As individuals, our experience in the modern marketplace shapes the way we think as employees. We bring our consumer mindset to work, and it is disrupting the way we learn on the job. We want self-directed, always-on, individualized development programs that will take us wherever we want our personal and professional lives to go.
What drives modern marketing is content: the blogs, white papers, email and other messages meant to inform and attract buyers to lead them down the journey to becoming a satisfied repeat customer.
Buyer Profile
Two concepts shape the way modern marketing delivers content: Ideal Buyer Profile and the buyer persona. People often confuse the two ideas and try to use them synonymously, but they are different concepts.
In consumer markets (B2C), an Ideal Buyer Profile is based on broad commoditized characteristics: demographics, income level, occupational group, education, and geography, to name a few. In the B2B market, an Ideal Buyer Profile is a company of a certain business sector, size, location, etc.
An Ideal Buyer Profile is useful when you are developing go-to-market strategy. It helps decide how to allocate resources to attract people and start a relationship.
Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is about likes and dislikes, motivations and emotions, the need for social standing, and other individual preferences. In the B2B market, it is all of those considerations, plus job function, position, buying authority, and organizational culture.
Buyer personas are useful when you are building a relationship of trust. It enables you to use individual, targeted communication. For example, a successful product demo will not be a generic presentation. It is personalized to address the individual needs, wants, and motivators of the individuals in the audience.
We can apply this model of thinking to employee learning. The basic information we have about our people helps allocate resources, but we need to develop deeper knowledge to help them grow and develop.
Employee Profiles and Personas
We store a lot of information about employees when we hire them, but almost none of it is personal. They tell us about an employee’s occupation, education, and history, but give us little or no information about what drives them. We need to develop better insights into employee personas. For example:
- How does the person assimilate information? Is the person a linear thinker, an intuitive explorer, or something entirely different?
- Does the individual prefer to know exactly what to do or to figure it out?
- How does this person work Independently? With a team? In tandem with one other person?
- Is this a risk-taker or a risk avoider?
Competency models and future role descriptions to drive development are useful, but they have limitations. First, they rely on employees to choose a future role based on limited information. Second, they are limited to current positions and do not help the individual know what future possibilities might exist. Third, and most important, it is not personal.
We are not implying that organizations should not use competency models to structure employee development. Your competency model is the foundation for a strong development effort. But we support the practice of providing assessments that help individuals in your organization discover themselves, their teammates, and the people they are charged with developing. The value of insights into future performance far outweigh the minimal cost of an assessment.
We have seen assessment programs work as managers have learned how to develop the individuals on their teams. We watched as employees gained new insights that improved their performance and commitment. People gained self-knowledge in a few weeks that otherwise might have taken a lifetime to learn.
Other Considerations
Before you look into solutions, we recommend that you stop and consider how it will work in your organization and what safeguards you need to have in place.
- Privacy. Much of the information in employee profiles can be public on your intranet or social media platform. Employee personas should not. You may want to develop a privacy policy which includes a requirement for employee consent for each individual’s access to the information.
- Development Strategy. Understand that employee development is not a perk, nor a necessary evil. It is the foundation on which you will build the future of your enterprise. The skilled workforce is shrinking. Academia can’t keep up with changing technology. In today’s world, growing the capability of the workforce is a do-it-yourself endeavor. Align your development practices with your workforce strategy.
- Long-Term Impact. Will some of the people you develop leave for other opportunities? Of course, but they will leave knowing you helped them along their career paths, and may become advocates for the way you nurture your people. That is much better than having them leave because you don’t care enough to help them grow. Take a long-term view to develop a development program that attracts top performers.
Each learning path is unique to that person. Let’s give our people the tools they need to have the right development conversations.
PhenomeCloud is a comprehensive technology solutions provider committed to empowering businesses to overcome challenges, enhance their workforce capabilities, and achieve superior outcomes.
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