Our Programmes
Balance™ (A new way of managing career)
A new way to successfully manage your career development“If we learned one thing from the events of the job market, it’s that nobody’s coming to take care of our careers. We can’t wait for a big bailout, a massive economic turnaround, or some miracle to grow our paycheques. We’re each responsible for taking charge and making things happen for ourselves.” “I own it” “it’s up to me” I’m responsible for my career” are common statements from highly engaged and productive employees. They do not expect the organisation to play a primary role in managing their career, rather a support role. Balance is created to help individuals adopt this ownership mind-set in managing their career. In essence, if your aim as an employer is to maximise productivity or as an individual is to maximise job satisfaction, Balance™ is for you. Since it is impossible to separate the destiny of an organisation from the collective destinies of its people, Balance™, helps to drive home a symbiotic relationship between good career management behaviour and effective self-management Balance™ is an original behaviourally based self-score questionnaire and coaching programme developed on 40 years of experience and recent research into the question “what has contributed most to success in career development"? The research identified seven categories in all that are important elements of successful career management. They are:
- Building relationships
- Career development strategy
- Learning and development
- Adapting to change
- Use of personal energy
- Work-life balance
- Self-focus- employer focus
Balance™ enables both individual and their employer to benefit from a relationship that is well founded on a balance in all the 7 areas identified. There are many self-development (focus on self) and assessment (focus on employer) tools in existence; so far, Balance™ is the only questionnaire which fills the space between the employer’s need to maximise productivity and the individual’s need to maximise job satisfaction. Because Balance focuses on behaviours (not a measure of personality or attitudes), and it is self-scored, it puts the individual in control of the coaching discussion. The outputs can be very easily combined with personal development plans, in-house career discussions, external career coaching and talent management programmes.
Benefits of the Balance™ Programme to Individuals
- identify ways to build towards success in managing individual career
- find out individual strengths and development areas in career management
- find ways to increase awareness of employment and development options in your organisation
- be better prepared for development discussions at work
- identify relationships you would like to improve and ways to do so
- manage more effectively the balance between ‘self and employer focus’
- use your strengths in the most energy efficient way
- improve the way you plan and manage your learning and development
- be ahead in your profession or sector when you are actively managing your career
- know how to respond more effectively to changes at work
- create a work-life balance that works for you
Benefits of the Balance™ Programme to Employers
- when employees are more conscious of relationship building, it can help facilitate cordial relationship among teams and employees
- gets employees to be more aware of employer’s need while not putting self to detriments
- it helps individuals in an organisation to take ownership of their career management
- when individuals take ownership of their career management in the key areas identified by Balance™, it has a positive impact on job performance
- it enhances employee engagement
- employers benefits when individual employees take ownership of their learning and development
The Programme The programme can be run as a workshop for a group of people or for individual. For individual meeting, it will usually take the following approach;
Stage 1: Preparation (allow up to 2 hours) Completing a short Background Questionnaire and the Balance™ Questionnaire
Stage 2: Meeting 1 (2 hours)
- Discussing your current career context
- Debriefing your Balance™ results
- Identifying your career management strengths
- Devising a career management plan to cover the six Balance™ categories
- Agreeing development actions to take
Stage 3: Meeting 2 (1.5 hours)
- Reviewing actions and exercises
- Identifying ways to sustain the balance you need to manage your career development successfully
- Deciding on further meetings if appropriate
What people have been saying about Balance™ Like a coach in your pocket, Balance asks all the right career questions (and can work as a regular reminder). Not just a ‘one-off’ review. Wish I’d had this from the start of my career, as I think it would have really made a difference What I particularly like is the focus on “you” and “the employer” in interaction. This is not something I have come across. Usually it’s either all about the organisation’s aims or all about “what I need from work” This is a very clear and energising questionnaire. It gets you thinking about your career behaviours and aspirations, providing an ideal platform for self-reflection - an excellent tool to help inform a career coaching programme. I found the questionnaire easy to complete and it enabled me to reflect on how closely aligned my career goals were with the opportunities at my current employer. This is a good exercise to take back control. It really “puts you in the driving seat”. The outputs can be very easily combined into personal development plans and encourage you to recognise and use your resources. This is just kind of tool a big organisation might seek to make available online to employees. It encourages self-questioning from the outset as well as facilitating a conversation about career management. I like the way it includes suggested actions related to your scores. The Balance questionnaire showed me a way to succeed by giving me a range of different development options that I could use to change the way I do things. It made me aware of the importance of both my needs and my employer’s
Facebook
Latest Tweet
Tweets by @careeredgeplusConnect With Us