7 Career-Defining Tips

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Kellie Hart

Everyone has their own ideas when it comes to what it takes to have a successful career. That being said, you wouldn’t think it would take an Executive Coach to figure these out and that they would be considered common sense, but they are not!

In a recent Forbes article, an Executive Coach reveals “the best career advice ever” – advice that applies to any industry, any role and fits in nicely with Intelex’s Corporate Values: Leadership, Sustainability, Integrity, Respect for All Individuals, Teamwork & Trust, Stewardship, Hard Work, and Happiness.

1. Recognize a diamond in the rough – you would be hard-pressed to find an organization that is perfect and of course everyone has their own definition of a “prefect organization”. It is also important to recognize that a career-defining moment can come from helping an organization get out of a tough situation.

2. Be accountable – be the person who follows up, makes deadlines, and takes ownership. How do you gain respect from your clients, management and colleagues, if you can’t be trusted?

3. Be honest – recognize when you’re wrong and speak up when you disagree. Standing out means having your own opinion.

4. Treat everyone equally – no matter what your role is, respect goes a long way. It is as basic as referring to your direct reports as your colleagues rather than your staff.

5. Be gracious – this one should be the most obvious, but is probably the most neglected. Self-entitlement plagues workplaces. Saying thank you for the opportunities you receive and recognizing a job well done goes a long way.

6. Take initiative – don’t wait to be asked – be proactive!

7. Help others – focusing only on your own development is not the only way to be recognized. Mentoring and developing someone else’s career shows your leadership potential.

Career tips based on Kristi Hedeges’ Forbes article, “Executive Coach Reveals Best Career Advice Ever”.

Are you over-preparing for your job interview?

Posted on September 26, 2012 by Bryan Humphries

When most people think of “HR interview questions”, a traditional set of questions come to mind. These questions are predictable, repeatable, and easy to prepare for. Candidates also come prepared to defend their experience and their resumes. They think any gaps in timeline will meticulously be scrutinized. Candidates can over-prepare to answer questions like, “what are your strenghts and weaknesses?” or “do you prefer to work on a team or on your own?” and my personal favourite “tell me about yourself”.

Typically, when these questions get asked, the overly prepared answers are delivered. Answers that can easily be found on the Internet. Candidates are representing not who they truly are, but who they feel the interviewer wants them to be. These questions might be able to secure individuals who can handle the everyday aspects of the roles they are in contention for. However, for companies concerned over their corporate culture, these questions not only miss out on cultural-fit, but also do not accurately predict how well they will do in the role.

Interviews are similar to a consultative sale, there needs to be a discovery conversation to define what a candidate needs in a new role, what are their skills? Their background? What are the intangibles? At the end of it all, the most important question is what do they want to do? The only way to get here is getting honest answers. The goal is to have a relaxed candidate who is not put on the defensive and relying on prepared answers, but actually thinking and speaking for themselves and relying on their experiences rather than what they think they should say.

At Intelex, our interview process is intended to foster a conversation about what you can bring to our organization, what Intelex can do for you, and what we can pull from your past experiences. For us at Intelex, preparing for the interview process means researching the company, reviewing your experiences and showing us who you are as an individual – not what something on the Internet said you should say!

Bryan Humphries is a Corporate Recruiter with Intelex’s Professional Development Office (PDO). The Intelex PDO posts advice, tips and insight on careers and professional development every second Wednesday.

Training Gap Analysis 101

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Purdal Mya

Training new hires in the tech industry has become a challenging pursuit among training and development professionals. As technology endlessly evolves, training objectives have to follow suit. This can cause large gaps in your training program if they are not addressed early and often. Conducting a Training Gap Analysis is a great way to stay on top of the dynamic beast that is your tech organization.

What is a Training Gap Analysis?

Essentially, a Training Gap Analysis describes the difference between the job skills that your people are currently gaining or improving through training and the skills that they will need in the immediate future to keep your company competitive.

The idea behind any Gap Analysis is to create a bridge between where your organization is and where it needs to be. In training, it is about making what we train as close to what actually happens on the job.

Who do you conduct Training Gap Analysis with?

Use a pool of diverse employees from all walks of your company. This will improve the results of your analysis, extract vital insight from your workforce, and allow you to see how training impacts everyone in the company. Look to all employees, regardless of seniority, including:

Experienced Employees: Employees who have been around your company for a long period of time have seen both your training programs and your company at large evolve and can hopefully help make suggestions based on their experience.
Managers/Supervisors: Employees who have direct reports are great to leverage, they see the benefits and obstacles of the current program in their own employees.
Newer Employees: Employees who have started in the last six months are my favourite to work with – they have recently gone through your onboarding program and have had a chance to get comfortable in their job. Ask them what they liked, what they found redundant, what they would like to see in the future.

Why conduct Training Gap Analysis?

Carrying out a Training Gap Analysis will help your organization from many different angles, including:

Sending the Same Message: Too often do new employees come out of training where they are being told one thing and told another once they get on the job. This will help all parties promote the same message.
Identifying Trends: If those you converse with during your analysis are all saying the same thing, it can help prioritize transformations moving forward.
Strengthening Relationships: Everyone wants to feel like they are cared for and considered, this is an easy way to build a strong relationship with the rest of the company. Let them be heard, and deliver on what they ask for.

Now there are many ways to go about completing a Training Gap Analysis but the most important message I am trying to push is for your organization to comprehend the significance of completing these analysis. The accuracy and efficiency of your Training Program weighs heavily on the success of your employees.

Purdal Mya is a Corporate Trainer in Intelex Technologies’ Professional Development Office (PDO). Reach him at purdal.mya@intelex.com or use the comments section below.

Training needs assessments help your organization’s training efforts

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Anthony Cogliano

In many ways, Training Needs Assessments are the backbone of an organization’s development and transformational efforts. It may surprise you to learn that less than 50% of small to medium-sized organizations actually conduct official, robust Training Needs Analyses to gain insight into training requirements, and even fewer actually use the acquired data in any meaningful way.

Training isn’t about people sitting in a classroom; it’s about how effective those people can be once they are released into their respective roles. Training builds contributors; focused training builds focused contributors, and focused contributors provide an increased benefit to any organization.

Get Started!

Training Needs Assessments begin with understanding your current state, and being able to identify the various requirements of your desired future state. The future state is highly dependent on a clearly defined set of corporate goals that serve to inform all supporting activities, such as training.

At Intelex, we are fortunate to have a clear set of goals that are defined on an annual basis, and help us to move the organization forward. These goals serve as a target for our Future State. One great thing about our Corporate Goals is that we arrive at them together, by pooling our resources and ideas, and deciding on the best course of action for our company. Other companies can benefit from this highly effective model.

Pick Your Analysis Tools

Once defined, a gap analysis can be performed using any number of tools available to the organization. Interestingly, tools used vary widely from industry to industry, and in fact from company to company in many instances as well.

Whenever considering the tools available for your use, always remember that you are attempting to ensure that a) the tool measures what it’s supposed to measure, and b) the tool produces consistent results when used, so that we can trust our findings and make informed business decisions.

Examples of Tools that can be used by your Organization:

Employee Satisfaction Surveys (what do your employees wish they had?)
Employee Reviews (what are the challenges facing your employees?)
Analyzing KPIs and Balanced Scorecards (what do the metrics tell you about current quality and productivity?)
Observations (what do you actually see occurring day-to-day?)
Informal communication (what do you hear around the water cooler?)
Analyzing the allocation of Educational Allowances (in what areas do employees ask to focus this benefit?)

Use Your Data

With your analysis in hand, training requirements can easily be described, along with required budgets and related ROI. The most important thing for an Organization to keep in mind is that Training, when properly vectored using a Training Needs Analysis, helps reduce costs by eliminating costly mistakes and inefficiencies. Effort expended through training is not wasted; it is leveraged exactly where it is needed every time.

Make It Stick!

Monitoring is a necessity if you’re trying to validate your ROI. Check your Key Performance Indicators and listen to what they tell you:

Has production increased or decreased?
Is production or process quality higher or lower?
Are employees more or less satisfied?
What does your turnover rate look like?

If you find that required positive metrics are still stalled or in decline, do something about it by adjusting your approach. Once you are clear on the problem you need to solve, it’s that much easier to make the right changes. This is what Total Quality Management is all about.

Always remember that your goal is to be in a more favourable position than you were previously. Track your training; track your results; listen to the information. It will only help you to improve your overall Training efforts, and by extension the efficacy and credibility of your organization!

Decoding corporate culture: key questions to consider when evaluating that new job

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Kellie Hart

As I’m sure everyone has been told, the interview process is not only a way for a company to assess your fit, but also your opportunity to interview the company. You need to ask yourself the question, ‘Is this somewhere I would like to come to everyday?’ We are told over and over again that we spend more time with the people we work with than we do with our families, a fact that makes it all the more important to ensure that there is a cultural fit.

Many companies (especially in the tech industry) are moving towards developing corporate cultures that set them apart in order to foster employee engagement and thrive in a tight labour market. The problem is, a company’s corporate culture is not something that you can understand from looking at their mission statement or taking someone’s word for it – you need to experience it for yourself! One type of corporate culture is not suited for everyone; different personalities thrive in different cultures. This is why it is so important to ask questions and be observant throughout the entire interview process.

How do you experience a company’s corporate culture during the interview process? Arrive early for your interview! A lot of a company’s corporate culture can be observed while you sit in the waiting area.

Here are some key areas to take note of throughout the interview process:

Style

What is the dress code?
What is the energy level in the office? (e.g. is it buzzing, quiet, chaotic?)
Where is the office located? Is it a trendy neighborhood or an industrial park?
Does the company believe in work/life balance? What are the business hours?

Office Space

How is the office space arranged?
Who has an office and who has a cubicle?
Are senior executives hidden away on their own floor where you need special access?
What are the common areas used for?
What is displayed on the walls and posted on bulletin boards?
What do employees have on their desks?

Social

How do employees interact with one another?
How do employees interact with you? Are you acknowledged?
What does the company do for fun? What types of social events have they had in the past? How often? (Pictured is a shot from a recent monthly Intelex patio party.)
Are employees working in teams or independently?

Professional Development

What opportunities and resources are available for professional development?
What is the company’s policy on promoting from within?
How is success measured?
How are employees recognized?

Lastly, ask everyone you meet throughout the interview process how long they have been with the company and how they would describe the company’s culture. Take each opportunity to gage whether you are getting an individual perspective with a consistent underlying message. Most important, don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions!

The Top 3 Resources to check out before your Intelex interview

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Bryan Humphries

Interview preparation is everything and truly knowing who you are being interviewed by and what they actually do is critical to making a great impression. At Intelex, doing your research in preparation for your interview is a huge part in showing that you are interested and dedicated to the opportunity of working with us! After all, you are interviewing us, just as much as we are interviewing you. As a potential employee at Intelex – or any company for that matter – you will be responsible for representing the company and the product or service they offer. That being said, it should be something you believe in!

Here at Intelex we have so much content on our website and as a result it can be hard to focus on the key elements in a short time line. To make things a little simpler, as Intelex’s Corporate Recruiter I’ve put together a list of the top three links that really sum up who we are.

Learn more about Intelex, our products and everything we do by watching this presentation by Intelex President and CEO Mark Jaine.
Take a look at our Meet the Team page and video, the latter of which provides a great, unscripted perspective into the real world of Intelex. Our employee testimonials provide a great primer on what it’s like to work at Intelex.
Check out feature interviews with team members Tomas Kuras (embedded below), JP Nadeau and Cheryl O’Connor. Our Facebook Page is also another great way to view these testimonials ad get a sense of our corporate culture.

Got questions? Use the comments area below. And don’t forget to check back every second Wednesday for our Professional Development Office (PDO) blog series.

True competence starts with strategy

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

We’ve discussed how training is not competence and how compromised employee competence can hurt all aspects of business performance. So, what do you do about it? Today I’d like to discuss a very simple approach to developing effective training and cultivating workplace competence.

While a high level of employee competence makes the difference between a simply serviceable workforce and one that truly excels, many might contest that achieving competence is easier said than done. This is true; properly training staff can be a significant burden on any organization. Simply providing training, tracking training, and measuring competence post-training involves substantial costs, multiple dedicated, full-time trainers, depending on the organization’s size – burdens that are significantly reduced if not entirely eliminated for organizations that use the right training tracking and management software. Coupling these software tools with a training strategy will generate results for any organization of any size, under any budgetary constraints.

To that end, here are some essential tips for improving your workplace trainign programs and enhancing employee competence.

Start with a training strategy. Conduct a basic needs assessment to define what the requirements are for all employee groups and determine resource and content availability so you know who is available to provide training and what materials exist or need to be created. The results of these investigations will inform your implementation strategy. Plan to leverage training management software to execute your strategy, and ensure it is scalable software that can accompany corporate growth.
Evaluate your time constraints and resources. Do you need an employee up and running as soon as possible, or can your training resources take time to train the individual and gradually integrate him or her into the workforce? If you don’t want to hire and maintain a team of trainers to implement your training plan and conduct training and competency exercises as your organization grows, use a training software tool. Yes, training and competency-building is a significant investment, but it cannot be reiterated enough how time-consuming and resource-heavy thorough training can be without streamlined software. Even the simple act of tracking training manually – that is, without a training tracking tool – will eat up unnecessary resources on a daily basis and grind your training program down to a lumbering pace.
Define goals and track progress. While this may be one of the most crucial aspects in a successful training strategy, it is also one of the most overlooked. Business leaders often think that training is nebulous and too difficult to track, and this factor might be the greatest contributor to the gulf between training and competence described above. Yet it is quite simple to track the success of a training strategy.
Get a training software solution that can capture and streamline key performance indicators (KPI), such as dates and times for training, instructors, cost per delivery, attendance, and accountability. It is also ideal to have functionality to automatically assign courses (e.g. Brian is hired in the manufacturing department and automatically assigned a group of required courses), reminders and escalations, generate reports, and produce detailed analytics on training performance.
Build custom quizzes. Critically, you’ll want the capacity to generate customized quizzes to test employees on course content to ensure they have actually absorbed required information. This step is generally overlooked, yet is one of the most crucial aspects of building competency as opposed to having employees simply ‘sit in a classroom’. Notably, possessing all of these documented metrics will help you circumvent potential legal calamities by enabling you to easily prove all employees were thoroughly trained.
Calculate ROI and get buy-in. An underlying component to a successful training strategy is buy-in, and not just from senior management and those that hold the purse strings, but across the entire organization. As you prepare your training strategy, create case studies, define scenarios that illustrate the consequences of compromised training – as well as the costs, time and resources associated with a manual training management system as opposed to a software-based system – and calculate training ROI to build a convincing case for a streamlined, competency-focused training strategy.

Do you have ideas on how to better ensure training programs improve workforce competency? Write me or post your ideas in the comments section below.

Want to learn more about building effective training programs and generating true competency among your workforce? Check our white paper, Cultivating Competence: Leveraging Training Tools for Measurable Results.

The organizational costs of incompetence

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

Yesterday we talked about how being trained doesn’t necessarily equate with competence. Today we’ll take a brief look at how that discrepancy can impact organizational performance.

To start, take a look at the picture to the right. Now, by no means are we casting aspersions on the capabilities of these two able-bodied young men by implying that they are incompetent, as the title above alludes. However, given the tremendous level of accuracy, acuity and precision required every day in their individual roles within their manufacturing setting, it’s a good entry point for this discussion to consider how one hole in their training could, at any point, on any day, engender compromised competence, thereby resulting in a possible environmental, health or safety-related disaster or impact product quality.

Training touches every part of your business

The benefits of a training program that cultivates actual competence are multifaceted and impact all aspects of corporate performance. Of course, on a day-to-day basis, competence reduces the probability of errors in all job functions, thereby boosting productivity and profitability. But above and beyond that, from a corporate perspective every organization has a moral, business and legal obligation to their employees in terms of education, and a good training strategy will address each facet in a comprehensive way.

For example, a business has a moral obligation to ensure employees are sufficiently trained in their job function so as not to suffer injuries or encounter preventable illnesses on the job. In business terms, should an employee get injured or become sick at work there is the potential of a variety of costs that may impact the organization’s bottom line, including claims, lost time, and fines associated with regulatory infractions. From a legal perspective, if an employee is injured in, let’s say a manufacturing setting, they could initiate a lawsuit against the organization and claim that they were insufficiently trained. In such a situation, if the business could not produce documented evidence to clearly prove the employee was provided with required training, it would be on the hook for substantial damages and other consequences, not to the always mention unavoidable legal fees.

Competence boosts retention

Beyond the business-critical advantages to a comprehensive training strategy outlined above, a powerful byproduct of such an approach is, quite simply, that a competent employee is a happy employee. By ensuring employees are fully prepared to appropriately fulfill all of their job requirements, they suffer less stress over the tactical elements of their job, and enjoy greater confidence and increased motivation to do their job better.

Further, organizations that take a holistic, continual approach to training and skill-building will ultimately cultivate the sentiment among its workforce that the employer genuinely cares for the employee. While this all leads a higher level of morale among staff and an enhanced focus on quality, the most notable benefit is that retention rates will be greatly improved, and attrition rates will fall. Happy, competent employees who feel they are adequately equipped to excel in their duties are less inclined to leave their organization and more inclined to contribute to their employer’s success.

So how do you do it? Well, you start with a training strategy, the subject of tomorrow’s post.

Is your trained employee competent?

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

It happens all the time. A worker makes a misstep in his or her day-to-day duties. The mistake leads to a serious injury, compromised product quality, negative environmental impacts, or even a fatality. “But they were trained,” the supervisor responsible for the employee in question objects. Trained, indeed – but were they competent in their job?

This situation is a regular occurrence in workplaces around the world and it speaks to a widespread and persistent discrepancy in many conventional approaches to training management: the gulf between simply delivering training and ensuring actual competency. Organizations that have achieved success know the value of a comprehensive, robust training program. Streamlined onboarding of new employees and ongoing training – and, critically, training tracking – throughout the course of their professional development can, if delivered effectively, lead to a more effective and responsible workforce, and greater retention rates. After all, while the costs associated with recruiting, training, support and professional development can be great, any seasoned business owner knows it is even more expensive to lose those employees.

A widespread problem, however, is that too often employers equate training with competency. They assume that since an employee has sat in a classroom and completed a course, that they are competent – a very inaccurate presumption. The following misconceptions contribute to some traditional views on corporate training:

Any and all training is good training, so we ought to train for the sake of training.
Simply having employees sit in a classroom means they are competent.
The availability of training material is sufficient enough to induce learning.
Subject-matter experts (SME) are able to train other staff based on tenure (that is, the notion that longer-serving employees are more capable of delivering training).
That robust training is not necessarily worth the investment and ROI is too difficult to capture.

As with the mistaken belief that training is tantamount to competence, all these assumptions lead to false conclusions. But above and beyond how these misconceptions are engendered it is important to clarify what is actually meant by competence in an organizational context. Essentially, ‘competence’ refers to an employee’s ability to do their job properly. But establishing competency within an organization is not something that just happens, nor is it something that will be necessarily produced by the provision of an otherwise robust and seemingly comprehensive training program. Instead, a systematic approach featuring a nuanced training strategy is an essential prerequisite for employee competence.

Competency certainly sounds like something that would be an advantageous element to cultivate within a corporate culture, if not an essential element of doing business. However, the intrinsic value of a training program that engenders competency is not always immediately apparent to upper management whose buy-in is critical to the success of any training strategy.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss how training impacts different areas of business performance, and on Thursday we’ll talk Training and Competency Strategy.

Top 5 tips for setting a great foundation for new employee expectations

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Purdal Mya

As a child I had set of family values that were established in our house that acted as guidelines for my behavior. My mother would always remind me anytime I would steer away from these guidelines why they were important. Family values can be whatever works best for you and your family. Some of our values included “Dream Big”, “Always Be Honest” and my favourite, “Laugh Out Loud”. Looking back on them now, I believe these family values acted more like expectations of the people living in the house.

These expectations helped me become a contributing, respectful member of the family and shaped who I am today. I believe the same theory can be applied to the workplace. If you set expectation for your employees they can easily identify what is required of them and perform to that standard. Setting high yet attainable expectations for your employees to reach can help uncork brilliant potential, and who reaps the rewards of that? Everyone – the individual employees, his or her subordinates, management, the company at large, and most of the individual themselves.

So how do you set expectation of your employees? Who should be involved in setting expectations? How do you measure success of reaching expectations? Below are five ideas that, if blended together, can provide you and your employees a great foundation for setting expectations and achieving mutual success.

Don’t wait until they arrive – Get a head start: Why not let your new employees know what their first day couple days are going to look like? This can happen during the recruitment cycle or it can happen before their first day of employment. This ‘preflight’ stage helps put new employees’ minds at ease and sets the stage for you to deliver on what you have promised – an easy win when it comes to setting expectations. One of the ways I have seen work is by emailing all new employees before they start to let them know what their first day is going to look like, where they can park, how much parking cost, where to eat around the area, who to ask for when they first get in, and most importantly what they can expect from their new career on their first day. This allows new employees to understand the outcome of their first few days and also allows them to prepare for what is being thrown at them.
Prepare for their arrival: A new employee’s first experience should be one that is well-organized, regardless what other day-to-day demands and responsibilities you are facing. We all get busy, but ensure you carve out time beforehand to be ready when new employees come on board. When a new employee realizes that the company they committed too is prepared for them, it helps puts any jitters they may have had to rest and allows them to focus on learning the ways of the new company.
Expectation setting is a team sport: Once your employee is feeling settled into his or her role, sit down with them and ask them what they are expecting, indicate what you are expecting and come up with how you both think you will get there. You should do this early on to get a head start on the expectation train. The simple interaction can make sure all parties are motivated to meeting the same goals. It also informs the new employee that he or she has to come in and perform.
Everyone loves numbers: Now I am not sure if everyone loves numbers, but in this day in age, those in the business world certainly respond well to numbers. Provide your new employee with metrics related to goals and targets that should strive to attain. This will provide them with a tangible goal to strive towards that indicate success.
Put their shoes on your feet: I firmly believe you cannot create expectations for someone unless you can comprehend where they are coming from. In which every way you can, understand their job, their responsibilities, their strengths and their weakness. Use this information to challenge them and provide them with expected goals you intend for them to meet.

Again, embedding some of these simple tips into your recruitment and professional development programs is a great way to expedite onboarding, boost employee comfort, minimize confusion, improve retention and, ultimately, improve organizational efficiency.

Purdal Mya is a Corporate Trainer in Intelex’s Professional Development Office (PDO). Every second Wednesday, different members of the Intelex PDO provide great insights on everything from professional development to hiring and recruiting to career planning right here on the Official Intelex Blog.