Tag: HRZone

Career Development – Are We Getting It Right?

How people create opportunities for career development, and growth through learning has aways fascinated me. I’ve previously undertaken research into the subject which has yielded some disappointing results.

For example, at a major UK charity I worked with, over half (53%) of 800 respondents said they did not have a development plan outlining agreed training and development needs for the coming year, and almost half (49%) said they did not meet regularly with their manager to discuss progress.

I also found that out of 1800 respondents working for a local authority, only 33% felt their career development aspirations are being met, and from a team of 400 graduates in a global company, only 35% felt they got regular, useful feedback from their manager.

These statistics are pretty uninspiring I think you’d agree, but so what?

Companies are always talking about the importance of attracting, retaining and engaging the best people, but these numbers show that these experiences are not always well delivered.

And employees are looking for personal involvement and more self determination in their work and career choices, yet these numbers show me that neither the company or the employee is well served by the processes currently in place.

What do you think?

How representative is the research I have? For sure the sample sizes are reasonable but is the approach to career and development planning really this bad across the board?

I’m currently doing some work with a company called Careergro, and we want to improve and share a broader understanding of how companies and employees perceive career development.

So we would like you to help us with this research and in order to do this, we’ve published two very short surveys, one for employers, and one for employees. Each survey takes only around three minutes to complete and will give us useful data which we will freely share.

The first cut of data will be available at the forthcoming CIPD learning and development event in London on 25th and 26th April, and we will also be sharing the results and reporting back here and on HRZone too.

Here is the link to the employer survey, and here is the link to the employee survey.

We would really appreciate your help in completing this and if you can share it with your colleagues too that would be great. Thanks in advance for your help and I look forward to sharing the results with you soon.

photo c/o heath_bar

Sharing and Growing – A Social Framework

A social framework

So there I was, goofing around on Facebook back at the end of January, when this intriguing picture caught my eye. It’s called ‘a social framework‘ and it was being shared by sharer par excellence, William Tincup.

William used it to frame a talk he gave at The Workforce Institute about where he spends time on social, doing what, why…etc. Thereafter William stuck it on Facebook. Now I like to make my talks about the conversation – I usually just use a few photos and images on screen to provoke discussion and trigger a few thoughts in my head and I really like the way William has framed a discussion on one slide here. I was keen to learn more about what William meant by ‘promotion, 30 days’ so I got in touch and William fed back:

Doug – think of it this way… Gen 1 – it was enough to just be smart, Gen 2 – one had to be smart AND create thoughtful content, Gen 3 – assume Gen 1 and Gen 2 AND promote the heck out of stuff… so, most people create content and promote it once or twice… IMHO, that’s not enough… I suggest a promotion schedule that is more like 30 to 1… for example, create a thoughtful blog post and promote it (differently) for 30 days… rather than just once, twice or three times… or so goes the thought process…

I’ve been thinking about sharing and growing for a while. I enjoy writing this blog and I work hard at it and though still modest, the traffic volumes are picking up (hey I busted through the 4,000 visits mark last month – thanks folks). I tweet my blog posts once or twice when I write them, sometimes stick ’em on Facebook and LinkedIn too if relevant.

And I’ve played around with taking my game to where bigger audiences are. I mean – if my content is good enough, hell I don’t have to just host it here. My Waltzing Matilda collaboration with @democracyfail garnered over 10,000 hits at Human Capital League last year, compared with 800 direct hits on youtube and 134 on here. Clearly waaaaay more than I could manage by being too parochial and expecting folks to come by here all the time. So I guess I’m saying, get over yourself. If your stuff is good, find ways to get it out there as well as just leaving it on your own front doorstep.

I’m intrigued by William’s ‘3o day’ plan so I’m having a play at combining that with the ‘go to where the crowd is’ technique I’ve just illustrated. I’m using the recent report I wrote on Social Media in HR as the content for the experiment. It’s very early days, so far I’ve used this blog, and Scribd to host it. HRZone picked up on it and invited me to run it over that their place too, where it snuck into the top ten most read 😉 It’s on the CIPD Facebook page and Michael Carty will soon be providing a link from XpertHR. Thanks in advance.

So far this experiment has yielded a seven fold increase in hits to this report (comparing direct hits to here against those I can track elsewhere). I’m pretty happy with the return on investment so far.

I intend to move on and reframe the report for my customer service audience too. After all – what chance has a company of being social outside if it can’t get social inside? It will be interesting to see how this part of the experiment evolves and I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, huge thanks to William for encouraging me to look into sharing and growing anew. And to all of you I’d ask, what works for you? How do you share and grow ideas? I’d love to hear what you think.