Talent & Learning Organization Launches New Career Development Philosophy

THE SITUATION

The Global Head of Talent & Learning at a Fortune 500 technology company had a new vision for career development. He wanted to encourage employees to grow their career within the company and offer tools and resources for managers and employees to have more effective career development conversations. Initially, he reached out to Blue Beyond to develop a toolkit for employees.

Around the same time, it was brought to light that another team had plans to launch an internal website focused on learning. Since learning is a big part of developing a career, we knew we needed to help the organization communicate and align on what they were both hoping to achieve and start working together toward a common goal.

After working with project managers through several iterations of a career and learning website, we unfortunately still ran into roadblocks that stemmed from siloed thinking, lack of alignment from leaders, and lack of access to key decision-makers. It was time for a new approach.

WHAT WE DID

We designed and facilitated a two-day workshop with the goal of aligning leaders on a purpose, vision, and philosophy for learning and career development at the company. The entire Talent and Learning organization leadership team — which included leaders from around the world responsible for performance management, learning, employee communications, talent management and more — came together and were fully committed to getting this done.

Design Thinking Workshop

The two-day workshop focused on creating a compelling and inspiring career development experience for employees.

• Understanding the user experience. Day one focused on encouraging leaders to think strategically about the user experience. Through design thinking exercises and employee personas, leaders learned to empathize with employees’ unique needs, interests, and concerns. By understanding what matters to them most, we were able to create an organizing framework for the career development experience and the “ecosystem” of available offerings in a way that’s intuitive to employees. Then we developed the narrative necessary to help shift employee mindsets, change behaviors, and inspire them to engage in growing their careers at the company.
• Bringing the vision and employee experience to life. With the organizing framework and narrative in place, day two focused on working together to design the architecture for the career development and learning website in a way that made it easy for employees to take advantage of the many resources, tools, and opportunities available to own and drive their career growth.

With the workshop as our jumping off point, and all stakeholders fully engaged, we had the action plan, timeline, and momentum we needed. We collaborated with the leadership team and “tiger teams” within the Talent and Learning organization to create tools and resources. We held focus groups with people from all levels and locations around the globe to get feedback on the site architecture, messaging, and content. We also did a soft launch to all of HR to incorporate their feedback. Four months after the workshop, we launched the new career development website to global employees.

Tools We Developed

• Self Reflection Questionnaire to help employees think through where they want to go next in their career and what steps they can take and resources they can lean on within company to get there
• Meaningful Conversation Guide to enable employees to have more productive conversations with their manager
• Peer Conversation Guide to encourage employees to reach out to colleagues in other departments or functions to learn about other career opportunities within the company with tips and templates to help facilitate these discussions
• Tip sheet on how to ask for and give feedback