CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
1.3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS
1.5 RESEARCH HYPOTHESIS
1.6 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDYE
1.7 SCOPE OF THE STUDY
1.8 DELIMITATION OF THE STUDY
1.9 DEFINITION OF TERMS
CHAPTER TWO
2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 MEANING AND CHARACTERISTICS OF CAREER
2.2 CAREER DEVELOPMENT
2.3 TRAINING AND ITS IMPORTANCE
2.4 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.4.1 SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY
2.4.2 CLASSICAL CONDITIONING THEORY
2.4.3 REINFORCEMENT THEORY
2.4.4 TRANSFER OF TRAINING THEORY
2.5 LINK BETWEEN TRAINING AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT
2.6 HINDRANCES TO CAREER ADVANCEMENT AFTER TRAINING
CHAPTER THREE
3.0 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
3.1 RESEARCH DESIGN
3.2 AREA OF STUDY
3.3 POPULATION OF THE STUDY
3.4 RESEARCH SAMPLE AND SAMPLING TECHNIQUE
3.5 INSTRUMENT FOR DATA COLLECTION
3.6 VALIDITY OF THE INSTRUMENT
3.7 METHOD OF DATA COLLECTION
3.8 METHOD OF DATA ANALYSIS
CHAPTER FOUR
4.0 DATA ANALYSIS AND PRESENTATION
CHAPTER FIVE
5.0 SUMMARY OF FINDINGS, CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION
5.1 SUMMARY
5.2 CONCLUSION
5.3 RECOMMENDATIONS
REFRENCE
APPENDIX
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
Career development is the continuous attainment or improvement of competencies and understanding, as well as job familiarity and professional growth, coupled with career planning activities. Career development is a progressing and dynamic process and therefore employees should be encouraged and supported in reviewing regularly as well as re-assessing their goals and activities (Raymonds, 1991).
A career is a progression of occupational roles of a person, an activity that is carried out for a considerable time of man existence and with opportunities for advancement. It also implies upward mobility and advancement in work roles (Torrington et-al, 2005). Career development includes advancement or growth and job enlargement, lateral moves and development of portfolio work. It is considered as an individual’s property and therefore it is the responsibility of that individual to manage it. This includes identifying career goals, making plans and adopting strategies to achieve the goals identified. Waterman et al (1994) suggests that employees have to be conversant with market trends in the job market, be aware of skills and knowledge essential in a given profession and predict prospects of its growth, beware of their strengths and weaknesses, have a career growth plan and make career moves when a win-win situation is no longer possible with the current employer. Although career development has been identified as the responsibility of the person, the organization needs to offer a facilitating and supportive role.
The primary goal of career development is to fulfill the present and future requirements of the organization as well as an individual’s work which means developing employability (Torrington et-al, 2005). Organizations’ encounter various challenges in running particular career interventions and initiatives. Challenges to career development include identification of criteria to select a suitable combination of career-planning activities for employees, and that which will avail optimal amount of support to individual employees. Also an organization is tasked on deciding at what point in time, in an employee′s career, specific careers interventions should be availed and also what target interventions to particular groups of employees. Organizations are required to encourage career planning by carefully studying information available to employees and the training consequences for personnel and line managers (Jackson 1991).
It is worth noting that in any organization career support practices signify to an individual and group both means of developing and retaining skills (Battistelli and Picci, 2008; Ellett et al, 2007). Regardless of size, sector and market career development and staff motivations are very focal factors to be considered by any organization (Mwanje, 2010). This is due to the fact that any employees require undergoing different training and different kind of development experience (Peters, 2006). In short in order to improve both employee and organization ability to invest in human resources by way of training and management development is inevitable.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the process of investing in human resources is not equivalent as the process of investing in equipment’s (Peters, 2006). Following that employer should carry out need assessment to identify employees’ recent training and development needs in order to maximize the effectiveness of training and development. Through this process organization will categorically identify different employees with different need. Not that some needs need to be changes slowly while others need a quick change (Peters, 2006). Following that the government have made several initiatives in career development such as career development initiatives stipulated in human resources development policy. However, despite numerous training interventions taken by government and several organizations aiming at improving workers performance, there is little recorded positive effect on workers capabilities. The trend of weak worker in term of capacity, knowledge skills and attitudes has remained higher even having gone through training (Okanya, 2008). This research is therefore aimed at investigating the challenges facing employee’s career development most using the public sector as a case study.
1.2 Statement of the Problem
It is not a new thing to employees most especially those in the public sector that career path is traditionally based on seniority and length of service which is still a crucial selection criteria for career advancement in many countries. Employees in the public sector are faced with different challenges on career development like slow advancement, where seniority has more importance than merit, fixed order of promotion i.e. promotion is independent of the level of employee performance or career development, weak recognition of the individual employee merits or knowledge advancement, unclear career path and insufficient career planning by the employee, most of this problem is more of a problem because promotion is majorly based on merit and level of employee knowledge, that is why employees in the private sectors train and advance more in their career path than those in the public sector except for the those in the educational sector.
All this problems combined together arose the interest of the researcher to embark on this research the challenges facing employee career development, using the public sector as case study.
1.3 Objective of the Study
The main objective of this study is to find out the challenges facing employees career development in the public sector, specifically the study intends to;
1. Establish the reason for employee career development
2. Find out the challenges of career development in Nigeria
3. Analyze the impact of career development on promotion of employee in the public and private sector
4. Proffer solution to the challenges of employee career development
1.4Research Question
2. What are the reason for employee career development?
3. Are there challenges to employee career development in Nigeria?
4. Is there any significance impact of career development on promotion of employee in the public and private sector?
5. What is the solution to the challenges of employee career development?
1.5Research Hypothesis
Ho: there is no significance impact of career development on promotion of employee in the public and private sector
Hi: there is significance impact of career development on promotion of employee in the public and private sector
1.6 Significance of the Study
This research intends to reveals the importance of supporting employees’ career development in the public sector. The researcher believes this study is much value to a number of people including Management of Government sector, employees and other people of interest like students. This study will contribute in minimizing this gap in the literature and thereby establish the basis to understanding of some aspects of human resource management in general and training in Nigeria. Also in view of the above the following are the significance to the research findings.
(i) It will help the Management and the decision makers to know their