Career Development And The Petroleum Industry
Authors: Lamb Craig F. , Dugan H. Sloane 
Published: March 2010

Introduction

Historically, many employees believed bard work and long hours would insure success in their jobs. However, three trends have emerged that indicate employees' views of work are shifting. First, as the educational level of the workforce has increased in North America, employees want to apply their knowledge and skills to challenging and useful work. In return, they are committed to helping the organization achieve its goals. Second, employees' expectations shift at different stages of their lives. While men and women in their twenties want to become competent on the job, persons in mid-life may be more concerned about finding the proper balance between work and family. Finally, employees' expectations change as they move through the early, middle, and late periods of their careers. New employees at the beginning of their careers want to achieve acceptance by colleagues and supervisors while others in the mid-career stage may seek new challenges or the opportunity to act as a mentor to younger employees.

These trends indicate employees want to work for companies that will enable them to achieve a sense of intrinsic satisfaction. If organizations do not devise programs to deal with these trends in meaningful ways, turnover may increase. Employees who remain with the organization may become less motivated to "go the extra mile" for the organization and others may "die on the job". Increasingly, organizations are learning they cannot buy higher performance by raising employees' salary and benefits. As an alternative, companies are considering career development programs to ensure high performance and provide challenging work for employees at different stages of their lives and careers.

In the United States many organizations have established career development programs in the last decade. Increasingly, companies in Canada are implementing policies and procedures that incorporate features of good career development programs. The petroleum industry can give employees increased control over their own careers through effective career development programs. The industry can also benefit from such programs through more accurate human resource planning, management succession planning, and reduced turnover.

This paper has four purposes:to describe the basic principles of effective career development programs;to explain their major features;to explore the degree to which career development activities exist presently in the Calgary petroleum industry; andto outline the future challenges facing the industry.

Basic Principles of Career Development Programs

We view career development as "the outcomes of interaction between individual career planning and institutional career management processes" (Gutteridge and Otte, 1983, p. 7). Career development does not occur instantaneously but rather occurs over time. Career development programs, therefore, refer to the policies, procedures and activities the organizations use to match the needs of their employees, derived from their own career planning, with the organization's current and future human resource requirements.

Implicit in our view of effective career development programs is the belief that they emerge from an exchange of resources between the organization and its employees. Historically, organizations have functioned on the assumption of a "fair day's pay for a fair day's work".