Career Management and Development November 2005 - CIPD

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development 

Professional Development Scheme 

Specialist Personnel and Development 

Career Management and 

Development 

November 2005 

10 November 13:50-16:00hrs 

2005 

Time allowed - Two hours and ten minutes (including ten minutes’ 

reading time). 

Answer Section A and seven of the ten questions in Section B. 

Please write clearly and legibly. 

Questions may be answered in any order. 

Equal marks are allocated to each section of the paper. 

Within Section B equal marks are allocated to each question. 

If a question includes reference to ‘your organisation’, this may be 

interpreted as covering any organisation with which you are 

familiar. 

The case study is not based on an actual company. Any 

similarities to known organisations are accidental. 

You will fail the examination if: 

• you fail to answer seven questions in Section B and/or 

Registered charity no: 1079797 

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CAREER MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT 

NOVEMBER 2005 

• you achieve less than 40 per cent in any section. 

SECTION A – Case Study 

Note: It is permissible to make assumptions by adding to the case study details 

given below provided the essence of the case study is neither changed nor 

undermined in any way by what is added. 

Following a Business Strategy Review and the £35 million acquisition of a leading 

web design and build company, Matador plc has created a new £400 million UK 

business called Home Access. The services offered by Home Access cover three 

main business areas and incorporate established business units. 

The three main areas are: Solutions Design - the development of websites, online and 

printed catalogues and the marketing of brands over the Internet; Customer Value 

Creation - the resources and systems needed to manage customer service i.e. 

management of databases, credit management, account processing and customer 

contact centres and Logistics - process management from order processing and 

warehousing to delivery of goods to the customer. 

The company wishes to create a new Career Development Strategy that reflects the 

modern, optimistic and positive culture of the new venture and that adopts a 

partnership approach. Throughout the recent changes the Corporate 

Communications Unit has emphasised the ‘importance of our people’. However the 

restructuring of the organisation following the acquisition has naturally meant 

redundancies, and changes that have caused anxieties amongst many employees 

and these have not been addressed. 

The total number of employees is 2000, of whom 35 per cent are call centre advisers 

who have direct contact with the customer, 35 per cent are involved in warehousing 

and home delivery and 20 per cent in the development of Internet activities. The 

remaining 10 per cent are involved in sundry roles. The highest turnover is in the call 

centres with 30 per cent leaving last year. 

Currently appraisals are linked to Annual Pay Reviews and have been seen as a 

matter of ‘do I get a rise or not’ Most managers simply either put forward their 

employees for a grade rise, or exclude them on the basis of poor performance. The 

system has not been consistent across the organisation. 

The organisation has changed from a traditional hierarchical structure to one that has 

more project development teams and less clearly defined roles. This has meant 

fewer promotion opportunities and less employment security and the company needs 

to compensate for this in order to improve motivation and commitment. 

There is a Planning and Resource Team that is responsible for succession and 

replacement planning at the ten call centres. They collate statistics supplied to them 

by managers, and issue recruitment plans. Managers are sometimes unaware of the 

implication of the figures they submit and often delegate the job. Smaller departments 

such as Payroll and Finance have no succession planning and managers have little 

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or no training in this area. 



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Assessment Centres are used on an ad-hoc basis, when and where the need arises. 

Call centre advisers who show potential are encouraged to attend in order to decide if 

they are ‘team manager material’. In the call centre environment the ultimate goal is 

to become a team manager and all team managers used to be customer advisers. 

Those who are successful at the assessment centre may be used for stand-in and 

designate positions and performance at these times will be considered for applicants 

for a team manager’s job. 

Redundancy outplacement workshops have been hard to organise across the 

company, with a minimum of ten people being required to make it viable and a 

shortage of staff trained to run them. 

You are the newly appointed Career Development Manager and have been 

asked to produce a career development strategy with a specific focus on the 

call centres. Drawing upon contemporary research: 

1. Produce a report to the HR Director that indicates the general 

career management and development issues facing the merged 

organisation. 

2. Describe, justify and prioritise the key elements of your proposed 

career development strategy for the call centres. 

You should spend equal amounts of time on tasks (1) and (2). 

PLEASE TURN OVER 

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SECTION B 

Answer SEVEN of the ten questions in this section. To communicate your 

answer more clearly, you may use whatever methods you wish, for example 

diagrams, flow charts, bullet points, as long as you provide explanations with 

these. 

1. Evaluate the significance for career management in your organisation of 

one governmental initiative in the field of vocational education and training. 

2. Drawing upon research findings, how might you use past assessment of 

an individual’s strengths and weaknesses to help clarify their future 

development 

3. Assess the use your organisation can make of local colleges to foster the 

career development of staff. 

4. Drawing upon research findings and evidence from good practice, explain 

the major factors that lead to personal development plans, drawn up at 

development centres, not being implemented. How could implementation 

rates be improved 

5. How might a 21 year old individual who has just left university set about 

self-assessing their motivation/aptitude/aspiration for a given career route 

What degree of reliance can a career adviser place on the assessment 

outcome 

6. Drawing on examples from your own organisation, explain the ways in 

which individuals can acquire transferable skills. 

7. Prepare a briefing note for the senior management team that summarises 

the benefits for the employee and employer of holding drop-in lunch break 

career action workshops. 

8. How would you distinguish between differential and developmental theories 

of occupational choice What are the practical implications of this 

distinction 

9. Explain to a group of undergraduate business students how ethical 

principles found in professional codes of practice have impacted upon the 

work of career’s guidance practitioners. 

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10. A friend has stated that a recent in-house survey in her organisation has 

revealed that most of the secretaries there have expressed no interest 

whatsoever in career development initiatives. She has asked you for any 

suggestions you might have to change their mindset. What advice would 

you give 

END OF EXAMINATION 

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PDS – Career Management and Development 

EXAMINER'S REPORT 


Introduction 

There were six candidates for this diet, all of them coming from the single centre that 

submitted candidates for the May examination. The overall pass rate was 50%, 

broken down as follows. 


Grade 

Number of 

candidates 

Distinction 0 0 

Merit 0 0 

Pass 3 50 

Marginal Fail 0 0 

Fail 3 50 

Total 6 100 

Percentage of 

total 

The results were disappointing. This was the lowest pass rate yet for this subject, and 

there were no Merits or Distinctions. More significantly, there was virtually no attempt 

made by candidates to draw upon published sources, be they research- based or 

more general, either for Section A or B. 

The failures all arose from candidates’ difficulties with Section B, where each 

question focuses on a specific part of the syllabus, as opposed to the more general 

coverage in Section A. The inference shouldn’t be drawn from this that Section B 

questions are harder than Section A questions. It draws attention to how important it 

is for candidates to prepare themselves across the whole range. For this small group 

there was a general lack of theoretical underpinning in their answers. 

Section A 

The scenario takes two increasingly familiar situations – that of mergers and call 

centre operations – and asks career management and development specialists to 

evaluate these from their professional perspective. It particularly focuses on those 

aspects of the syllabus that deal with the organisational management of careers in 

such a setting. All candidates achieved the 50% threshold, with a spread of marks 

from 50–61%. 

Question 1 

This should have proved to be a very rich scenario for prepared candidates, enabling 

them to apply their knowledge and understanding to various groupings within the 

organisation, operating on different sites, and with fundamentally different roles, and 

confronting merger issues. There is additionally an array of research – including 

research from the CIPD – dealing with problems associated with perceived changes 

to the psychological contract and perceived barriers to career development. On the 

whole, candidates dealt satisfactorily with the question at a pragmatic diagnostic level. 

Very few theoretical references emerged however. One candidate effectively drew 

upon Baruch and Herriot and Pemberton, but this was an exception.




Question 2 

Various possibilities present themselves here as in all questions, asking candidates to 

develop strategic options and priorities. But the answers should have at least made 

reference to a) generic debates in the literature as to the level of stress or otherwise 

in call centres, and b) concerns relating to outsourcing and offshoring of such 

activities. The issues of isolation, stress and narrowness of career development 

opportunities for call centre staff – often predominantly women – and how these might 

be handled have also emerged in a number of studies. Candidates were however, 

almost to a person, totally silent on any of these points, which contributed to a set of 

weak answers to this question. 

Section B 

Question 1 

Prepared candidates should have found this to be a straightforward evaluation 

question relating practices in their organisation to a mainstream syllabus area. There 

are of course a number of governmental initiatives that they could have chosen from. 

Surprisingly, only 50% of candidates chose this question, two with bare pass answers 

and one who did not reach the threshold. 

Question 2 

This is another mainstream syllabus area. There is much in the general literature on 

appraisal that reports studies addressing the issue of assessing strengths and 

weaknesses as a basis for making judgments about future potential. Four out of the 

six candidates attempted this question, none of them reaching the threshold. 

Question 3 

The syllabus clearly covers use of local colleges. The question addresses 

candidates’ understanding of their organisational reality and their ability to address 

issues emerging – answers would, of course, depend upon the size of the 

organisation. All candidates attempted this question, 50% of whom achieved the pass 

threshold. 

Question 4 

This question tests both theoretical and practical awareness of a well-known 

phenomenon. Two out of the five who attempted it achieved a merit-level mark. The 

remaining three were below 50%. 

Question 5 

Self-assessment of motivation and aptitudes for career routes is a mainstream




syllabus area, as are the issues emerging. Prepared candidates should be familiar 

with these, and with the theoretical backcloth surrounding self-assessment, including 

concepts such as self-efficacy. Four candidates attempted it, only two of whom 

achieved a pass level, and in both cases the mark was marginal. No significant theory 

underpinned any of the answers. 

Question 6 

Again, this should have proved to be a straightforward question for a prepared 

candidate, drawing upon a mainstream syllabus area. Much has been written on the 

subject of transferable skills both in general career management and development 

textbooks, governmental reports and specialist journals. Each candidate had a go at 

this question and four out of the six achieved a pass-level mark. 

Question 7 

There are a number of sources that discuss the value of career action workshops. 

Candidates were expected of course to contextualise these to their own 

organisational reality. This was the best answered of all of the questions, with all but 

one of the candidates attempting it achieving a pass level. 

Question 8 

Not a single candidate attempted this question, despite the fact that both differential 

and developmental theories of occupational choice are specifically referred to in the 

CIPD Standards for this subject. The concepts are very simple – differential theories 

are based on such things as gender and class differences, and developmental 

theories are based on such issues as predetermined life stages/cycles. 

Question 9 

Two candidates attempted this question, neither reaching the pass threshold. I was 

surprised at this given the current emphases on ethical principles and codes of 

practice. 

Question 10 

As a career development officer it is an essential skill to know how to give advice. All 

candidates attempted this question relating to career development opportunities for 

secretaries and 50% of them gave advice in their answers that took them over the 

pass threshold. 

John Walton 

Examiner



November 2005

Career Management and Development November 2005 - CIPD

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