For many employees, building a career no longer feels like a straightforward process. Automation is changing the shape of whole industries. Roles that existed a decade ago are disappearing, and new ones are emerging faster than most organisations can train for them.
Against that backdrop, employees are being asked to stay motivated, keep developing and plan for a future that feels genuinely uncertain. For HR and L&D professionals, understanding how to support people through that whilst achieving business objectives is one of the more pressing questions on the agenda right now.
The good news is that career development research gives us a fairly clear picture of what people need when conditions are volatile.. They need to develop the psychological capacity to navigate change, and that is something organisations can actively build.
Why Career Adaptability Is an Essential Skill in Times of Workplace Disruption
Mark Savickas, a career psychologist whose work has shaped the field for decades, developed Career Construction Theory to explain how people build meaningful working lives. A central idea in his framework is career adaptability, which he describes as the readiness to cope with changing work conditions. It draws on four resources he calls the 4Cs: concern, control, curiosity and confidence.
Concern is the ability to think ahead and take the future seriously. Control is the sense that you have agency over your own direction. Confidence relates to believing you can take the steps needed to progress. Curiosity is the willingness to explore possibilities, to consider different futures and different versions of yourself.
Of the four, curiosity has the strongest relationship with adaptability. Employees who actively explore their options and stay open to change tend to handle disruption more successfully than those who do not. In a stable job market that quality is useful. In one being reshaped by automation it becomes something organisations genuinely need their people to have.
Savickas’s research also makes clear that adaptability is not a personality trait people either have or lack. It develops through experience and through the quality of support people receive. That is where coaching comes in.
What Research Tells Us About Career Development Support
Professor Jenny Bimrose and colleagues at the Institute for Employment Research at Warwick University have built significantly on Savickas’s framework, exploring how career adaptability develops across different groups and how the quality of support people receive affects their capacity to grow.
Their research shows that people who engage in regular, structured career conversations develop stronger adaptive resources over time. Their work led to the addition of another “C” – commitment.
What Bimrose’s work also highlights is that access to quality guidance is not equal. Employees from different backgrounds, at different career stages and in different roles often have very different experiences of development support.
When organisations think about building career adaptability across their workforce, they need to think about who is actually receiving that support and whether it is reaching the people who need it most.
How the TGROW Coaching Model Supports Directional Career Development and Upskilling
The TGROW coaching model offers a structured approach to the kind of career conversations that build adaptability. It extends the well-established GROW framework by adding a Topic phase at the start, which invites the employee to identify what they want to focus on before anything else happens. That starting point matters because it gives the employee genuine ownership of the conversation from the beginning.
After the Topic phase, the model moves through Goal, which establishes what the employee is working toward; Reality, which takes an honest look at where they currently are; Options, which opens up possible approaches and directions; and Will, which involves committing to specific next steps.
Used consistently, TGROW does more than help employees plan their next move. It builds the reflective habits that underpin career adaptability. Employees who regularly work through that sequence get better at assessing themselves honestly, generating real options rather than defaulting to the obvious, and moving forward with a clearer sense of direction.
Over time, those habits are exactly what Savickas describes when he talks about developing career adaptability resources, particularly curiosity and confidence.
The model also supports upskilling in a more directed way than generic learning programmes. When employees start from their own goals and their own honest assessment of where they are, the development activity that follows has a much clearer rationale behind it.
Learning feels purposeful because it is connected to something the employee has identified for themselves.
Signs Your Organisation May Have a Career Development Gap
Before thinking about solutions, it is worth considering what is happening in your organisation in practice. These are some of the more common indicators that career development support is not reaching enough of the workforce.
- Coaching and structured development conversations are available to senior leaders and high-potential cohorts but not to employees in broader roles
- Learning activity is high but employees struggle to connect it to a clear career direction
- Employee engagement surveys reveal uncertainty about future opportunities within the organisation
- Managers are expected to have career development conversations but have no structured framework to guide them
- Attrition is higher among mid-level employees who report feeling stuck or unsupported in their development
- Development plans exist on paper but are rarely revisited in a meaningful way between annual reviews
If several of these are familiar, the issue is likely not a lack of learning content. It is a lack of access to the kind of structured, ongoing coaching conversation that helps employees translate learning into direction.
Democratising Career Coaching: Giving Every Employee Access to Quality Development Support
One of the longstanding challenges in L&D is that structured coaching has tended to be available to a relatively small proportion of the workforce. Senior leaders and high-potential employees often have access to executive coaching or dedicated development programmes.
Employees in broader roles typically have less, which means the benefits of structured career conversations are unevenly distributed.
This matters because career adaptability develops through sustained support, not single interventions. If the goal is to build an organisation where people at every level can respond effectively to change, then the coaching provision needs to reflect that.
Democratising access to quality career development is not just a matter of fairness, it’s where organisational resilience actually comes from.
Scaling coaching across an entire workforce is difficult to do through traditional delivery models alone. That is the space where AI-supported coaching tools have a genuine contribution to make, provided the methodology behind them is sound.
How AIDA Uses CCT and TGROW Coaching to Support Career Development at Scale
AIDA, developed by Saffron Interactive, is an AI coaching tool built on the TGROW methodology and measures progress through the Career Construction Theory framework. It was designed to make the quality of structured career coaching available to every employee in an organisation, not just those in senior roles or selected development cohorts.
Because AIDA is grounded in CCT and GROW, employees can assess their skills, and set their own goals from the start of each conversation. The tool does not steer them toward predetermined outcomes or work through a fixed development script. It supports the kind of exploratory, self-directed coaching conversation that research links to genuine adaptability development.
For L&D and HR teams, AIDA’s live dashboards give visibility into development activity and their workforces’ skills landscape across the organisation by region, site or business division. Managers can see how coaching conversations are progressing, identify where additional support might be useful, and understand how development is tracking at a team or organisational level.
That combination of individual autonomy and organisational oversight is difficult to achieve at scale through human-only delivery. It also tracks the 5 Cs – concern, control, curiosity, confidence and commitment to build career adaptability through learning.
AIDA integrates with existing LMS platforms, which means for organisations thinking seriously about responsible AI deployment, that integration is a meaningful practical advantage.
The results reflect this. Over 70% of users report improved work performance after using AIDA, which speaks to what happens when structured coaching is made consistently available rather than reserved for a select few.
The broader goal behind AIDA is straightforward. Every person in an organisation should have access to the kind of coaching conversation that helps them understand where they are, where they want to go, and how to get there.
In a working environment that is changing as quickly as the current one, that kind of support is not a supplementary benefit. It is part of what enables people to keep developing and contributing.
To see how AIDA works in practice and how it fits within your existing L&D provision, book a demo with the Saffron team. Or get in touch if you would like to talk through your organisation’s current development challenges first.
