4 Responses

1. 10 year development plan for graduates…
   Hi Kon
   Had this have been asked 10 years ago I would have said easy… buy now…

   In 10 years will the company even be building cars? Technology is changing so fast in this arena that anything that you plan for now will be different in 5 years let alone 10.

   While you can easily develop a soft skills plan, actually developing a management skills plan will vary considerably. With migrant workers moving around the globe, and the varying cultures that this generates I doubt if there is a predictable management development programme that will be robust enough to survive this length of time.

   I would start with the companies strategic plan & goals and align a strategic level plan to meeting these needs – so look at the focus of need on the strategic plan – what is increasingly important and hoe can you best equip individuals to this goal based upon the current situation.

   Ensure that the focus of early development programmes is on learning & innovation. I have recently developed a management development programme for a international construction companys’ graduates and put a development programme together which will support the business to achieve its 5 year goals.

   We initally concentrate on Learning to learn faster – accelorated learning, mulitple intellegencies(Gardner) etc and developing an innovative capacity using Byrds work (www.creatrix.com)at individual team & organisational levels. Here behaviours are the focus rather than skills.

   Mike

2. Self Managed Learning
   If you are looking at a 10 year plan then I would say a crucial element would be supporting the graduates to become experts in managing their own learning. A structured self managed learning programme (see Ian Cunningham’s work or the Centre for Self Managed Learning’s website) will help the graduates to work with your company to map out what they need currently and in the future. They will then be in a good place to take control of their own careers rather than imposing a bureaucractic structure which is likely to go out of date within the next year let alone 10 years!
   Best wishes
   Christine

3. Career Dev for graduates
   Hi. Have you read the recent CIPD report -Managing employee careers, issues trends and prospects.

   Indicated that majority of employers believe that employees should be responsible for managing their careers.

   That said the Windmills programme is excellent and can be found at:

   http://www.windmillsprogramme.com/

4. Career development programme
   What an interesting project!
   I guess I have lots of questions rather than advice as such – but here goes, in no particular order, with the intention of being helpful:
   What are/will be the links to the company’s Manpower and Succession planning mechanisms? What are the competencies (indeed are there any?) that they are working towards – both job skills and people/managerial/leadership skills and will these inform the topics for the training required? How will they (and you) measure and track their improvement? How will you spot those with high potential and what will you do for this population (or is there a feed to a company HiPo programme?)? How does this programme link in to any other career development programs that this company currently runs? What are the minimum standards required for these jobs and how will any necessary performance management be handled? Is there a current appraisal scheme (that works)? How are they managed and what is the calibre of that management? Is there an opportunity (or indeed a necessity) for job swaps and secondments so that these people can get a handle on how the company works? How do you get buy-in from the various stakeholders involved?
   Good luck – I think it’ll be a fascinating project to set this up from scratch.
   best wishes
   Andie
   Andie Hemming