# Emergent Career Development By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2023-01-04 A reflective and insightful manager who truly cares about your career development will recommend 8 times out of 10 that you leave the organization. If they put you into the company's development program or pay for additional training, closely examine the costs. If they pay for your development, they expect you to stay around or repay them. But sticking around is the quickest way to limit your career growth in most organizations. Many studies show that moving companies result in the largest pay increases and fastest promotions. The unknown outsider always seems more attractive than the known quantity. You see it all the time, regardless of the internal propaganda about hiring from within. So, we seem to have run into a paradox. Most companies have programs for career development or at least say they value it, but they often hire outsiders first rather than the people they spent time developing. This makes no sense until you consider that the company really wants stability from high performers in current roles and, this is important, at low pay. Telling early career, high performers they are being developed within the company keeps their pay low without dealing with actual change that would come via actual advancement. Keeping people where they are is simply the most cost-effective in terms of short-term thinking. Lower payroll expenses and lower management burden. When a person does leave, it is easier in the short term to hire someone from the outside at a higher cost than deal with shuffling everyone through the ranks and the management burden that would create. This highlights an unexpected, emergent behavior when organizations collide with human nature. It would seem that the organizational system is set up to minimize costs, but we have seen how it actually doesn't achieve this. When encountering paradoxes, think beyond the surface, focus on the interactions, and hunt for human motivations. If no one will listen, get a job somewhere else to really develop your career. #### Related Items [[Management]] [[Organizational Analytics]] [[Systems Thinking]] [[Psychology]] [[Complex Systems]] [[Career Advancement]]