Talent managers know transitions are often a key part of leadership and career development for employees. In times of change, individuals can re-explore their goals, assess their capabilities, accelerate their learning and close gaps in their experience. Talent managers too often fail to consider how transitions out of an organization — through the outplacement process — can be a powerful development opportunity. Further, when companies offer their employees career transition services, it communicates something important to the marketplace about their commitment to staff empowerment. In the end, providing outplacement as a learning experience benefits an organization’s brand as an employer.

However, talent leaders might think twice about building outplacement into the employee learning experience. But there are core values that ought to inform outplacement practices. The following principles serve as an important guide.

Respect the dignity of each person who receives services. While outplacement professionals make their livelihood from doing this work, they must not celebrate when people are let go from an employer. Further, candidates — the professional term for individuals in career transition, whereas a client is a company that retains the vendor — who partake of transition services are not victims. While candidates may begin their work in an outplacement program with some degree of pain, fear or anger, they have the opportunity to provide significant value in their next venture. The best outplacement professionals see each candidate’s skills, talents and capabilities and help that candidate advance a career search where he or she can use those talents to promote new levels of success.

Treat every person as unique. Commoditizing outplacement is unacceptable. While core models and approaches can be used in a best-practice manner to provide services, outplacement firms should never serve candidates in a way that is overly scripted or prescribed. While this can create scalability challenges, outplacement firms cannot retain the level of service clients expect if they create mechanical processes that do not consider each person’s unique challenges. This is especially true of executive-level services that require sophisticated customization to help executives achieve success in a complex, rapidly changing marketplace. Accordingly, outplacement is often called career transition consulting because it blends multiple approaches — individual coaching, appropriate group networking and training, and electronic services — while considering the context each person presents.

Help individuals achieve their goals with purpose and commitment. The outplacement professional’s role in career transition is to help candidates achieve a degree of stability after job loss. Consultants provide guidance, knowledge and tools that enable candidates to take control of their career searches. Outplacement coaches empower candidates to demonstrate the kind of leadership that will help them achieve true career growth and development. Transition coaches help individuals take actions in specific ways, but they do not take those actions for the candidates.