can change your courses into 42 different languages.
It also has a library of pre-made templates, so you don’t have to start making your courses from scratch.
Pros:
- It’s easy to connect with other software and apps
You can use it offline and on your phone, so it’s easy to learn when you’re not at your desk
Cons:
- You can’t change how it looks much, and you can’t use courses that are already made for you
2. 360Learning
360Learning’s online platform helps businesses handle all their learning and development stuff automatically. You can make, control, change, and give out training stuff and other content to help your employees get better at their jobs.
It also has tools to test how well your training is working, like tests and surveys.
Pros:
- You can see detailed info about how things are going and get reports
You can learn stuff that’s just right for each person
Cons:
- Sometimes it’s hard to get help from customer service when you need it
6. All-in-One Platforms
All-in-one platforms bring together lots of tools for developing careers in one place.
Instead of spending a lot of money on different tools for helping your employees grow, you can save by getting one tool that does a bunch of things.
This means your employees only have to learn one program, and they won’t get frustrated switching between different ones.
Here are two examples of all-in-one platforms:
- Zavvy
Rippling
Let us understand both tools in brief with pros, and cons.
1. Zavvy
Zavvy offers a bunch of tools to help you make learning and development better in your company. You can use their software to plan out what skills people need for their jobs and see where they can get better to move up.
They have a thing called 360 feedback where you can talk to employees regularly about how they’re doing and make plans to help them improve.
Zavvy also uses AI to suggest plans for growth based on what job someone has and what skills they need. You can make special training courses or use ones they already have.
With Zavvy, things like planning careers, training, and coaching can happen a lot faster because of AI and automation.
Pros:
- You can see how things are going right away with dashboards and reports
You can set things up to happen automatically, so you don’t have to keep checking them
They give suggestions on how to help employees get better
Cons:
- Might not be the best choice for really small teams because it starts at 300€ a month
2. Rippling
Rippling is a tool that helps businesses with a bunch of HR and IT stuff all in one place.
It handles things like paying employees, managing benefits, and getting new employees set up. It also helps with IT stuff, like setting up new computers and getting apps ready for employees.
It’s made for businesses that want to do all this stuff in one place, so they don’t have to do as much paperwork. Rippling’s big thing is that it brings together HR and IT tasks, making things easier for everyone and keeping everything running smoothly.
Pros:
- All-in-one HR solution
Easy to set up
Very customizable
ACA & COBRA administration
Unique features for remote teams, such as device management and inventory management
Cons:
- Requires you to get a custom quote
No free trial
7. Seminars, Workshops, and Conferences
Workshops, seminars, and conferences are great for helping employees learn new skills and get motivated about their careers. They also let them meet people doing cool stuff that they might want to do too.
Lots of people, both inside and outside your company, have useful knowledge and experience to share. You just have to help your employees find it.
You can do this by having workshops at work where experts come and teach stuff.
Or you can pay for employees to go to conferences or workshops they want to attend. You could even set aside money and time for this and make it part of everyone’s job.
8. Job Shadowing and Task Rotations
Job shadowing and task rotations are great because they’re much cheaper than other career development stuff. They’re easy to do and don’t mess up how things normally work.
All you have to do is figure out what your employees need to learn or want to get better at, using things like performance reviews and skill tests. Then you can find things for them to do that help them learn those things.
For example, if someone wants to be a manager, you could have them spend time with a manager to learn how to lead better.
When employees do different tasks than usual, they learn new things faster, practice what they’ve learned, and get more experience in less time.
7 Features to Look For in Career Development Tools
When it comes to choosing the right career development tool for your career, it is important to understand the features that the tools offer. The features are what makes them standout, and helps you choose the right career assessment development tool.
Here are 7 features to look for in career development tools:
- Personalized Learning Paths
- Interactive Content
- Feedback Mechanisms
- Skill Gaps Assessments
- Competency Assessments
- Career Gathering
- Varied Learning Resources
1. Personalized Learning Paths
Each of your employees learns in their own way and has different goals. So, they might need different stuff to help them learn and get good at what they want to do.
Picking a career tool online that lets people make their own learning paths means they can control how they learn better.
2. Interactive Content
If you want your employees to join in and be interested, pick tools that let you use fun stuff like quizzes, pictures, surveys, polls, rewards, and games in your courses and training sessions.
3. Feedback Mechanisms
After your employees finish a course or training, it’s important to find out what they thought so you can make things better if needed.
If the tool you use doesn’t let people give feedback, you won’t know how to make things better.
4. Skill Gaps Assessments
Before helping employees grow, you should figure out what skills they’re missing. If you don’t know what skills are lacking in your team or company, your plans to help them improve might not work and could hurt how well the business does.
5. Competency Assessments
In a perfect world, a career tool should help you see what training employees need, what they’re good at, and how much they can grow. You can do this with self-assessments, reviews from coworkers, performance evaluations, and one-on-one chats.
6. Career Gathering
Your career tool should help you see where your employees could go next in their careers. This could mean moving up, moving sideways, or trying new things.
It should look at what skills they have now, what they want to do, and what jobs are available in your company.
7. Varied Learning Resources
“Growth doesn’t happen in just one training session. It’s a journey that needs different ways of learning over time.” – David Bitton, Cofounder and CMO at Doorloop.
To help employees grow and stay excited about learning, use tools that support different ways of learning. This could include things like learning from colleagues, trying new things on the job, or more traditional training.
What Are The Benefits of Using Career Development Tools?
By focusing on helping your employees grow and using the right tools to do it, your business can get some great benefits. Here are the 4 benefits of using career development tools:
- Competence Development
- Increased Employee Engagement and Retention
- Better Alignment with Future Career Goals
- More Opportunities for Reskilling and Upskilling
1. Competence Development
Career tools can help employees keep up with what’s happening in their industry. They can also show them what skills they need to get better at and what they need to do to be really good at their jobs or in their area of work.
2. Increased Employee Engagement and Retention
When employees are encouraged to learn and supported with tools to grow, they’re happier at work. This makes them care more about their job and stay with the company longer, reducing turnover.
3. Better Alignment with Future Career Goals
Helping employees see what they need to do to reach their goals can make it easier for them to learn and do things that help their careers.
It also helps managers match up employee goals with what the company needs and give them the right support at the right time to do well.
4. More Opportunities for Reskilling and Upskilling
Career tools can help you see what your employees are good at naturally and where you can use their talents best. This way, you can help them get better at those skills and do better at work overall.
By doing this, you can train your employees to fill jobs in your company instead of always looking for new people from outside.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to career development tools, finding the right fit for your organization can make a huge difference. Look for tools that offer personalized learning paths, allowing employees to take charge of their growth journey.
These tools should also provide various learning methodologies, from traditional training sessions to interactive and social learning experiences, catering to different learning preferences.
Prioritize tools that offer feedback mechanisms, enabling employees to share their thoughts on their learning experiences. This feedback loop not only helps in improving learning outcomes but also fosters a culture of continuous improvement and employee engagement.
Finally, consider tools that seamlessly integrate with your existing systems and processes, minimizing disruptions and ensuring smooth implementation across the organization. With the right career development tools in place, you can empower your employees to thrive and drive organizational success.
Hey, I am Sachin Ramdurg. I run and manage futuredecider.com website that helps students, graduates, and professionals, to find and decide on their future career with ultimate future career advices and future career guides. I have an overall 12+ years of career guidance experience in multiple domains which has helped multiple students, graduates, and professionals to find the best career path for their future.