Career Development
Enabling career growth through diagnostics, planning, mentoring, and experiential learning
EXPERTISE
How can we boost your efforts?
Culture of Learning
Promoting a culture of learning often requires putting frameworks and programs in place that encourage mentoring, career sponsorships, IDPs, certifications, job shadowing, career fairs, and knowledge transfer, to name a few. We help you architect and implement those programs, working towards a development ecosystem.
Self Development
While a business can and should provide development opportunities and support, only their employees can make the magic of learning happen. That’s why most of our programs emphasize the skills and attitude of self development. We teach employees how to take ownership of their careers and help them become lifelong learners.
Training for Mentors
Training for Team Leaders
Through our Three Kingdoms Program, we train managers on best practices for assessing their team’s development needs, prioritizing and planning how to address them, and having the conversations with their employees. We also provide them with the tools they’ll need to succeed.
CAREER DEVELOPMENT
Success Stories
Learning to Self Develop
Career Development
For several of our clients, we have implemented processes, tools, and training to empower employees to take ownership of their professional development. Our Self Development Cycle is a process that starts with reflection on future aspirations, past experiences, and feedback. We provide guiding questions, sometimes in the form of job aids or worksheets and other times in the form of online surveys. Then we teach employees how to turn those insights into a set of goals and a plan of action. We also teach them how to leverage their network to create a personal board of directors, how to access expertise, and how to get the most learning out of any experience.
Peer Mentoring for Field Trainers
Career Development
A national specialty sales training department for a large biopharmaceutical company was challenged by its stakeholders to develop a structured onboarding process that improved consistency and time-to-proficiency, while leveraging an online curriculum and peer mentoring. Prestera FX was asked to develop the mentoring framework, onboarding materials for new hires and their peer mentors, as well as training for those peer mentors.
We established a mentoring competency model by benchmarking key success factors for mentors, then used that model as the basis for the onboarding materials and training. The process, tools, and best practices were implemented through an elearning module and in-person workshop.
Mentoring Circles
Career Development
We helped a large insurance company implement a mentoring circles program globally. Through the program, peers from different management levels come together in groups of 8-10 to form groups that meet regularly in person or virtually to discuss career development and leadership development topics of their choosing. Though the groups are chaired by senior leaders, each circle’s participants act as peer mentors, helping each other learn, develop, and achieve shared goals. Our team designed the training materials to support the formation and kickoff of these circles and provided tools to support the process.
Developing Field Trainers
Career Development
Several pharmaceutical clients have asked us to help them turn sales representatives into field trainers. Our programs can help sales managers identify reps with high potential to be strong field trainers, using our Mentor Readiness Survey. Those selected go through online and classroom training to help them learn the skills needed to deliver training, mentor peers, support new hire onboarding, coach struggling colleagues. The training is often complemented with field trainer guides that provide structured activities and tools for trainers to use with their colleagues.
Competency Mapping
Career Development
A global chemical manufacturer intended to build a corporate university that organized and mapped training content to a variety of job-specific competencies. Gus Prestera conducted interviews and focus groups with chemists, engineers, sales professionals, and their managers in order to develop competency models for various job families. The competency maps gave insight into the key tasks and activities associated with each position; how much relative time was spent on each; which were considered most important to the organization’s success; and which were the most difficult to master. We inventoried and evaluated existing courses; identified gaps in the library relative to the competencies; and organized the library into competency-based curricula.
Developing Your Team
Career Development
We tailored our Three Kingdoms Program to a professional services leadership team to help them initiate conversations with their employees around professional development. The program included a process and tools for conducting a team assessment, identifying and prioritizing development needs, and creating a team-based development plan. We also trained managers on how to conduct the actual conversations with their employees, using demonstrations and role play activities. As managers started engaging their employees, we monitored their progress and coached them until they were comfortable with the process. Employee morale and engagement improved.
