Catherine asks:
>>
Are organizations incorporating career management tools for their people
to work on at a self paced level ...... how do learning organizations
address this arena and what techniques are utilized to incorporate more of
an entrepreneurial attitude on the part of the worker? <<
We've been exploring these questions with one of our clients from the
perspective of what technologies (if any) can support "self-paced" career
management. We're engaged in developing and implementing systems that put
employees directly in touch with information and services to help them
make more informed choices for themselves. In addition to providing
services around benefits, our systems provide workers with information:
1) on jobs and the skills required
2) learning opportunities to develop the skills
We see that typically job postings are owned by one part of an
organization and learning opportunities are owned by the training and
development organization (newly renamed to reflect organizational
learning). A challenge from a technology solution perspective is to get
the owners of these two sources of information to talk about skills and
competencies in the same way. Then, employees can search for jobs, see
the skills/competencies required and then search for ways to learn and
develop these new skills. Organizations engaged in core competency
assessment reflect the results of this process in their information
systems. Then workers can begin to take responsibility for their own
career management, fortified with information on the opportunities
available to them.
It's just a start. We're working on mapping career/life cycles of
individuals to the human resource requirements at the organizational
level. One result we expect is to determine what information and metrics
individuals need to manage their careers. We are also developing a system
to track the costs of human resources management and development, in the
same way we track the costs of "supply chain management."
-- Alexia Martin alexiam@aol.com