The career development plan helps to strategically think about the employee’s career at the faculty and opens space for discussion between the employee and the head of department. Therefore, both of them are asked to complete the plan, each of them in a different manner.
The plan is created for the period until the next evaluation (i.e. usually for three years for employees with fixed-term contracts and five years for employees with open-ended contracts. At the same time, the head of department should have a meeting with each employee to discuss the extent to which the plan is being fulfilled. When necessary, the plan can be officially updated at these meetings, introducing minor changes in it.
For employees, the “career development plan” section provides an opportunity to reflect on their work at the faculty in the next years. The ideas presented are not binding, but rather outline the employee’s current vision, which may of course change over the years. It is OK to have more plans than can realistically be implemented, and to adjust them over the years in response to circumstances. Therefore, employees do not have to worry that by stating an intention to write, say, and article on a particular topic, they are committing themselves to actually having to write an article on exactly that topic.
While the career development plan completed by the employee is not binding, the follow-up plan completed by the head of department is. The head of department completes the career development plan based on the intentions presented by the employee and based on the interview.In doing so, the head of department must differentiate between the non-binding and binding part; the latter will constitute the employee’s job description. It is important to be realistic and to take into account that none of us really knows exactly what we will be doing in three years’ time. The plan drawn up by the head of department should avoid any particularities that may change unexpectedly over the years (e.g., publication themes) and be sufficiently general and flexible to practically guarantee its implementability.
The plan drawn up by the head of department is therefore based on the general job description provided in the Catalogue of Job Positions, which is specified in the form of various sub-tasks. The degree of their specificity depends on the employee’s performance (they can therefore influence it by their activity). If the employee successfully engages in a range of activities on their own, it is advisable to give them as much space as possible for autonomous growth and not to try to push them forward with any pressure.In such cases, the tasks may be outlined almost as generally as those laid down in the job description (such as “publishes in major journals or collective monographs, at least in part on international scale”). Employees who work well but tend to keep their activity at the necessary minimum can be assigned smaller stimulating tasks (such as “will publish at least one international publication”, “will innovate at least one subject”, “will apply for at least one project with the Czech Science Foundation – GAČR”, etc.). The situation is different for staff with inadequate performance, where it is being decided about their further employment at the faculty. In these cases, the tasks must be defined as precisely as possible, also in the short term (“must submit at least one article to a peer-reviewed journal”, etc.).
