Category: Change Management

Revitalize your Career plan: Take stock of where you are now in your career and identify any areas for development, set new goals, and celebrate your successes. This will give you the perspective needed to make sure you’re on the right path and have the information you need to plan out your next steps for the new year.

For your career to flourish, we recommend that you take a step back and conduct a career “checkup”—a self-assessment designed to help you evaluate the progress and achievements you’ve made throughout the year. And now is the perfect time. 

2020 has been one of the most challenging years, requiring many to adapt to significant changes in the workplace, increased stress and anxiety, and economic upheaval. Taking stock of where you are now in your career will help you to identify any areas for development, set new goals for yourself going forward, and celebrate your successes—giving you the perspective you need to make sure you’re on the right path and have the information you need to plan out your next steps.

But what should this career checkup focus on?

The industry and your employer

Before you look at your own skills and abilities, it’s vital to look at the industry you’re in. A bit of light research can tell you how viable your industry is, as well as its projected health. Be sure to seek out thought leadership articles and social media posts from respected industry authorities, as well as more general news pieces.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics website is also an invaluable resource for the latest projections on individual industries. You should also consider the performance of your current employer, and whether they are building a supportive culture that you want to be part of going forward.

Your skills

Giving yourself a skills assessment will help you see progress you’ve made in the year. Take stock of what you’ve learned, and what new skills you’ve picked up since this time last year, but also use your research to gain insight into those talents that will become most valuable in the future. At the same time, you need to consider what you may need to learn to stay ahead of the curve in the face of new trends, such as increased automation.

Taking positive action

A career checkup isn’t all research and soul searching. In fact, there’s positive action that you should take as part of the checkup.

1. Give your resume a refresh

Add new responsibilities, achievements, awards or accreditations should be on your resume, whether you’re thinking of looking for a new role or not. 

Tip: Use the bullets on your resume to highlight your accomplishments. Accomplishments are examples of how you have added value, versus responsibilities you had. Use a strong action verb to start each bullet. Describe the overarching action you took and give quantifiable results you achieved. This will help make your story more memorable and help the reader understand the value you can bring to the role.

2. Spruce up your social media profiles

Social media is one of the first places prospective employers will go to learn more about you when considering you for a role. In fact, 90% of recruiters use LinkedIn as their primary search tool. Update your LinkedIn profile—whether you are actively job seeking or not—to ensure that anyone who visits your profile will get an accurate snapshot of what you offer.

Tip: Update your profile summary and job description, and include facts and figures relating to key deliverables, to build credibility with your audience and make recruiters’ lives easier when assessing your experience. Embed examples of your work (links to awards, videos you are in, links or documents you have created/contributed to) to demonstrate what you have achieved, and ask for recommendations from people you have worked with and for. You can also look for relevant groups and communities to join, where you can seek advice and get noticed by contributing industry discussions.

3. Talk it over

Find a mentor, colleague, or supervisor who you are comfortable discussing your career with and ask for some honest feedback. It’s always good to get a second opinion. Asking them the right questions can help to provide a clear perspective. Questions you can ask to get you started include:

• What would you say are my most valuable soft skills?
• Which words would you use to describe my personal style?
• What would you say I am an expert in?
• Is there a time you can recall where I delivered something that impressed you? 

Tip: Use the answers from these questions to validate what you already know about your own qualities and experience and add new insights you gain to your resume and LinkedIn profile.

4. Get a head start on some soft networking

Reach out to influential contacts who you’ve made or helped over the year, and let them know that you’d love to work together if they ever need your assistance. Staying top-of-mind is a great way to find new opportunities.

Tip: Do your homework before your outreach, to ensure you know what your contact is currently doing professionally and to gain insights that can be used to personalize your approach.

5. Map out your next year

An action career plan for the next year lets you envision what you want to achieve and where you want to be by this time next year. It sets benchmarks that you can look back on in next year’s assessment, whether you plan for a career change, promotion or want to pick up new skills.

Tip: Be specific! Define the kind of role you would like to be doing, the skills you would like to develop, the kind of team you would want to work with or even manage/lead, and what success would look like for you. This will help you to crystalize what it is you are aiming for, as well as formulate an actionable career plan.

Following these steps will give you the purpose you need to make the next 12 months the best year for your career yet. It’s time to grab success with both hands. You have this!

Source: lhh.com

Related articles

How to Ask for a Job Reference

How to Emphasize Soft Skills in Your Personal Branding

Deanna Mulligan, the CEO of Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, was so confident that the “learning mindset” she helped create at Guardian was the way of the future, she wrote a book on the subject. “Hire Purpose: How Smart Companies Can Close the Skills Gap” offers practical advice on creating what Mulligan describes as a “learning and growth mindset.”

Mary-Clare Race, Chief Innovation and Product Officer, LHH

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America did not need a pandemic to realize that their business, and the skills required to succeed in it, were changing rapidly. 

Deanna Mulligan, the CEO of the 160-year-old company, said everyone realized that many of the core functions of its business were undergoing a significant change due to the introduction of AI and machine learning. That meant many of the jobs at Guardian—particularly actuaries—were going to be heavily influenced if not replaced by machines. 

So, in 2019 Guardian set to work with General Assembly, a global leader in upskilling and reskilling, and sister company to LHH with The Adecco Group, to train actuaries to be data analysts. “It was a very rigorous, intensive course,” Mulligan said in an interview for the LHH Conversations webinar series. “(Participants) spent 10 hours a week at work and 10 hours a week at home studying for a year.”

The results of this investment were almost immediate, Mulligan said. As the pandemic struck and disrupted many of the traditional approaches to work, an increasing roster of Guardian employees were already well on the way to new, more sustainable jobs. “We’ve had some very successful graduates of that course go on, not only to work in our data analytics area, but just to be able to apply data in their everyday jobs.”

But Guardian didn’t stop there. Another pilot program was launched to reskill call-center workers to be coders. “As their jobs become more automated, they will have the chance to move on to another field, another area within the company where there are a lot of growth opportunities,” she said.

Mulligan was so confident that the “learning mindset” she helped create at Guardian was the way of the future, she wrote a book on the subject. Hire Purpose: How Smart Companies Can Close the Skills Gap discusses the obligations that employers have to prepare their employees for rapid change through learning opportunities, while offering practical advice on creating what Mulligan describes as a “learning and growth mindset.” 

Mulligan agreed far too many organizations still put up a lot of barriers to the adoption of a learning and growth mindset. Some business leaders still view reskilling or upskilling as risky investments because of the possibility that employees will learn new things and then seek a job elsewhere. Mulligan said that is not the scenario business leaders should be worrying about.

“Other CEOs often say to me, ‘what if I train people and they leave and take the skills with them?’ Mulligan said. “And I say, ‘What happens if you don’t train people and they stay?’ This is a business investment and it’s really core to your company’s future but it’s a different way of thinking.”

Before Guardian could fully embrace a learning mindset and deliver projects to reskill actuaries and call-center employees, it had to build the foundation of a learning culture. To achieve that goal, the company started small, with an annual day dedicated to micro-learning.

Learning Day offered a wide variety of programs, from two-hour seminars to “lunch bites,” 30-minute videos on different topics that people could watch while eating lunch at their desks. It was so popular, Mulligan said that it evolved into Learning Month. “August is now the month where we have different activities every day around a learning and growth mindset. It is possible to change the culture to a growth mindset but none of these things happen overnight.”

The whole concept of a growth mindset—a term coined by renowned American psychologist Carol Dweck—is gaining traction in many workplaces. In keeping with Dweck’s theories, more employers are putting an emphasis on hiring people who believe that their talents and abilities can be enhanced through education and commitment. Mulligan said growth mindset is so important as a basic skill that it should prompt some companies to reduce the emphasis they place on academic credentials and previous work experience and start hiring based on a candidate’s capacity to learn and embrace change.

“One only needs to look at the situation we find ourselves in now, where we’ve all had to improvise over the last several months to accomplish things that normally would be easy to accomplish,” she said. “And the people who are best at that are the people who are flexible, who have a learning mindset. There was no job description for pandemic manager nine months ago. We all had to figure out how to do it. The days of managing risk by having people who’ve done the exact precise job repeatedly is gone. The world doesn’t operate that way anymore.”

When she is asked by other business leaders about where to start building a learning and growth mindset, Mulligan said her advice is simple: start small and keep moving forward.

“Don’t give up. This is major change, this is hard. You might fail at first but keep trying. The results are worth it. Your employees and your customers are depending on you to get this right.”

Source: lhh.com

Related articles

Outplacement vs Career Transition Support

What is Outplacement?

Many people, including providers of these services, use the terms interchangeably. This interchanging of words is partly driven by the negative overtone of the word “outplacement” resulting in a preference to use the more positive term “career transition”, particularly to their employees being offered this kind of support. Career transition suggests a proactive journey to something else whereas outplacement often conjures up images of something being done to an employee on their way “out”.

Perhaps not surprisingly, in a recent poll we conducted amongst HR professionals, when asked about what they would change about outplacement programmes, many said the word “outplacement” was the first thing they would change!

Technically there is a difference between the two terms. Outplacement is used to describe the support given to someone whose role has been made redundant. Typically in these instances, the person whose role has been made redundant looks to secure their next move outside of their existing organisation. In contrast, career transition can have many different drivers. Yes, in some instances it may be redundancy, but for others it may be a need or choice to change direction in their career and may not necessarily result in them leaving the company. For many the difference is subtle which makes the interchangeability of the two words all the more understandable.

Does it really matter?

Is it just semantics? Does the language really matter? At the risk of sounding like a politician, yes and no. If organisations buy outplacement support but it is not fully promoted, understood or taken up by employees because of the negative name association then it means the employees and the organisations are not getting the value they need. That matters. If people are not taking up the career transition support offered because they think it’s only for those definitely leaving the company to secure a new role, then employees and their organisation are not deriving the benefits such programmes can deliver. That matters.

Actions over words

But HR professionals who are all too familiar with the old age HR personnel debate appreciate that terminology is only part of what matters. It’s actions that have a far greater impact than language. Words aside, what matters is HR teams choosing the right kind of career support for their employees and clearly communicating to each and every employee what this support looks like for them, the value it can bring to them personally and how and when they can access their individual programme.

When it comes down to it, employees won’t remember or care whether they were offered a career transition programme or an outplacement programme. What they will remember is they were treated with dignity and respect, and therefore supported in the best way possible. They’re more likely to speak well of you to potential customers and employees, more likely to “boomerang” back to you in the future, more likely to be brand advocates for your organisation and ultimately more likely to secure their next move faster. And that is what matters and makes the difference.

Related articles

Best Practices to Get The Most From Your Outplacement Support

What is Outplacement?

What is outplacement?

Why provide outplacement support?

Redundancy costs can present a heavy, albeit necessary, financial burden. With budgets under pressure and the average time in a role less than five years, organisations may be questioning whether they should add to these redundancy costs by providing outplacement support to affected employees.

Although most business leaders acknowledge that being socially responsible and “doing the right thing” are all valid and noble aims, the rising pressure on budgets means leaders must present a robust commercial business case for all expenditure. The tangible benefits experienced by organisations as a result of offering career transition support are many and varied, resulting in a compelling business case that business leaders ignore at their peril.

1. Improved employee morale, motivation and productivity

Employees remaining with the organisation can be as profoundly impacted as those individuals who lose their jobs. Feelings of insecurity, anxiety and demotivation are all too common and can quickly and negatively impact performance, sickness absence and productivity. Seeing friends and colleagues being let go without adequate support with the knowledge that it could so easily have been them, only adds to the feelings of unease and taints their opinion of the organisation. Employees with these negative emotions and unfavourable views of their employer are unlikely to provide the discretionary effort and collective input organisations need to flourish in these competitive times. In research conducted by the Aberdeen Group, 63% of organisations surveyed cited the desire to improve engagement and retention amongst existing employees as a driver of outplacement initiatives. The same research found that best-in-class companies are 2.5 times more likely to use outplacement services.

Findings by the Centre for Organisational Research (COR) showed that in businesses using outplacement services, both productivity and profitability increased in the 12 months following downsizing, with staff turnover, sick days and lateness remaining the same in the same 12-month period. When comparing businesses using outplacement services with those which did not, productivity increases were twice as common and profit stability or improvement was 50% more likely – evidence that the benefits are tangible, not merely theoretical.

It’s therefore vital that leaders take the following steps to support those who remain:

• Communicate, communicate and communicate some more. Whether it’s sharing a clear vision of the future, clarifying the new business structure, roles and responsibilities or reconfirming how the change can bring long-term stability and growth, regular, honest and open communication is key. Without this, misinformation will spread and the rumour mill will go into overdrive.
• Acknowledge and allow for an emotional response. We spend as much, if not more, time at work as we do at home so it’s normal for survivors to experience a range of emotions. Make it OK for people to talk and ask for help if they need it.
• Offer external support. Whether it’s counselling, an employee assistance programme (EAP) or coaching, leaders can help ensure employees feel supported by making them fully aware of the services available, emphasising that it’s confidential and providing information on how to access the support on offer.
• Offer employees training on managing change. Giving employees the opportunity to explore and understand the emotions around change and learn tools and strategies for managing themselves and others during periods of change can really help morale and motivation.
• Provide career development. Post redundancies, employees need to understand their opportunities for future advancement and how their future career goals are aligned with those of the organisations. Without this understanding or belief, survivors may choose to pursue their career elsewhere at a time when you need them the most.

2. Brand and reputation protection

Social media allows people to share their views to thousands in a matter of seconds. Negative experiences relayed to the masses can quickly damage the employer and customer brand. The speed and high impact this can have explains why our research shows that 71% of participants cited improving reputation and protecting the brand as the key driver for procuring outplacement. However, for the same reasons, positive experiences and opinions can also be shared at lightning speed with huge reach. Providing genuinely useful help to employees going through career transition can therefore help to protect and even enhance the organisation’s brand and reputation.

3. Attracting future talent and shortening the time to hire

We are in the midst of a skills shortage and that shortage looks set to grow in coming years. Organisations are finding it harder than ever to recruit skilled workers, with almost three quarters of businesses struggling to make the hires they need. Combine that with the lowest unemployment rate for 44 years and it’s clear why organisations are in fierce competition for scarce talent. Research by Aberdeen Group shows organisations with formal outplacement initiatives are 81% more likely to shorten the time taken to fill key positions. In fact, they’re two and half times more likely as those without outplacement programmes to indicate that this metric improved by 10% or more. Due to the faster rate at filling vacancies, these organisations are nearly 50% more likely to reduce the cost per hire too.

4. Reduction in legal costs

Providing outplacement support helps minimise and avoid legal risk, a key driver cited by 12% of participants in a recent survey of ours. A study by the Centre for Organisational Research found that legal action reduced by 72% amongst employees using outplacement services with their displaced staff. With legal costs running into the tens of thousands per case, reducing the likelihood of legal action by providing career transition support makes sound financial sense.

With such strong evidence of the commercial benefits that offering outplacement support to employees delivers, HR professionals need to question whether their organisation can afford not to provide it to their employees affected by change. Outplacement support only represents a fraction of the overall cost of a redundancy package, yet is arguably the only part that offers a genuine return on investment.

Cash versus Outplacement

We sometimes get asked by our clients what the best practices are around offering the cash equivalent to outplacement services rather than providing access to the programmes themselves. And whether these recommendations change depending on the profile of the employee eligibility.

In short, we advise that for all employees regardless of seniority or function, the value derived by an outplacement programme is always higher than the cash equivalent, both for the departing employee and their employer. Perhaps you’re thinking that it’s not surprising that a company selling outplacement programmes would advise this, but it’s precisely because we see thousands of people come through our doors when their role has been made redundant and see first-hand the issues they face that we know the cash equivalent is of limited use. Here’s 3 reasons why:

1. Think about the reasons why you offer outplacement support to your employees.

 It may be because you feel it’s the right thing to do. It may be to help protect your corporate and employer brand or to help you attract future talent. It may be to help you manage the employee morale, motivation and productivity of both your “surviving” and departing employees or to reduce the legal risk. Or it may be a combination of some or all of these reasons. Whatever the rationale, these benefits are only derived if the impacted employee is given the support, tools and expertise they need to be able to secure themselves the future that they want, whether that be securing a new role, retraining, retiring or setting up their own business. An employee that takes the short-term appeal of cash is still unemployed and with less tools at their disposal to build the future they want — leaving the organisation at risk of not being able to meet their strategic objectives of supporting employees impacted by change.

2. The importance of speed

We know that people using our outplacement programmes find new jobs on average 65% faster than if they searched on their own. Without this focused support, your employees are likely to be in limbo for longer, increasing the chance of them developing and expressing negative feelings about your organisation.

3. Memory of cash fades as quickly as it is spent.

The job market is changing rapidly. Employees that have been out of job search mode for a while quickly realise how unprepared they are to secure a new role in the world of algorithm-based job boards, applicant tracking systems and immersive assessments. Many struggle to navigate their way through this maze and remain unemployed not through choice long after the cash has gone. At this point, many forget it was their choice not to take up the offer of outplacement support and their anger, blame and frustration towards your company grows and is shared amongst their networks, increasing the damage to your brand.

But it’s not all about reducing risk. There are many positive benefits that organisations gain from offering outplacement support to their employees (see page 19) that cash equivalents simply do not deliver.

Looking at the tangible benefits gained combined with the reduction of the potential risks and it’s clear why best-in-class companies are 2.5 times more likely to use outplacement services and why 71% of UK employers report that they do not offer cash in lieu of outplacement.

Related articles

Best Practices to get the Most From Your Outplacement Support

Outplacement: How to Separate the Experts from the Opportunists