Career development guild
Career development is a program that Critical Mass runs that is pretty unique. This program pairs each person with a mentor in their field. This person is in charge of their growth, development and writing performance reviews based on peer feedback.
IDEA
We wanted to create a space for career developers to get together share insights and get supports from their peers that would ultimately help improve the craft of career development
PROBLEM
Career development is something that I am really passionate about. My approach to career development is not just to manage the individuals career while at the company but help them in their broader career. I typically book 1:1s every other week at a coffee shop to help build our relationship and create a safe space for the individual I work with.
Through conversations with my direct reports they indicated that their peers receive varying levels of support and quality from their career developers. This made me curious, so I started probing with my fellow career developers.
This looked like a really big opportunity to improve the quality of our career develop practice in Toronto and use the learnings to bolster the career development program globally.
I partnered with our EVP of Talent so this would work well with our existing career development program so this could tie in with the existing career development program and receive executive support.
We would do this through monthly meetings that would either be free form discussions, more structured HR training, Ted Talk style or moderated discussion with activities. We would create a companion slack channel to help keep career developers abreast of key dates along with updates about the meetings.
Ideally this would help create more of a practice around career development and help foster conversations outside slack and the meetings.
Our first session would serve as an introduction to the guild and career development as a practice. Our next 3 months would focus on holding a review meeting, setting up development session right and setting goals and expectations to align with the next development review cycle.
Conflicts of interest
Having career developers of career developers in the same room might be potentially challenging.
Development stages
We need to accommodate developers that work with talent at various levels in their career at the same time. The challenges at different levels can potentially be very different
Creating a feedback loop
As we continuously learn from our peers to be better career developers, there will be ideas on how to make the practice better.
CONSIDERATIONS
SUCCESS MEASURES
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Improved survey feedback around career development
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Improved performance of talent
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Reduction in questions around performance review times
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Reduction in complaints about career developers
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Reduction in churn related to career development
We are ran our first session – digitally. We look forward to building out our content roadmap.
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