Career planning, performance and OD

Career planning aligns what employees want (growth, security, challenge) with what the organisation needs (people ready for bigger roles). It runs through self-assessment, exploring opportunities, setting goals and acting on them — and the organisation supports it with career paths, counselling, mentoring and succession planning. Performance management is the wider system: setting expectations, coaching through the year, appraising results, and using the outcome for pay, development and promotion decisions. Worked example: an engineer rated 'excellent' for three years but never promoted shows a broken link between appraisal and career planning — the appraisal measured performance, but nobody planned the next role, so the organisation loses a motivated employee it had already proven.