What the data reveals

“Continuing to confuse career development with attaining specific positions will only limit the growth that both employees and organizations need.”
– Julie Winkle Giulioni, Promotions Are SO Yesterday

Yesterday on our weekly internal Zoom call, our thought leader partner and career development expert Julie Winkle Giulioni shared two remarkable sets of data with us that we’d like to also share with you.

What she discovered, and we’re not surprised by this, is that learning & development professionals are increasingly having to do exponentially more with much less. But what did surprise and delight us, is Julie’s response to that challenge and how that matches what’s trending in L&D, a less-is-more content model of learning that reflects people’s limited attention spans and available resources of time and capital.

Julie says she’s doing more micro bursts of short video, audio, and even SMS-based learning, micro keynotes (20-30 minutes), and more on-the-job application of learning. She’s also using custom AI-enabled tools for on-the-spot answers (hers is the GrowBot), and tasking AI with pre-work research to help organizations more quickly zero in on the learning structure they need.

Some background and more data from Julie:

The author of two books, the award-winning Promotions Are SO Yesterday (2022) and the bestselling employee development classic Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go (with a new 3rd edition coming out later this year), Julie helps managers and their employees discover new and meaningful ways people can grow in their work through her multidimensional career development framework that looks beyond the scope of traditional career advancement.

When she kicked off her newest book and an accompanying program, Developing Multidimensional Careers, she also launched a self-assessment measurement tool to help people understand their interest in 8 different career development dimensions: contribution, competence, connection, confidence, challenge, contentment, choice, and climb.

The data from that assessment shows how people’s career development interests have changed in the past couple of years. The No. 1 dimension people are most interested in is still contribution, the feeling they are contributing in a meaningful way to the organization.

No. 2 is still competence, but No. 3 has switched places with No. 6 from connection when the research began early in the pandemic (and we were all still figuring out how to work remotely) to contentment in 2023. And interestingly, climb, or the desire to advance up the organizational ladder, remains dead last at No. 8.

Her second data set is from her recent survey on Beyond Leadership Lip Service: Gaining Support for Learning Initiatives, which we promoted here in November as one great thing. With responses from more than 100 learning & development professionals, her report provides in part a snapshot of what they feel is most challenging right now:

1. Designing engaging learning experiences employees enjoy
2. Selecting high-impact content that can deliver business results
3. Choosing the best delivery method/platform

If those challenges are also yours, let us know because they are a perfect match for what we do best.

Stay tuned! We plan to feature a guest blog post from Julie soon with more details and data. And we’ll provide you with access to her full report.

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Contact us or talk to your Advantage partner to learn more about the learning initiatives we can bring to your organization from Julie and from Christine DiDonato, another Advantage thought leader with expertise in career development. Their content pairs especially well together.

Ask us about Julie’s new multidimensional career toolkit, with engaging and opportunity-expanding card decks, an activity guide, and more – all designed to make growth a lot easier and more fun than ever before.

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One great thing for 01.30.24 – Your Multidimensional Career: A Self-Assessment
Discover your own career development interests and possibilities