Deborah Broome asks:
>Has anyone out there developed or work(ed) for a company that engages
>employees in preparing learning plans or development plans. I'm thinking
>of a document that an employee and supervisor would outline together that
>targeted the employees career goals, promotional goals, learning goals and
>identified specific training courses, educational courses etc. that they
>wished to do during the year, either work related or not.
I have recently left a $500M global consultancy who advocated this type of
career planning mechanism before and to some degree after a recent merger.
As with all things there were IMHO many pluses and minuses.
Pluses:
(1) Gave career managers a good feedback and dialogue tool with the
employee
(2) Good planning vehicle for personal growth (in line with the philosophy
that each employee "owns their own career")
(3) Validated and completed initial career plans were placed in the
personal file of each employee and reviewed at the annual performance
appraisal.
The minuses:
(1) Inconsistency in approach (not everyone was trained and not everyone
had an effective manager who "bought into" the idea) -- I personally was
very lucky to have such good managers
(2) Lost its fire after about 4 years when management changed (post-merger)
(3) Low awareness to process for new employees who joined after 2 years
from roll-out, creating a caste system of haves and have-nots WRT career
plans.
All in all I am a strong proponent of them, and hope to introduce this
concept into my new organization. But some cultures are not conducive to
such career planning (automotive industry is a good example in the
non-management/non-technical ranks). Often they are very difficult to
introduce throughout the organization. I would suggest doing so by edict
to get the ball going, making it a new requirement of all managers but
with supporting systems to help them down the initial process over the
first 1-2 years.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
William D. (Bill) Newman CMC
Manager, Applied Technologies Group
AOK Controls
Waterford, MI
--"William Newman" <bruinz@sprynet.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>