Supporting your employees’ career development enhances their capabilities and knowledge. This has benefits for both employers and employees, such as:
- improved employee job satisfaction
- improved employee job fit
- increased employee retention
- upskilling your workforce.
Supporting career development can help to align workforce capability with your organisation's goals. It also makes your organisation and your workforce more adaptable.
See below to learn how to support your veteran employees’ career development.
Establish a veteran career development focus
Begin by establishing a focus on career development for veterans in your organisation.
Veterans can benefit from tailored career development. They may be unfamiliar with the civilian workplace and career progression. They may also lack connections with people in their industry and be unfamiliar with the process of civilian networking.
Focusing on veterans’ career development can help you to support veteran employees’ potential.
Make a commitment
Make a commitment to support the career development of your veteran employees. In doing so, consider how career development aligns with your organisation’s strategic goals.
Ongoing training and opportunities for advancement are key aspects of the ADF experience. Many veterans may seek out similar opportunities in civilian roles. Communicating your commitment to supporting employee career development may attract veterans to your organisation.
Allocate resources
Ensure that your career development initiatives are well resourced.
You can do this by:
- setting a budget for career development initiatives
- setting an individual career development budget for each veteran employee
- giving veteran employees the time to undergo career development alongside their other duties.
Assign responsibility
It can be helpful to make supporting veteran career development a specific job responsibility. Identify staff who are well placed to provide career development support to your veteran employees. This is likely to be those in a supervisor role.
Staff with this responsibility should be able to:
Career development initiatives
Consider the following initiatives to support the career development of veteran employees.
Establish a mentoring program
Mentoring can support veterans’ on-boarding and career development. Mentoring is particularly important for veterans who are new to civilian employment and are adapting to and learning about the civilian workplace. They can learn from both veteran and non-veteran employees.
Mentoring brings many benefits to the workplace. It can:
- help new veteran employees adjust to the civilian workplace
- encourage sharing of knowledge and experience
- support veteran employees to build positive working relationships
- allow mentors and mentees to plan career development
- establish a supportive and productive work culture.
A mentoring program can be formal or informal, depending on what best fits your organisation.
To find out more, see the guide below.
How to develop a mentoring program [PDF 136.91 KB]
Introduce structured career development practices
In the ADF, career development is a clearly structured process of training and promotion courses. By contrast, civilian career development often relies on employee initiative. This lack of structure can leave veterans unsure about what to do to progress their civilian career. Introducing some structured practices can be useful for supporting veterans’ career development.
Some ways to do this are outlined below.
Professional development plans
A professional development plan outlines a clear and achievable pathway toward a veteran’s career goals.
At minimum, it will outline:
- career goals
- current capabilities
- desired capabilities
- intended professional development activities
- how the organisation will support the veteran’s career development.
A professional development plan should be created by the employee together with their supervisor(s).
Capability frameworks and assessments
A capability framework is a detailed map of the employee capabilities needed across an organisation. Some of these capabilities will be core to the organisation and required by all employees. Other capabilities will be specific to certain roles.
Employee capabilities may include:
- technical skills
- soft skills
- knowledge
- behaviours.
A capability framework allows employees to be assessed against the capabilities required by a role, revealing areas for improvement. This makes them a powerful tool for planning career development.
To use a capability framework to support career development practices, refer to the graphic below.
Facilitate training
Training is the cornerstone of career development. With training, employees develop their capabilities in both their current role and future roles.
ADF members are highly adaptable and used to undergoing training on a regular basis. Providing training opportunities is therefore a good way to support veterans’ career development.
To facilitate training for career development, consider:
- providing training in technical and soft skills
- offering training delivered by your organisation or an external provider
- sponsoring employees to undertake further study
- providing flexible work arrangements to enable employees to undertake training and/or study
- identifying and facilitating opportunities for employees to implement learning within the workplace
- developing an in-house leadership development program
- supporting veteran employees to attend professional events
- encouraging ‘on the job’ training
- facilitating learning from others in the organisation, such as through peer-to-peer training or mentoring.
These resources provide further information and guidance about career development.
- The Veteran Employment Program provides guidance on identifying and building veterans’ skills.
- Business.gov.au offers general guidance on staff development and training, including links to resources and training programs.
- Business Victoria provides a professional development plan template.
- Refer to this Seek article on how to write a professional development plan.
Related Veteran Employment Commitment (VEC) activities:
- Provide a formal or informal mentoring program for veteran employees
- Support education and training opportunities for veteran employees
- Provide career development support and advancement opportunities for veteran employees.