Chapter 2

Moving Your Career Forward

If you read the first chapter of this book or pay even moderate attention to your local newspaper, you know that the workplace is all about change. So it's a safe bet that your job will change in the near future—slightly, maybe dramatically.

In some cases, old job titles, roles, and practices simply are being replaced by new ones. In other situations, practitioners are being asked to redefine an old role or practice to align it with current needs, And practitioners are taking on new roles, functions, and practices as needs arise. In such an environment, you have every reason to be nervous and apprehensive about where all the change will lead, but it's a mistake to assume that the outcomes will not be positive. Your years of experience are highly valued in this new economy, and the good news is that your own career has every opportunity to grow and flourish. Let's look at just a few of the assets you bring to the table as a seasoned professional.

You can be the resource that helps individual workers, teams, divisions, and your organization as a whole cross the bridge from the traditional workplace with its old rules to the new workplace with its opportunities of diversity, technology, and novel ways of doing business. If you've been in the field for five or more years, you've witnessed many of the changes discussed here. Because you've watched the transition to new technologies, new markets, and new methods, you already “get it” because it's happened to you, too. You know, first hand, the urgent need to implement the new ways of thinking and action that change prompts. You also know it's possible to go successfully through these transitions and emerge reenergized on the other side after changes take place. That's why your experience can help guide others through the process.

As someone who's been in the field a while, you've probably moved into a more senior role where you can speak up, contribute your expertise, and help influence important decisions in your organization or in your clients’ professional lives. Even if you are entering training, HRD, or workplace learning and performance from another field, your years of work will be very useful to organizations that can benefit from an experienced professional's perspective.

Think about the trends we described in chapter 1. Can you see opportunities there for your own career? To help you make this connection to the future, here are some action options that any willing and experienced training, HRD, and other workplace learning and performance practitioner can take:

• “Grow in place” by learning new skills in your current position.
• Make a lateral move to increase your understanding of your company's business or to gain new skills.
• Pursue and accept a promotion.
• Choose a downward transfer it that's what works best for your life and your career now.
• Take on a new international assignment or some short-term project work.
• Explore emerging opportunities just opening up in the field.
• Move outside if you've been inside an organization—or move inside if you've been an external consultant.
• In the spirit of these entrepreneurial times, combine several options to shape a career tailored just for you.

Your possibilities are endless. The key is to know where you want to be going and what you want to do once you get there. This chapter highlights your options; the second half of the book will show you how to put these ideas into practice.

Changes in Job Titles and Descriptions

As a practitioner in the field, you know firsthand that titles and descriptions often represent a very small window for viewing the full range of work that's being done. Although job titles and descriptions once served as accurate overviews of the tasks and responsibilities that defined one's role in an organization, today they are little more than token placeholders. They change overnight and vary widely among organizations. Writing in Training & Development, Galagan and Salopek (2000) have characterized the situation this way: “[W]hat you call yourself—trainer, performance specialist, knowledge manager, learning officer—isn't the point. It's what you can help a company achieve that makes the difference these days” (p. 27).

Consider the titles and descriptions in the following sections of this chapter. Remember that the lists are not meant to be exhaustive. Also, keep in mind that positions and responsibilities aren't neatly packaged into distinct units as they were in the past. What once was the sole responsibility of a trainer or a career counselor or an organizational development specialist may now be the focus of a performance consultant with responsibilities in all three areas. Scan the latest “positions available” section on Websites like those of ASTD or the Society of Human Resource Management and you'll see just how blurred the lines are becoming. Some advertised openings combine the responsibilities of two or more specialties, such as “training and performance consultant” or “career adviser and change leader,” all within one position's requirements.

Choosing Your Next Career Move

Making a change always prompts many questions, including a discussion of options. For the training, HRD, and workplace learning and performance professional, the questions most likely resemble these:

• How do I advance or “jump-start” my HRD career by taking on some new challenge within my current position? Is this an area that could offer some possibilities for my growth?
• How do I move to a new area in the field? Is this an area I'd like to learn more about?
• How do I move into training, HRD, or workplace learning and performance? Is this an area to which my experience and skills would transfer successfully?

The next section will help you make decisions in answer to those questions. As you read the section, remember that even the core, traditional areas are undergoing some changes—reconfiguring themselves to align more fully with current workplace realities. No matter what career option you pursue, don't count on it being more of the same. You'll need to adapt your skills and mindset to fit the new audiences you'll be serving and the new processes, services, and products you'll be offering to them. Chapter 3 highlights the skills you'll need to prepare and position yourself for these opportunities.

Opportunities in Training

Training is at the core of our field and chances are good that it will remain important, given workplace needs for ongoing skill development and upgrading and the impact of trends toward the transformation of training and the changing nature of work discussed in chapter 1. Although some of the core skills and responsibilities of the trainer position will remain the same, many more will be rebundled and other, newer skills and responsibilities will become critical for meeting the demands of new audiences. Alison Rossett (1996), professor of educational technology at San Diego State University, summed up the newer world of training in this way: “No longer defined primarily as a stand-up instructor in a classroom, the training and development professional becomes responsible for assessing, designing, developing, and brokering larger performance systems that often include training, but are by no means limited to it” (p. 555).

Here are some of the traditional and emerging job titles in training:

Traditional position titles:

• trainer
• instructional systems designer
• internal training consultant
• training coordinator
• training manager
• vice-president of training and development

New position titles:

• workforce training coordinator
• distance learning coordinator/director
• Web-based media developer
• technical trainer
• technical trainer
• e-trainer

Opportunities in Career Development

Career development is one of the core areas of HRD. Its original thrust was to prepare employees for the future “by giving them a plan for acquiring the knowledge, skills, abilities, and experiences they needed to advance within one organization” (Rothwell, Sanders, and Soper, 1999, p. 6). But just as the employer-employee relationships of the 1980s and 1990s changed, so, too, did the career development emphasis, refocusing its efforts “on keeping individual skills current” (p. 6).

Now, as we move beyond the 1990s and into the first decade of a new century, the focus of career development is shifting again. Its role and place, like most HRD efforts, have become more visible and figural inside organizations. Career development has expanded and repositioned itself as a more central partner. It helps individual workers discover and capitalize on the full measure of their talents, and helps organizations continue to build and make full use of their human capital reserves in order to remain competitive and successful.

As career development takes on this more central role, new career opportunities are created. For instance, the career development facilitator (CDF) designation, recently created by the National Career Development Association, was developed to provide standards and training for people working in career development settings who do not have a background and training in counseling. People who study for and earn the CDF designation are well prepared to apply for work as job search trainers, career resource center coordinators, or occupational and labor market information resource persons. Likewise, the career coach position is growing these days. It meets the needs of people who want help in improving their performance to advance their careers.

Here are some current and future career development opportunities:

Traditional position titles:

• vocational counselor
• career counselor

New position titles:

• career adviser
• career coach

Opportunities in Organization Development

The traditional emphasis in organization development (OD) has been “assuring healthy inter- and intra-unit relationships and helping groups initiate and manage change” (Rothwell, Sullivan, and McLean, 1995, p. 6). But the emphasis of OD specialists today includes other areas as well. For example, the increasing number of company mergers and acquisitions has stepped up the need for OD practitioners to help manage more complex change efforts and coach employees on organizational culture issues. And OD professionals are moving into some other interesting territory. Here are two contemporary scenarios that represent real-world opportunities for OD practitioners:

Scenario 1: An OD practitioner is called into a new dot-com start-up to help bring together the wide range of talents, worldviews, and work styles of its extremely diverse workforce.

Scenario 2: An OD practitioner is asked to facilitate a discussion of organizational culture and help align workers’ goals and vision within a virtual organization where the employees only interact through online chat rooms, bulletin boards, and the company's extranet.

Scenarios like these are sure to increase in the days ahead as dot-coms and virtual organizations grow in size and number. As they do, there should be added opportunities for OD practitioners to provide cutting-edge services to that emerging client base.

So what are OD positions called these days? According to Marti Kaplan, a 20-year OD practitioner in Sonoma County, California

In the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, the OD field was defining itself and strove for differentiation. Part of that [process] was to define what we were not: we were not trainers, and not HR folks. As the usefulness of the field becomes more evident, and training and HR functions become more OD-oriented, these distinctions are diminishing. For example, ten years ago, OD consultants were facilitators. Differentiation from training was considered important in the field, as it defined itself. Now, training has been added to facilitation as a “normal” requirement. I also see this as a reflection of OD work becoming more programmatic, developing and implementing organization-wide processes that require training competencies.

In addition, I've noticed the emergence of what I call OD-plus jobs over the past three to four years: lots of OD and training, and OD and HR generalist at the professional level, and a number of OD and staffing, OD and communication, and OD and compensation management positions where the employer wants a strategic focus. I don't think this is specific to the OD field—I think there is a routine pendulum swing from specialization to generalization that occurs in the world of work…and that we're on our way back to broad-spectrum thinking.

Here are some of the older and newer position titles that Kaplan has seen recently in her role as developer and manager of the OD Network's Job Exchange:

Traditional titles:

• OD consultant
• OD specialist

New position titles inside organizations:

• leadership and team performance consultant
• organizational capability specialist
• performance consultant—team dynamics
• organizational change consultant
• manager, global development
• change enablement manager

New position titles for practitioners working externally:

• learning consultant
• executive consultant
• strategic adviser
• team effectiveness coach
• practice leader

Opportunities in Education, Knowledge Management, Organizational Learning, and Performance

The opportunities within this section are in two separate but related areas. The first area comprises options in education, knowledge management, and organizational learning. These opportunities are emerging as a result of advances in technology and an increased emphasis on learning, trends discussed in chapter 1.

As an experienced professional in the field, you've been around long enough to see the value of intellectual capital surpass the value of capital based on physical holdings like property and machinery. A company's competitive edge rests now more and more on its ability to capture and make full use of all the knowledge it holds. That's why the whole area of knowledge management is growing tremendously. And that's why positions like knowledge officer, which is focused on “leveraging knowledge into tangible results,” and learning officer, which is focused on “leveraging learning,” are on the rise (Bonner, 2000).

Here are some of the traditional opportunities in education and ones that are opening up in knowledge management and organizational learning:

Traditional position titles in education:

• instructor
• assistant dean/dean for undergraduate/graduate programs in business schools

New position titles in education:

• coordinators/instructors/deans in corporate universities
• writers/editors/subject matter experts for online learning programs

New position titles in knowledge management and organizational learning:

• chief learning officer
• director of learning and knowledge
• learning consultant
• organizational architect
• vice president of learning services
• learning architect
• chief knowledge officer
• director of knowledge management
• knowledge facilitator
• knowledge management consultant
• knowledge strategist
• senior knowledge librarian

The second area of opportunity in this sector includes performance-related positions within the newly emerging field of workplace learning and performance (WLP). According to Ethan Sanders, manager of instructional design at ASTD and one of the authors of ASTD Models for Workplace Learning and Performance,

Workplace learning and performance represents a more progressive way of viewing the field; rather than viewing performance and learning as juxtaposed to each other, we begin to see how integral and necessary they both are. Most of the disciplines that reside within WLP have been around for quite a while now. What's new about WLP is that it begins to pull the many approaches and disciplines that are used to improve performance into a cohesive and coherent body of knowledge.

WLP positions may represent a great opportunity for experienced practitioners. Professionals moving into such WLP positions as performance consultant usually have three to five years of experience in human resources, performance improvement, and/or training and development. That means that those who move into these positions often come from the ranks of seasoned professionals like you.

If you'd like to learn more about emerging opportunities in this area, check the Web-Based Resources and Further Reading sections in the back of this book, network with colleagues who have gone into this area, and consider attending classes that focus on WLP.

Because WLP is evolving and multidisciplinary in its approach, there aren't any official job titles that cover the variety of work taken on by practitioners in this area. The list that follows includes the job titles used most frequently to describe opportunities for WLP practitioners (Robinson, 1999). Chapter 3 will give you a fuller picture of WLP roles and responsibilities as they're currently understood and practiced.

WLP position titles:

• performance consultant (the position title mentioned most often in Robinson's survey, 1999)
• business consultant
• learning and performance adviser
• learning services consultant
• performance management consultant
• project manager
• training and development adviser

Opportunities in Consulting, Contract, and Project-Based Assignments

Consulting positions for experienced professionals who wish to work outside the organization are opening up in many areas within the field, in part because of the decision by companies to outsource several HRD-related functions. Some professionals in the field choose to move in and out of the external consultant role—working independently for a time for several client companies and then choosing to work within one organization—to suit their interests, available positions, and other life commitments. Furthermore, as outsourcing has increased consulting opportunities, it has also meant an increase in project and contract positions in several HRD and WLP-related areas.

How do you find out about these consulting and contract or project-based assignments? The Internet and Websites like guru.com and freeagent.com, along with project-based job and contract search options on Websites such as those of ASTD, the Society of Human Resource Management, the OD Network, and www.knowledgejobs.com, offer experienced professionals a wide range of possibilities.

Add to this the number of staffing firms that specialize in placing HRD professionals in short-term assignments and you can begin to get a picture of the tremendous range of opportunities available to you.

Other chapters in this book will help you explore how best to position yourself for these consulting and short-term contract opportunities, and the resources sections at the back of this book will give you ideas for investigating them more fully.

Quality-of-Life Intervention Opportunities

The demands of the workplace are sure to increase in the days ahead and, along with these demands, the personal and family challenges of workers are sure to become more complex. Moreover, as the labor market continues to grow tighter and tighter, companies are realizing that attention to their employees’ work/family/life concerns is viewed as an important benefit and an attractant for job candidates who are considering which company to join.

Because of the increased emphasis on work/life and work/family programs and an increased understanding of the need for emotionally healthy workers, new positions not in abundance a decade ago are being created. And it's likely that such programs will continue to grow in importance in the days ahead.

Job opportunities:

• work/life program staff and directors
• employee assistance professionals
• workplace chaplains

Your Next Steps

Now that you've read through an overview of the areas within the field and seen a sampling of the positions available there, consider which areas hold the most interest for you, which ones you might like to explore in more detail, and which ones could help you advance your career. If you're feeling a bit overwhelmed by the wide range of opportunities available to you and the energy, effort, and time it may take to advance your career, don't worry. A career move, like other important moves you choose to make in your life, will take time and energy, but it's a step-by-step process rather than an overnight event. The key to making a successful career move is to reflect on your strengths, understand your options, and then decide where and how you'd like to make a difference.

Chapter 3 will take you one step further along in this process. It will give you a fuller understanding of opportunities in the field by outlining some of the key roles, competencies, and activities of positions in training, HRD, and workplace learning and performance. The more you know about a position—both how it contributes to your organization's or client's bottom line and its day-to-day responsibilities—the more you'll be able to make good career decisions for yourself. As you read through the next chapter, play close attention to the opportunities that most excite and challenge you. Chances are good that these opportunities represent the career options that are most worth your attention as you consider your next career move.