The 2014 National Career Development Association Conference in Long Beach, CA was a tremendous experience.  Here’s what I learned along with some thoughts on leadership actions for us all to consider:

1.  Career Development in an Employee Engagement Strategy. I heard about how Boeing and GM are setting up systems (mainly through online tools) to facilitate employees to take ownership of their careers and for leaders to take ownership of facilitating career development discussions and planning with their employees as a part of performance management.

I personally learned how true this lesson is through an experience a friend had before we departed.  The organization he works for has a new CEO. He had a one-on-one meeting with him, and the first question the CEO asked him was, “What are your career goals?”  He then engaged in a discussion with my friend about how he could help him facilitate the growth of his career. This is the first time my friend has experienced this and his engagement with his organization is now renewed.  He called it “refreshing.”

ACTION ITEM FOR LEADERS:  Ask your employees,  “What are your career goals and how can I help you reach them?”

2.  Planned Happenstance Happens.  As a career development theory I’ll have to admit I wasn’t immediately drawn to, I saw it in action when a lady attended one of my sessions with a desire to put a plan in place to facilitate business and industry connections with schools.  The session I was speaking about wasn’t on this topic, but the roundtable I presented earlier in the conference was. I was able to provide her with the handouts and resources for this hopefully enabling some food for thought for her on how to do this in her community. She shared with me how her community set up a program where teachers were immersed in business and industry that I was able to learn from.

ACTION ITEM FOR LEADERS:  Put yourself in a position to interact regularly with others you wouldn’t routinely get the chance to interact with. You can be a resource to them and they can be a resource to you. We all have something to learn from those around us.

3. “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”  -Richard Buckminster Fuller@BryanLubic did a fanatic job in a roundtable illustrating how you can use tools to create experiences that lead to career decisions and actions instead of telling people what career path they need to take.  Teach people how to fish, don’t give them a fish.

ACTION ITEM FOR LEADERS:  Show and do, don’t tell. No one likes a dictator or a know-it-all.

Agree?  You may like this post.

What take aways did you have from your last conference or professional development experience?  How did you act on them?