Socialisation Helps Career Progression

Socialisation has a beneficial effect on performance and work related values. New members should be made to feel involved and accepted by the rest. Training opportunities are considered vital for career progression and personal development. Knowing staff well helps decide who needs what when it comes to training requirements. Internal promotion is more of a possibility when vacancies appear further up the corporate ladder. There are often very useful and profitable people already in a business that could do the job well.

Education and training for career progression require a person to be able to learn. The nature of the work people do leads to a particular view of learning. Low skilled and repetitive tasks lead to associative and behaviourist views of learning even if knowledge and understanding are required to produce behaviour that can be repeated time after time where the conditions change little or not at all. More complicated tasks require more knowledge, understanding and higher order cognitive skills and an outlet for behaviour in the workplace and lead to cognitive learning.

Modern learning theories contain elements of both associative and cognitive learning. Process and continuity are emphasised. Kolb's integrated learning theory is that learning is prompted by the interaction of the learner and the environment. Individual needs and goals are central in determining the type of experience sought and the extent that learning is completed. Completion of the process is vital for development to take place. If the development takes place the individual may be considered for more empowerment.

There is a branch of management philosophy that recognises employee rights to empowerment and participation in decision making beyond collective bargaining. Empowerment means greater freedom, autonomy and self control. Some doubt remains as to whether empowerment is just another term for delegation. Some forms of empowerment aimed at improving the quality of working life produced self-managed work teams and flexible working arrangements. A further development is quality circles. Quality circles are groups of people who meet regularly to discuss day to day working arrangements and problem solving. Problems that prevent effective empowerment include misalignments between responsibility and authority.