Used by more than 4 thousand organizations, SAP SuccessFactors is a cloud-based human resources package solutions software, helping organizations to digitalize their human resources procedures and manage these procedures in an integrated manner(way), and provide integration with other SAP solutions and third-party software.

In this article, we’ll be talking about the features of Career Development Module, which is included into human resources talent management procedures of the SuccessFactors solution that modularizes human resources procedures and allows us to run these modules in integration with each other. Following module-related statements, we’ll cover points of integration with other modules.

With SAP SuccessFactors Career Development Module, you can motivate your employees by providing meaningful career plans and career opportunities, and create development goals and learning activities for their development. Career Development Module helps human resources specialists dealing with development of the employees within the organization via four different tools. These tools are:

• Career Path
• Career Plan
• Development Plan
• Mentoring Programs

Career Path

It helps with aligning career goals of the employees with business requirements of the organization and populating the section of suggested roles in the Career Plan page for employees.

Roles within the organization can be interconnected within a predecessor-successor relationship. Due to this connection referred to as career path, the system can suggest future roles for employees. Employees can explore the career paths prepared for their current roles, and identify the points to be improved in order to be assigned to such roles in future, and create development goals to make up for these qualities with their managers.

Career Plan

With a Career Plan worksheet, you can encourage your employees within the organization to explore their career paths, identify the missing qualities for getting ready for their future roles, and create development goals accordingly.

Career Plan is a tool that allows employees to plan their careers. Employees can add their future roles by performing a role search or via roles suggested for them. They can add development goals to make up for their missing competencies through viewing the competencies needed for employees to be assigned to these roles, and launch role readiness forms for evaluation of their readiness for the desired role.

System evaluates the readiness of employees for future roles by using competencies required by such roles and the evaluations of employees in terms of these competencies.

Development Plan

Development Plan is the tool in which development goals can be added and managed for employees. Achievements included into continuous performance management in relation to the goal, and goal-related learning activities can be viewed and managed via this tool. Learning process for employees can be accelerated through affiliation of development goals with trainings within learning module for customers using SAP SuccessFactors Learning Management System.

The information intended to be kept within development plans and development goals can be configured to customer requests.

Mentoring Programs

Mentoring Programs are the programs created within organization for employees to continuously learn new skills, build interdepartmental relations and make progress towards leadership positions. Smart mentorship offer helps employees check out their development and make their career ready for future. It allows for human resources departments to create successful mentorship programs without any need for manual and time-consuming administrative work to match mentors with mentees.

Boosted by a smart algorithm, mentorship offer provides mentor-mentee matching based on factors such as skills, competencies, job title, department, manager, location, personal preferences of mentors and mentees, and focus areas. Since data collected through these programs are reportable, it can be used for analyzing and developing mentorship and other talent strategies.

SAP SuccessFactors Career Development Module allows organizations to create three different mentoring program:

• Supervised
• Unsupervised
• Open Enrollment

Supervised mentoring programs:

• System administrator invites mentors and mentees to sign up for the program.
• System administrator manually edits mentor-mentee matches.
• Program dates are final, and mentor registrations end once mentee registrations start.

Unsupervised mentoring programs:

• System administrator invites mentors and mentees to sign up for the program.
• Mentees send matching request to mentors directly without any intervention from system administrator.

Open Enrollment mentoring programs:

• No invitation is sent to mentors and mentees to sign up for the program.
• Mentees send matching request directly to mentors.
• There is no end date for programs.

Points of Integration

• The job profile configuration within the SuccessFactors Suite is the basis for the career development module as well as working together with the recruitment management, performance and goal management modules. Goals, future role assignments and suggestions within career development module are powered by SuccessFactors job profile configuration. Thus, it’s required for SAP SuccessFactors job profile (job families, roles, roles-related competencies etc.) configuration to be adapted into the system for effective use of Career Development module. While career paths are created via roles within the job profile configuration, readiness for future roles is based on competencies assigned to roles.
• Development goals can be added to performance evaluation forms, and if desired, they can be taken into consideration as part of the performance evaluation procedure.
• For acceleration of learning process, career development module also allows for organizations using SuccessFactors Learning Management System module to add training to their development goals within learning module.