Attracting, developing, and retaining key employees are critical business imperatives today. Many segments of business already face a potentially serious shortage of workers with critical skills, and this problem is expected to become more acute in the coming decades (Conway, 2007; Powers, 2007). This skills shortage could jeopardize the survival of many businesses unless steps are taken to address this issue (May, 2006). One of the best ways for firms to ensure they will have employees with the necessary technical and business skills in the future is to focus on providing better career development and career planning opportunities for their current employees (Kirton, 2006). While the critical role career development will play in the future success of many firms has been well established, surprisingly little research has been done on specifically what types of tools, techniques, or processes lead to the most effective career development plans. In this research, one potential career planning aid, mind mapping, is examined to determine whether it can be an effective aid to those creating career plans or making career decisions.

To assess the effectiveness of mind mapping as an aid to career planning, a quasi-experiment was conducted with students in a college career development class. All subjects were first given two common commercially available tests designed to measure their career decision making ability. Next the experiment group was given several hours of training in mind mapping and shown how mind mapping techniques could be used to aid in career planning and general decision making. Finally both groups were retested to determine if the experiment group showed significantly greater improvement than the control group. In addition to testing for the effect of mind mapping this study also included the examination of correlations between a number of demographic variables and scores on the two test instruments.