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Using Assessment Centers to Measure Management Potential

The assessment center was conceived for one reason and only one reason to find people who can succeed in certain critical, high-impact jobs.

You can download excellent powerpoint slides on HR management, business strategy and personal development HERE.

To be perfectly correct, the primary function of an assessment center is the measurement and evaluation of human characteristics and potential, figuring out who, among a group of “likelies,” is the most likely to succeed in a specific type of job. The acid test of the assessment center, then, is predicting winners for key jobs that have less than obvious, straightforward or easily agreed-upon performance parameters and entry-level requirements. Continue reading →

Career Development and Career Planning

For HRD professionals, the career development task in the 2020s will be to balance the individual’s needs for freedom and growth with the organization’s needs for productivity and results.

Most existing career development systems will continue to maintain the basic components of career development. These components include:

You can download excellent powerpoint slides on HR management, business strategy and personal development HERE.

1. Techniques for individual self-assessment: Skills, interests, preferences, values and constraints such as family needs, geographical location, financial pressures, etc. Continue reading →

Assess Your Strengths, before You Start Your Own Career Plan

Ask a trainer what he or she is good at and you’ll hear something like this: “I’m pretty good at A but I really need to work on B, C, D, E, F….” Perhaps we spend so much time investigating other people’s performance problems and patching up weaknesses in the classroom that we’re unable to look objectively at our personal and professional assets.

You can download excellent powerpoint slides on HR management, business strategy and personal development HERE.

But a rational career planning and development effort is based on understanding and exploiting one’s strengths, not on bolstering one’s perceived weaknesses. To do otherwise is to fall victim to a reasoning/thinking fallacy that psychiatrist Albert Ellis refers to as the Musterbation of Perfection: “I must be perfect. After all, I’m a trainer and trainers are infallible.” Continue reading →

Career Planing and Career Management in HR Fields

A topic of increasing interest to trainers is personal career development. Many competent trainers finally are asking, “Hey, where do I go from here?” According to David Brinkerhoff, vice-president of Abbott-Smith Associates, a Millbrook, NY-based recruiting firm specializing in the training field, the question is more than justified.

“It’s incredible,” says Brinkerhoff, “that these sophisticated professionals, who are so concerned with the training and development of others, spend next to no time thinking about themselves and their own careers.” Continue reading →

Traditional Performance Appraisal System is Failing

A conversation with Jay Beecroft can be a heady experience. Topics change and twist; one good thought invariably triggers two more. We recently had the good fortune of finding Beecroft at his St. Paul, MN base of operations and available for lunch. Between soup and salad, we gathered the following classic “Jayisms.” Continue reading →

Becoming a Corporate Sales Training Supervisor

3M’s Jay Beecroft is a training directors’ training director. Though his official title— di¬rector of education, training and development— accurately mirrors his lack of personal pretension, it tells next to nothing of his successful 28-year reign as 3M’s top trainer.

You can download excellent powerpoint slides on HR management, business strategy and personal development HERE.

Beecroft joined 3M in 1948 as a sales rep and, like so many, became a trainer almost by accident. In Beecroft’s case, the accident was named Bill Gove. Though now a nationally known speaker/trainer, Gove was 3M’s manager of business develop-ment when he met and was impressed by the ex-Army-Air-Corps-pilot-turned-sales rep, Jay Beecroft. Continue reading →