Effect of career development on employee engagement in Nairobi city county, Kenya

Abstract

Career development is one strategy that employers deploy to reduce employee turnover and to improve employee’s morale, motivation and engagement at work. Employees at Nairobi City County feel that they are not well engaged in their work despite of their long term development and capabilities. Employees’ engagement and assignment of duties is marred by favourism and biasness; this coupled with unclear structures has led to regular employee tardiness, high absenteeism, long lunch breaks, frequent unrests and poor service delivery. This study sought to establish effect of career development on employee engagement. Specific objectives included, establishing effect of employee training on employee engagement, to determine the effect of career planning on employee engagement, to evaluate effect of career counselling on employee engagement and, to evaluate effect of career mentoring on employee engagement. This study was anchored on Expectancy theory, Ego identity theory and Social cognitive career theory. The study adopted explanatory research design. The target population involved was two hundred and eighty two (282) staff of Nairobi City County HR department. A census sampling technique was employed to determine the study sample, thus taking the entire population as a sample. Data for the study was collected by use of questionnaires. Data was analysed descriptively using mean, mode, standard deviations. In addition, correlation and regression analysis were used to test the relationship and effect of independent variables on the dependent variable. The findings established that employee training; career planning, mentorship and counselling are basic elements which make employees engaged in their work and make them productive to the organization. The regression findings showed R 2 is 0.471; this implied that holding all other factors constant, the study variables which are training, career planning, career counselling, and career mentoring significantly accounts for 47.1% of employees’ engagement at work places. Statistically, the overall relationship was very significant with significant value, P value = 0.000, (P < 0.05). In conclusion, this study established that employee training (p=0.168, r=0.001), career planning (p=0.495, r=0.000), career counselling (p=0.570, r=0.000) and career mentoring (p=0.152, r=0.101) were positive predictors of employees’ engagement at NCC. However, hypothesis testing showed that employee training, career planning and career counseling have significant effect on employee engagement; they all showed coefficient values less than 0.05(P <0.05), while career mentoring proved to have no significant effect on employee engagement at Nairobi City County, P=0.101>0.05. This study recommended that governments through legislations and policy making process should give the County governments’ HR departments’ ability to implement training programs and other career development initiatives to improve on employees’ competencies. Secondly, the County government should put up structures and policies that promote career development and growth of employees. Additionally, this study recommends that the County government should formulate mentorship programmes to ensure skill transfer from senior staff to the newly recruited employees. This ensures that a strong succession plan and a clear career path for all employees at Nairobi City County