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Career Mapping is charting an Employee's Path to Success.Strategic plans are essential for any company to succeed. They guide leaders and employees in their decision making and help ensure everyone understands and meets objectives.

HR department has to provide critical guidance to employees through career mapping. With this process, you collaborate with individuals on your team to set long-term objectives and detail the steps required to accomplish them. This would demonstrate that you care for their career. This will help the employees to develop trust and will increase their loyalty to the organization. Naturally it will improve job satisfaction and ultimately result in increased productivity.

In the career-mapping process it is important that the employees extend absolute cooperation .The Company has to take feedback on the questionnaire where the employee has to indicate their priorities in the development of their career. For example in the following categories: values, working style, strengths, and weaknesses.

Values: The employee must indicate what matters to them personally when they think about their careers. For instance, they might list having a mentor, ethics, professional work environment.

Working style: This should cover the types of projects your employees enjoy, Independency ,the amount of diversity they require in their assignments, how much professional challenge they want, as well as their need for creative outlets and stability,

Strengths and weaknesses: The employee should write down his strength ie strong in what? Specialization and expertise developed through hands on experience in the earlier jobs. And is weak in what? Perhaps in computer operation, in communication Schedule a special meeting with each employee to discuss the worksheet and prepare a career map. It's helpful to find if the employee has already has an objective in mind so you can analyze the comments listed on the document more effectively.

For example, abilities that the employee values intellectual challenge may find match in her goal of becoming chief of an organization may indicate his/her entrepreneurial spirit.

After discussion with the employee we can narrow them down to one professional objective. Then develop a plan for achieving this goal. To become a chief of unit, department, organization, qualities, skills, knowledge level required to be listed out. We will have directed the employees to undertake training required, qualifications to be acquired to become eligible to become a chief Executive. Apprise the employee about the supports he/her can get from the organization including in house training facilities

Career planning: It is a useful way to support your employees' professional development and enhance their contributions to your company. With a clear plan in mind, staff members will better understand how their work is contributing to their long-term goals and ambitions. The time you invest in this process now will help ensure your company has qualified internal candidates to fill senior-level positions in the future.

Outline a path that tracks the progress of all the organization’s professionals, enabling them to be fully aware of current opportunities and future growth possibilities that can be attained within the organization. Once employees have a clear idea of the rules of the game, they will be prepared to invest in the development that best suits their purposes with a view to moving up the career ladder.

Career planning also creates a climate of transparency and impartiality for all. A well-structured plan should strive to maintain a philosophy of fairness and equality of opportunity.

The elements of effective Career Planning in an Organization:

Competency designing and Mapping:

Competency matrix and mapping of all the competencies against the existing competencies gives a clear picture of all kind of behavioral and technical skills lacking in each person against the benchmarked competencies. Then rectifying all the gaps with proper training, coaching, job specifications etc is also important part of it.

Evaluating Performance:

Performance evaluation is very critical in correctly assessing the employee impartially on all the parameters .Evaluation makes it simpler on judging what set of people requires what kind of career planning. If there are weaknesses than the system allows filling all those gaps with right kind of trainings and education. Correct Feedback also provides right rewards systems and helps in apprising the employees in an appropriate manner.

Job rotations and Cross functional Movement:

Job rotation is a phrase used to refer to the planned movement of people between jobs over a period of time and for one or more of a number of different purposes. Basically there are two forms of job rotation. One is within-function rotation and the other is cross-functional rotation. Within-function rotation means rotation between jobs with the same or similar levels of responsibility and within the same operational or functional area. Cross-functional rotation means movement between jobs in different parts of the organization over a period of time. The jobs identified for cross-functional rotation are likely to be arranged in a sequence representing increasing levels of responsibility.

Employee Growth
For effective career planning an employee should be shown a path of growth within the organization. Providing training for the job and tasks that one needs to perform as well as the development process for the employee so that he/she can also fulfill their personal goals as well as organizational.
The right training is essential for the growth of the personnel in various areas and makes the way up the hierarchy to take up new roles, challenges and responsibilities. Development is a continuous process of creating a learning environment in the organization.

Mentoring and coaching
Having a mentor and/or a coach can be very helpful to the career development in the company.
The roles of mentor and coach differ in several ways. The mentor acts as your counselor, providing advice on career paths, development opportunities, and an overview of what it takes to become a leader in the company. Typically, the mentor is a senior manager, at least two levels above you in the organization. The mentor must have broader experience in the company and the ability to place you into assignments that will help with your development. A critical element in the mentoring relationship is a mutual respect between you and your mentor.

The coach is more of a tutor, observing your work and actions, providing comments on execution, and teaching skills which may be lacking. Coaches can come from many sources. A coach can be a colleague, a manager, or an employee, and doesn’t have to come from the same function or division in which you work

So, these are the areas which contributes to the effective career planning of an employee in the organization, but one needs to be very careful as one thing which works for an employee A may not work for an employee B, hence it is sometimes a very challenging task for HR Managers to design a proper career path for their employees.