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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 |
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