Professional Development

For our firm, knowledge is of key importance, requiring that the company must develop a formal system to capture, and disseminate this knowledge generated by our employees. Due to the recent reorganization, employees have differing duties and responsibilities. Further, our professional organization relies almost exclusively on knowledge for our value creation, whereas our high turnover and fast promotion has resulted in a need for development of an efficient way to transfer this knowledge from one generation to the next. This rapid change results in our employees frequent promotion into a supervisory position based mostly on their technical skills rather than their potential as a supervisor, and they lack the soft skills needed to lead teams,

With the continued emergence of new technologies and new business needs, it is important for our company to recognize that the skills required to succeed tomorrow are not the same as the skills required to succeed today. Where once it was enough to establish skill benchmarks based on the success of the past, we must now seek to anticipate the benchmarks of the future, and plan development proactively. We must establish a general skills framework to promote balanced development, and ensure that at every stage of a career, a professional is building a blend of technical, business, and leadership skills (Friefield, 2013). In shifting from a skills based focus, we must provide training on leadership, motivation, and conflict resolution, the softer skills training our supervisors need (Lyons, 2007). These softer skills are the area of current shortcoming for our

Important steps in this phase include providing the budget dollars, identifying the full training content and level, selecting the training type, identifying the training provider, and the timing of the training. It is important that we communicate our well-formulated plan throughout the organization. The communication to staff will be clear that management is fully behind the training initiative, and all levels of the organization support it. The training must be communicated to all employees as a must have, from the top down. It is an essential component to the future success of our company. We will regularly evaluate workforce capabilities and production, for market improvement in workforce