The idea of career development as an investment in your work force is not new. For decades the term has described the counseling, training and experience opportunities offered by large progressive companies to promising management-level employees. As a rule the participants were young people just entering the organization and being groomed for leadership positions. Another application for career development programs was retraining. Older employees, who had been with the organization for years and had gotten off-track, were placed in career development programs to get them up to speed so that they could keep pace with new and changing technologies being used by the organization. What is new about career development is the challenge to broaden the direction of development programs from strictly upper level management to clerical, technical and operations level employees.