Does the future of your work life worry you?
Do you run a small business and want to support the on-going professional development of your key people, or are you an individual professional determined to keep yourself at the leading edge in your chosen field? Constant and radical change is the norm for every professional in every sector: a recent Deloitte video describes this as The Big Shift.
Yet most professionals these days work in small and medium sized businesses without access to the dedicated in-house personal development services provided by big companies. That leaves the professionals themselves and those who employ them with a dilemma – what can you do if you are determined to stay in step with the rest of the world and need some structured support in taking on the challenge?
Tom Peters Company’s solution is to flip the problem by drawing like-minded professionals into the dilemma. We have launched an individual professional excellence program and have piloted it for two years with existing clients. The online version of the Excellence Academy, launching later in the year, supports committed individuals or small groups of professionals to create and execute their own radical development plans.
Our early clients are reporting significant mindset shift in their participants and have seen obvious personal and professional growth over the period. Further, they believe that the approach has benefitted the whole organization in getting professional development onto the management agenda across the business.
Specific benefits have emerged:
- Most of the learning take place by reframing existing work assignments into structured learning projects which produce beneficial results for the individual and the business.
- Practicing action learning on real work assignments becomes a habit, which can last a life time – a fantastic investment for the individual and the organization.
- The program has four action learning cycles over a 12 month period, with regular inputs and provocations from TPC and systematic monitoring of what is being achieved and what is being learned. This structured approach makes the learning sustainable.
- Senior people, managers and professional associates, act as participant mentors which is a powerful personal development experience for them, too.
- Management’s visible and active involvement in the learning process sends an important messageto the whole organization that professional development is a priority here!
So far this program has been available to SMEs in a blended learning format with a mix of face to face delivery, group video conferences, individual participant and mentor coaching, and regular on-line inputs and updates.
We will be piloting an online version of the program in early 2016. Are interested to know more?
Sign up here for our next webinar, where we will explain the program and take questions from you.