Focus Magazine - Winter 2012 - 7

FROM THE PRESIDENT Carol Wells

Make 2012 Your Year to Develop!
A career development framework
begins with knowing yourself
ith 2012 bringing a new year and new opportunities, it’s appropriate that we look forward and think about our professional and personal goals, and how we can challenge ourselves to be the very best that we can be through e ective development planning and execution. Career development is a process that helps each of us gain the skills, the experiences and the competencies that we need to ful ll the goals that we have set for ourselves against a backdrop of a more competitive resource-constrained and regulated environment. Your career development goal can come in a variety of ways, whether you are looking to: • Grow in your current position by developing a new skill or skill set; • Make a lateral move in your organization that adds to your breadth of experiences; • Move in a completely di erent business direction; • Take on a greater level of responsibility through a promotion. It is up to you to decide how to get there. A career development framework begins with knowing yourself. What are you good at? What do you need to improve in? How are you doing in your current role … are you excelling or just getting by? Based on your performance, what options are available to you? Added to that, which ones do you personally aspire to? All of these questions need to be considered before you write your plan. As we’ve set goals at the start of a new year, whether they are professional or personal, many of us simply wrote a statement of an activity that we wanted to do. From a professional standpoint it might have been that we wanted to read

a speci c book or attend a speci c class. is event-based form of development planning does not set the adult learner up for success. As adults, we learn through experiences, applying what we’ve learned and receiving good coaching and mentoring along the way. at’s why, as the Center for Creative Leadership has researched and published in its booklet, “Development Assignments, Creating Learning Experiences without Changing Jobs,” a successful development plan should be comprised of a blended 70/20/10 approach. at means e ective development happens through on-the-job experiences (70 percent), fostering e ective relationships, networking and feedback mechanisms (20 percent), and getting our grounding in formal training such as classes, webinars and articles (10 percent). e 70/20/10 approach needs to be applied across the board for any given skill or competency that you’re seeking to improve upon. So for example, if you were hoping to improve in your ability to lead innovation in your organization, your development plan might look like the following: Ten percent of your plan might be attending a workshop on design thinking models and principals. Seventy percent of it may be focused on leading an action team in your area in order to incorporate a new process or concept, and then 20 percent is nding somebody who excels in this skill and can coach you through the experience and engage in brainstorming sessions. It could be with your peers or your manager, or someone else in your organization who e ectively leads innovation. is is a perfect time of year for you to think about doing things di erently. Best wishes for a very rewarding professional development year in 2012. I

Carol Wells is president of SPBT and senior director, commercial training and development for Genentech, Inc., a member of the Roche Group. Email Carol at wells.carol@gene.com.

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Focus Magazine - Winter 2012

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