Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Beyond Work

Beyond Work is our line of resources for people and community leaders looking for something new and innovative outside, be it a new job, career change, or personal development outside of work.

  • 3 Highlights from the 2014 NCDA Conference

    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?

  • The What and Why of Competencies as Seen through CDF Training and SHRM’s new move

    The What and Why of Competencies as Seen through CDF Training and SHRM’s new move

    The HR world has been all a buzz with SHRM’s announcement of a switch to a competency-based certification.

    In an email to members, the SHRM CEO stated,  “We believe a competency-based certification is the new standard for HR professionals around the globe. Our members have told us this; and we have listened.”

    Regardless of whether or not you agree or disagree with SHRM’s move, competency models are prevalent.  The career development world has been competency-based through its Career Development Facilitator Training for quite some time.

    What is a competency?

    Good ole Wikipedia provides us with this definition: “A competency is a set of defined behaviors that provide a structured guide enabling the identification, evaluation and development of the behaviors in individual employees.” 

    Why I like competencies

    Competencies are behavioral-based.  Whereas an assessment of knowledge is just that, knowledge that may or may not be acted upon or put in to practice, a competency begets action through behaviors.

    If you have knowledge of something, you can tell me about it, but if you are competent in something, you can show me how to do it by demonstrating it.  You apply your knowledge and demonstrate it through your behaviors.  This aids others in learning through your behaviors.

    What are the CDF Competencies?

    CDF competencies emphasize the broad scope in which career development professionals practice.   They are:

    1. Helping Skills
    2. Labor Market Information and Resources
    3. Assessment
    4. Diverse Populations
    5. Ethical and Legal Issues
    6. Career Development Models
    7. Employability Skills
    8. Training Clients and Peers
    9. Program Management/Implementation
    10. Promotion and Public Relations
    11. Technology
    12. Consultation

    To read more about the competencies click here.

    If you are tied to the career development world in any way, are these things that you think you need to be able to DO not just know as they relate to delivering services to whoever your “client” may be?  If so, CDF training may be an option for you, as it provides a path that can lead to your Global Career Development Facilitator (GCDF) certification.

    Among other reasons, the emphasis on GLOBAL may be why SHRM is driving towards a competency-based model.  The National Career Development Association (NCDA) already sees competency-based training, education and certification as the best method for preparing practitioners to operate in a global environment. It also emphasizes the need for the same standards of practice for a profession around the world.

    More to come in our next post about the CDF competencies as we sample what a couple of them look through the doing of them, not just the knowing of them.

    What do you think?  Is knowing something the same thing as being competent in it?   Is it all really just six of one and half a dozen of the other?

  • Career Development Facilitator Competencies in Action- Tell, Show and DO

    Career Development Facilitator Competencies in Action- Tell, Show and DO

    One of the reasons I love CDF training is because the competencies that the training emphasizes fit together so nicely.  Not only that, but they also spur action through behaviors as any good competency model should do.

    An example of 2 CDF competencies in action

    Take these two competencies:

     

    “Helping Skills – Be proficient in the basic career facilitating process while including productive interpersonal relationships.”

    And

    “Program Management/Implementation – Understand career development programs and their implementation, and work as a liaison in collaborative relationships.”

    In the CDF training, you learn that helping skills includes being competent in helping others set goals and create action plans for themselves as it relates to their career.  You act on this knowledge, by creating tools to help clients to set goals.

    But the application of being competent in goal setting is taken to the next level through the competency of program management implementation. What good program manager doesn’t need to know how to set goals, track them, and meet them?

    Participants in our CDF training take what they have learned about goal setting in the helping skills content and demonstrate that they can direct their behavior to apply goal setting by mapping out a new program or a redesign of an existing one complete with goals, timelines, deliverables and metrics.

     

    Tell à Show à Do 

    We like to call our model for building the CDF competencies Tell à Show à Do, with an emphasis on the DOING.    We focus on building the 12 competencies by designing assignments and deliverables in the course that help you kill two birds with one stone.  They build your knowledge, but the assignments also produce tangible tools and plans that you can use on the job. Then you can easily show that you know how to apply knowledge by doing.

    Your boss can’t see the knowledge in your head without you acting on it, so the doing helps advance your career just as much if not more than having the certification.

    If are a career development professional and want to have some fun doing, you can register for our CDF course.

    If you’re a part of school system, college career center, local or state workforce agency or career center, you may want to learn more about how this model of applying the CDF competencies can help your group create a strategic plan through the professional development opportunity.  To do so, you can view our presentation on CDF Training and Strategic Planning (which will be presented this Saturday, June 21, from 8:30-9:30 am at NCDA’s Conference in Long Beach- join us if you are here!) There is also a case study you can read to see how this has been put into practice with a K-12 School System

    How has doing helped advance your career more than knowing?

  • 4 easy steps to know which keywords to include in your resume

    With all kinds of tools out there these days for a computer instead of a person to initially screen a resume, we get lots of questions about keywords.  What keywords am I supposed to include seems to be the critical question.

    What keywords should I include?

    You will know what keywords to include because they are in the job posting.  Tagcrowd.com  is the quickest and coolest way we’ve found to identify keywords by the frequency they appear in the posting.

    What you do:

    1. Find a posting
    2. Copy and paste the posting into Tagcrowd.com
    3. View the word graphic it displays
    4. Make sure the biggest words are incorporated into your resume

    Here’s an example:  On Indeed.com we did a simple search for “IT” positions.

    Picking this one:

    ITJobPosting

    We pasted it into tagcrowd, and this is the result:

    tagcrowd copy

    If you were applying for this position, the key is to make sure you emphasize the marketing experience you have in social and content marketing.  Development software, writing, research, and Mircosoft product experience are going to be needed.  You’ll also need to emphasize ways you’ve collaborated and engaged others.   And see “bachelor” up there in the top right corner? You’re going to need a bachelors degree.

    If you are wanting to develop a resume for a variety of openings, then search for openings in the area in which you are pursuing, copy and paste several of them into tagcrowd and look for consistencies.  The words that come up the biggest and most frequently need to be included in your resume.

  • 2 Reasons You Should Consider Dual Career Ladders

    2 Reasons You Should Consider Dual Career Ladders

    Being in a leadership role seems to be the ideal in most companies. Leading is what people strive for, and in most cases I think this is the norm because it is the only path by which advancement can take place. Want to move up and get paid more? Well then you have to lead and manage others.

    Another way to help people grow

    A client we’re working with is considering dual career ladders for the organization. With this organizational structure, there are advancement opportunities into the traditional route of leadership, but there is also a path by which people can grow by demonstrating technical expertise in their field.

    Why you should consider dual career ladders

    Dual career ladders may be a good route for your company because:

    1. Not Everyone is suited for or has the desire to get work done through others. Quite frankly, some people would rather do the work themselves and may be best suited to do so. Getting work done through others can be extremely challenging, and for some, can be draining instead of stimulation. If people are in roles that are constantly proving to be draining instead of energizing, productivity will suffer. Which leads to the 2nd reason to consider dual career paths…

    2.  Dual Paths can help your company be more successful. By placing people in the roles where they contribute the most, the company gains success through talent.

    Dual career paths may not be feasible for all companies due to size of the organization or the nature of the work, but the structure begs the question for any organization about how to provide opportunities for people to advance and grow in their careers.

    The best place to start if you are considering how to determine who is best suited for an expert role or a leadership role is to assess your talent. There are a variety of instruments that are effective for this purpose (email us if you want some recommendations), but the most important way to assess people for advancement opportunities is to ask the hard but simple question, do you want to lead? It’s much easier for people to honestly answer “no” if there is an option to grow in their career through another path. I think we hear the answer “yes” to the question do you want to lead more than we should because it’s the only option.