Talent Developers & Career Educators Need A New Solution
Making Sense Of The Training & Development Landscape
In this post I aim to make sense of the various training & development options available to Talent & Career Developers in executive education & industry. This is the broad mix of training solutions I find talent & career developers using to serve their goals.
This is for: Talent Developers in Executive Education or Industry, specifically
Leaders of Career Development Centers in executive eduction, who aim to develop and train Career Changers in MBA or EMBA to be ready to enter the job market after graduation.
Heads of Talent in Industry, who find manage talents your organisation has invested in as part of a leadership development or management rotation program, to take on future leadership roles within the organisation.
In both cases, you aim to: Develop and train a large cohort of talents for career success, as their career success is a vital part of your organisations success.
During my career as a talent, a decade in brand strategy, 7 years in talent development, I’ve learned about the most common solutions available to the goal of talent developers. Here’s how I’ve made sense of them:
1. Psychometric Testing
Where I’m coming from:
A talent who was asked to fill out several psychometric tests during my MBA. And as geek of human behaviour, I’m not only curious to try out any testing approach that claims to have the answer but have also taken up a long personal study of behavioural sciences, Jungian psychology, career identity and more.
What I’ve learned:
They’re best used in support of, rather than instead of, traditional career-meaning-based approaches.
“Moreover, traditional psychometric approaches are not that sensitive in assessing subjective or phenomenological dimensions in individuals, including lived experiences which affect career development. These theoretical approaches should not replace the traditional ones but rather complement them for the best interest of the clients”
- Kaliris, A. and Issari, P. (2022) Exploring Narrative Ideas in Career Counseling. Open Journal of Social Sciences
Advantages:
A popular option, easy to apply on a large population, widely accessible through a variety of online platforms.
Disadvantages:
- Not all are psychologically sound: The MBTI, though popular, is questionable at best, Big 5 is a far more psychologically sound but a bit harder to interpret for talents.
- It’s hard for career owners to integrate learnings into their professional identity: The outputs, though interesting, tend to be far too theoretical, and can rarely be assimilated into one’s self-concept. Though it gives them new information, it doesn’t enable
“the kind of knowledge we need to make change in our lives is personal and situational; it comes from involvement in a specific context and with specific people, not from solitary introspection or abstract information gleaned from theoretical, general-purpose personality profiles.”
- Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies For Re-Inventing Your Career
Recommended Options:
The psychometric testing options I find most useful are: Career Leader & Gallups Strength Finder. I find their outputs most profound, clear and easy for the career owner to integrate into their professional identity thereby positively influencing decisions & communication for their career.
Best use case: In support of, rather than in stead of, other approaches.
2. One-on-One Coaching:
Where I’m coming from:
While I’ve done some one-on-ones, I’m not a certified coach. Given your close proximity to working with talents in career development, I’m sure you have far more knowledge than I do about one-on-one coaching. You might even be a certified coach. For these reasons, you’ll find this section brief.
What I’ve learned:
Clearly the holy grail of talent & career development, but I’ve found that it’s demanding on resources.
Advantages:
Deeply impactful personal process, Enables clear meaning development for your talents, Helps your talents feel understood and supported in the process of their career development, Potential impacts on agency and self-direction, Customised sense-making & support for the individual.
Disadvantages: Taxing on your resources.
My personal recommendation:
If you have the bandwidth, this is the best thing to do. If not, solutions that can replicate 80% of the depth of one-on-one work in a manner that demands less resources, can be very helpful. It is for this reason I use focused story sharing based exercises & small groups in my trainings, to help re-create the impact of one-on-ones.
3. Personal Branding
Where I’m coming from:
More than a decade in brand strategy having built strategies for brands including Coke, Kellogg’s, Danone, Unilever and more. And working with 3500+ talents in world leading business schools, to enable career development.
What I’ve learned:
Personal branding is not useful in the context of career & talent development.
“If you think you are building your personal brand, please don’t. You don’t have a brand. Crest has a brand. Perrier has a brand. When I hear anyone talk about building their personal brands, I know that’s not right.”
- Sheryl Sandberg, in conversation with Adam Grant
Advantages:
Popular, possibly a fad. Ease of understanding as we see brands everyday so it’s easier to ‘get’ how that applies to us. Aspirational, as its desirable for talents to see themselves in the same vein as brands.
Disadvantages:
Note: This is in the context of talent development and career owners, not for creator or founder lead businesses who rely on online visibility:
- We don’t think of ourselves as brand models:
We don’t navigate our inner & outer landscape as a ‘model’ with competition, unique assets & promises. We navigate ourselves as character-in-story. We’ve had experiences (past) that make us who we are (present) who want something (future) and how we see ourselves getting there (plan) - It’s not clearly defined as a concept:
A decade in branding taught me one thing: branding is hard to define, which is why we see packaging & design agencies claiming branding services though they rarely shape the brand’s core strategy. It’s the same in personal branding: content creators & headshot photographers can claim branding services, but that doesn’t address the core of what a career owner needs.
”There is little agreement on the exact boundaries of the concept”
- Gorbatov, Khapova et al (2018) Personal Branding: Interdisciplinary Systematic Review and Research Agenda, Frontiers in Psychology
- It prioritises ‘making an impression’, not ‘making sense’:
The core argument of personal branding stems from the notion that career owners have to make a ‘strong impression’ on stakeholders they are aiming to convince. But that can often be a recipe for disaster, as its easy to find somethign that ‘makes an impression’ which may not be fully rooted in one’s lived experience. The real goal is to ‘make sense’: such that one’s lived career experience is coherent with where one sees themselves, what they bring and where they are going.
“Coherence is crucial to a life story of transition because it is the characteristic that most generates the listener’s trust. If you can make your story of change and reinvention seem coherent, you will have gone far in convincing the listener that the change makes sense for you and is likely to bring success — and that you’re a stable, trustworthy person”
- Dr Herminia Ibarra, What’s Your Story?, Harvard Business Review
Recommended Options:
I don’t recommend personal branding in the context of talent development & career coaching. I’ll leave you with the words of a career development leader at global top 10 business school, which to me sums up the nature of the problem:
“We hired a popular personal branding speaker to help our MBAs & Masters talents. They gave generic advice of how brands work and how talents ought to do the same. That’s not what we’re looking for”
4. AI & CRM Styled Careers Tools:
Where I’m coming from:
Being a talent who had access to such platforms when I was pursuing my MBA at Esade, 7 years in the talent & career development industry, working with business school clients who have a host of career platforms to choose from, and trying to build 2 tech platforms to pivot to this side of the business, both of which I gave up. Below is a summary of what I’ve learned from these experiences.
What I’ve learned:
CRM styled career tools; if done right, can be very helpful in helping talents organise the tasks of their career development. AI based tools; though interesting, are tricky at best.
Advantages:
- AI based tools can help talents write better, by critiquing their writing, studying the organisation / institution the talent is aiming at and offering style advice to frame a better argument.
- CRM based tools can help talents manage their career actions; such as networking, applications and job-boards to help them keep an eye over the fairly taxing tax of career management which is nearly a full time job.
Disadvantages:
- Usability issues stemming from enterprise solution ethos in CRM based tools:
I’ve head several clients complain that though they buy solutions, the talents rarely use them. As these tools tend to have a strong enterprise solution ethos, they don’t fit with the landscape of apps that talents use. In short: They look like SAP, not like Tinder or Instagram, which is what talents are more used to. Usability is a key competitive advantage for providers of such solutions. - AI based tools don’t go into the depth of individual impact:
While an AI can help talents research a target organisation/institution, and help them write better, the AI lacks in one significant area: The AI doesn’t know the talent. Despite varied claims, there appear to be no AI tools that replace or replicate the depth of true counselling work, which helps talents make-sense of who they are. They simply aim to help one write better. - Net-net, they can give talents a false sense of progress:
More flattering writing with an AI that doesn’t know the talent, or more control over the process with CRM styled tools can give talents a sense of a deeper or more active career progression. At worst, if the talent is unsure about who they are, what they bring, what they want and why, it can also help them get to the wrong career goal, faster.
“𝗚𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗷𝗼𝗯𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝘂𝗽 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗴𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺 𝗮 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗮𝗿: 𝗶𝘁'𝘀 𝗴𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆'𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗰𝗸 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰”
- Dan Kiernan, Head of Careers, Industry, Oxford Said Business School
Recommended Use Case:
Useful to support talents who are clear on key aspects: career identity & career anchors. CRM styled tools with genuine user focus are helpful, and AI is a handy writing assistant. But neither can replace the work of defining meaningful career anchors & career identity.
So, Do Talent Developers & Career Educators Need A New Solution?
I believe we do.
For the simple reason that the solution that is most effective in helping talents make sense of their careers & drive meaningful growth is also the hardest to scale.
I find that approaches that the most potent interventions with developing talents has to do with:
- helping them ‘make sense’ of their career trajectories
- helping them define what they can offer to future roles and what they want going forward
- equipping them with vital skills that drive their career goals
One-on-ones are the best way to do this but are incredibly resource intensive.
A combination of other tools that support the meaning created in the one-on-one process can then serve in the talents in acting out the meaning gained during one-on-ones.
Thereby also driving our real goal as talent developers: To help our talents live more meaningful careers.
The more meaning talents & career changers see in their own careers, the more likely they are to direct their careers meaningful for and by themselves.
Narrative based approach are designed to do exactly that. And though there is substantial academic literature to prove the efficacy of narrative based approaches in helping talents navigate career change, there simply is no product out there that is rooted in that science.
There’s a gap that needs to be filled, which is why this training solution exists.
If this resonates with you, do get in touch and I'd love to exchange ideas.