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Why STEPUP.WORK?Aspiring professionals today are faced with many challenges, including a very competitive labor market, and a world in which few companies strongly support long-term career growth and development for the majority of their individual employees. This is a change from the past. For much of the last century, many large companies were paternalistic, and provided support, training and guidance for career advancement. In those “good old days” an aspiring professional just needed to get an education from a respected college, and land a job in a large company such as IBM, and they could be set for their entire career.
In the last few decades, there has been a sea change in the labor market[i], especially at the large multi-national companies that employ many professionals, as well as in the smaller companies who also employ professionals and provide products and services to these larger companies. The contrast between the old implicit employment contract and the new has been summarized as[ii]: |
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THEN |
NOW |
“We expect loyalty from our core mid-level employees, and we provide loyalty in return. If you work hard, and receive satisfactory performance ratings, your job is secure (we might take exception if the financial health of the company is threatened).” |
“The work you do will be interesting, and you will learn new skills while you are here. Your employability will be high, although perhaps not at this employer. We work on great projects, but as each project ends, it is up to you to find a new place for yourself within the company – otherwise, you must find a new place for yourself outside the company.” |
The table below shows the changes in the implicit contract between
professional employees and the companies they work for between
the past and the present with respect to who holds specific
responsibilities for young professionals’ career development.
professional employees and the companies they work for between
the past and the present with respect to who holds specific
responsibilities for young professionals’ career development.
RESPONSIBILITY |
PAST |
PRESENT |
Identify skills needed in the future |
Company (with career paths offering long-term employment) |
Employee (for skills needed in a career likely to span multiple companies) |
Provide learning opportunities (e.g. pay or provide formal courses, training, workshops) |
Company |
Employee (although a few topics may be covered by in-house training provided by the employer; in some companies, this only covers compliance training which is legally required, but does little to help employees advance in their careers) |
Provide apprenticeships, mentors and coaches |
Company |
Employee (even companies which have internal mentoring programs often do not extend them to all employees) |
Create opportunities to practice new skills |
Company |
Employee |
Too Many Choices, Too Little Personalized Guidance for Individual Aspiring Professionals
Many authors and education-related organizations have sprung up or added offerings to address the needs of today’s aspiring professionals. Each of these claims the knowledge held within their books, or disseminated during their courses, is critically important for professionals to master. Perhaps, in the course of a 40 – 60 year career, all of these areas of knowledge are indeed needed. But for an aspiring professional with a limited amount of time and energy—in the present—to devote to the acquisition of knowledge and skills, it can be daunting to identify which specific learning would be most immediately useful. And the timing required by learning does matter a great deal. Research has shown conclusively that human learning, if not followed soon by opportunities to apply the new knowledge, is likely to be at least partially forgotten.[iii] Therefore, professionals whose careers are still young are well-served by advice that leads them to pursue learning that can be immediately put to good use in their professional lives.
A professional seeking advice about what knowledge to acquire and what skills to develop is inundated with articles, books, college course topics, training opportunities, and lots of information on the web. Some aspiring professionals succumb to “analysis paralysis” and continually spend time absorbing new information, without being able to choose good opportunities to tackle new challenges which require putting this learning into practice through new skill development. Others randomly take in articles and books recommended by colleagues and friends, and hope they learn enough to make a difference in their careers. |
Still others vacillate between just focusing on doing their assigned work (and not devoting any time at all to learning and skill development), and frantically trying to master new knowledge and skills after they lose a job or discover they have plateaued in their career progress. Early career professionals not only need to know what to learn, and to learn the right things first, but they need develop confidence in the course and balance of the learning opportunities and workplace activities they undertake to advance their careers.
Finally, developing professionals need to learn a bit more about themselves and how they are responding to the challenges and experiences of their nascent careers. They need to learn from their recent past and current feelings: what they are good at, what they feel they need to improve, what they feel comfortable with, and what they must avoid, in order to be successful in their careers. These are all reasons for aspiring professionals to find and take advantage of the guidance of professional career mentoring. With or without the benefit of corporate mentoring programs sponsored by their employers, smart developing professionals will recognize quickly that they can focus their efforts effectively with the help of STEPUP.WORK ’s virtual career mentor, MYCAREERMENTOR. [i] Per the book “How New Is the “New Employment Contract”?: Evidence from North American Pay Practices” by David L. Levine, editor, “Understanding changes in internal labor markets requires an |
understanding of how perceptions of the implicit contract between employers and employees have changed. . . . A contract that produced long-term job security and skills training in return for loyalty and commitment is being replaced, many suggest, by a contract which purchases skills for the time period they are useful . . .”
[ii] From Charness and Levine “Changes in the Employment Contract?” published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organizations Vol. 47 (2002) 391-405, found at (see file) [iii] Herman Ebbinghaus in 1885 published the book “Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology” which included the forgetting curve, showing how memory degrades over time (see article); more recent research by the National Training Laboratories (see article) show that with traditional training, about 4% of the information is retained after 6 weeks, and even with game-based training (which actively involves learners) only about 45% of the information is retained after 6 weeks. But (according to research by Edgar Dale cited at (see article) 90% of the information can be retained if it is applied immediately in a real situation. |
Affiliates
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