What is Career Planning?

Normally, employees want to advance and grow in their careers. Most indiviuals develop quite early in life an idea or a mental image of what career they would like to pursue. Unless an organization meets these desires and aspirations of its employees it cannot make optimum use of its human resources. But organizations have their own requirements and constraints which limit their capacity to meet the employee expectations. Career planning is an important technique for productive resolution of this conflict, between the indiviual and the organization.
From employees view point career planning can be defined as a systematic process by which one decides his/her career goals and the path to reach these goals. While, from an organization's point of view, career planning stands for the forward looking employment policies in which employees are helped to plan their careers in terms of their capacities within the context of organization's needs.