Beverly Kaye
Founder and CEO
Career Systems International

The focus of our work is one of the most important topics in the life of an employee –personal development and satisfaction in the work place.

We help managers gain skills in engaging, developing and retaining their best talent. We also help individuals prepare for a development/engagement dialogue with their manager.

As a firm, Career Systems International spends considerable time helping our clients accelerate the transfer and application of what we teach. I am happy to share what we have discovered works best.

Dr. Beverly Kaye is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Career Systems International. She has been a leader in the career development field for 25 years. Dr. Kaye is the author of the classic career development book, Up is Not the Only Way, and the co-author (with Sharon Jordan-Evans) of the international bestseller on retaining talent, Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay.

Career Systems International is a Talent Management Company whose workshops and materials show organizations how to use development processes to attract and retain their key people.

CSI helps build a culture where employees are energized and managers are supportive, where mentoring becomes a natural, everyday occurrence, where growth and learning are on-going.

The purpose of the Learning Alert is to share best practices that help learners follow-through and improve their personal and business results.

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Love It and Use It!

Beverly Kaye
Guest Editor

Like the rest of my colleagues in training and development, I love teaching and I love helping people develop and advance in their careers. Over the years, we have come to appreciate the importance of ensuring that people put what they learn in our programs to use. To ensure that people get the maximum value from learning and development, we need to engage their hearts as well as their heads.

Focus on Head and Heart

We design and deliver every program so that when participants walk out the door they feel empowered and prepared to take action with a 'can-do' attitude.

We intentionally work to get participants’ adrenalin going. We engage their hearts so they have a passion to apply what they learn. They leave with an understanding that no one can take charge of their development and job satisfaction but themselves.

So learning about taking charge of your own development is more than a cognitive exercise, it is about creating super empowered individuals.

But that is not enough. The second half of the equation is the managers of participants.

Focus on the Managers of Participants

Managers are critical to success of participants to help them follow-through on what they learn. We find the world of most managers is difficult. Managers in most cases are already overwhelmed with the task portion of their work so the demands of taking care of their human capital put them in overload.

Most managers have the will to lead development discussions. We have yet to find a manager who gets up in the morning and says. "I don’t want my people to grow"or "I don’t care about retaining my best people." But today’s manager often lacks the skill or the how-to for these conversations.

To engage managers in learning, we try to be practical and focused. We offer possibilities, not prescriptions.

We use a mantra in all our design and delivery: We want all our work to be deceptively simple, delightfully engaging, and deliberately flexible. Instead of delivering a complex, overwhelming process, we deliver clear steps that make the conversation easy and help managers bring out the best in their people.

We boil down what needs to be learned to its essence. We do it in a way that is intentionally engaging so that managers will want to do it. And we design the process to be flexible so that managers can make it easily fit their unique situations.

We also believe managers need to experience the development process first. When managers are given the opportunity to work on their own careers, they have a better insight in how to help others with necessary skills.

As a result, managers gain the confidence that they can come through for the people who report to them. Growing and motivating the talent on their team goes from being a burden to an opportunity.

Ideas for Action

1. Engage the Head and the Heart.
2. Keep learning simple, engaging, and flexible.
3. Make managers an important part of the process.

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