As I look back on my career development, I realize I was lucky to have benefited from what I think must have been the golden age of corporate training.
On reflection, several factors combined to create a unique situation:
As an aside, to the third point, I was recruited by my first employer, Fujitsu ICL, four years before they expected me to join them full time. Before I left high school, they agreed to sponsor me through university, paying me an allowance while I studied. They placed me in three interesting and valuable six-month work placements during university, and paid me a good salary while I worked. I left university not just with valuable experience and the offer of a good job, but also enough cash for a down payment on an apartment. I expect that modern-day graduates, burdened by debt and expected to participate in unpaid internships, with uncertain prospects awaiting them, will find this enviable.
I won’t sugarcoat the reality of taking corporate training classes back then. There were some great classes, and some not so good. In some respects, it was a numbers game: attend lots of classes, and some will be valuable. Some of the best I attended were through the management program for graduates at Fujitsu ICL. This program was well-funded and operated in conjunction with a local business school.
At Fujitsu ICL, I took as many courses as I could legitimately sign up for. These included:
Not only was the course content of value, but the majority of these courses were off-site at the management center for Fujitsu ICL. This gave me great opportunity to socialize and network with my peers.
Once I had exhausted the in-house training catalog, Fujitsu ICL also funded me to take an Open University course on marketing as well.
In the end, one of the reasons I left Fujitsu ICL was that I was beginning to run out of opportunities to develop my skills and gain new knowledge. My next employer, FileNet, opened up a number of new doors.
FileNet was an American company, and (at least while I was with them) had a very sales-oriented culture. A sense of vibrancy and dynamism pervaded its sales training, which covered product, technology and sales and consulting technique. The American perspective was a nice complement to the British and European background I was used to.
Adobe, which I later joined, was an American company but with a different culture. Like Fujitsu ICL, it was big enough and mature enough to have a structured corporate training program. Once I relocated to the corporate HQ in California, I had a whole new program of training available to me.
This time the technical training was for different products and technologies: mostly centered on the web and publishing. On the professional skills, side, I picked up training on press and analyst relations (which came in very useful as the prime advocate of my product lines, conducting launch press tours, etc.), and also web marketing analytics.
I also attended the Pragmatic Marketing course at Adobe. The value for me wasn’t necessarily much new content. But it was instructive to see how the content was packaged. This has been relevant given how widely attended Pragmatic Marketing is, particularly in the US.
Adobe was also great for allowing me to revisit the portfolio of management training courses. This was useful not just as a refresher, but also highly useful for appreciating the different cultural expectations of US employers and employees, along with the legal aspects that are different.
Most recently, I have Geomagic to thank for training to help me step up to being a member of an executive team.
About a year after I joined Geomagic, I attended a senior leadership course run by Grinnel. Because the Grinnel course is aimed at executives and up-and-comers, it can assume that attendees are already good at their job, from a professional and functional perspective. This gives them the room to focus more on what it means to be an effective member of a senior management team.
Interestingly the Grinnel training quite strongly reflected content of the early graduate training I received at Fujitsu ICL. It turns out that (rather obviously), just as it was when starting out on a career, an executive needs to reflect on how their personality and behavior is perceived by others, and to pay more attention to one’s own values, preconceptions and motivations, to understand how that drives one’s own behavior.
If I was starting my career now, I doubt the path I outlined above could be followed. The world has moved on, and the opportunities for self-development are different now. But I think the basic message to invest in oneself when the opportunity arises holds universally. As a manager and leader, even in a company that doesn’t offer the sort of structured program I personally benefited from, I try to support my staff to take self-development seriously, and create incentives for them to follow through.