Ensuring Your Career Development Efforts Have An Impact

Too often we make the mistake of thinking attending a workshop or getting a certification is career development. In reality, it’s just one part of the equation. This is important to understand if you are developing your own career and trying to get the company you work for to invest in your growth and development. It’s equally as important if you are the people manager or senior executive developing others.

To understand all elements of the development equation and ensure you get the most out of your efforts, you can reference the 70:20:10 model created in the 1980s by Morgan McCall, Michael M. Lombardo, and Robert A. Eichinger, researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina.

They asked 191 executives to self-report on how they believe they learned: “Please identify at least three key events in your career, things that made a difference in the way you manage now.” The results suggested that 70% of learning came from challenging job assignments or experience on the job. 20% came from developmental relationships or exposure to how others do things or feedback on how you may be performing. These two types of learning are often labeled as informal learning.

The surprising result was that the remaining 10% was a result of what we usually consider as formal learning or structured development programs. All the workshops, certifications and learning series you may have attended or have sent your employees to attend had a small slice of a person’s development of new skills or capabilities.

Does that mean we should all stop engaging with formal learning and education? Absolutely not. In fact, many have criticized this model and picked apart whether these percentages are the right numbers.

Instead of getting too caught up in the percentages and how accurate they may be, it’s maybe more important to understand what role each part of the 70:20:10 model plays in development and how to use them to evolve your skills or the skills of others.

To use this model to effectively plan for development, you’ll need to switch the order a bit and focus on building towards make an impact on the company or organization that is investing in the development.

The Role Experience (70%)

When putting a development plan together, start with the end in mind. The 70% represents the end result. It’s the impact or outcome from investing in development.

The 70% should be seen as the outcome or goal of any development effort. What new experience or responsibility are we building towards? This is where the organization paying for development efforts realizes its return on investment. What will the individual being developed be able to do that they are not currently able to do to help the organization achieve its goals?

For career building, this is a critical piece to get clear on. It helps to create a meaningful business case for why the company should pay for and sponsor your further development. It also can help you build demand for the type of work you ultimately want to be doing.

As a manager, getting clear on what individuals will be doing with the training and support your providing can help you ensure your team is effective at meeting its goals. It can also help you make the case for critical resources and investment in the team’s overall evolution. Often, development efforts fall dead in an email chain because there is no tangible and credible business case to back it. It’s not about sending your team to a conference. It’s about what your team will be doing for the company with what they’ve learned once they are back from that conference.

An example may be launching a new program, adding cross-functional capability to the team or modernizing out-of-date or inefficient processes. The individual would take on delivering this end result, putting them in the driver’s seat. When it comes to learning, we learn a lot more by actually driving than we do by sitting in the passenger seat.

The Role of Education (10%)

Next, you’ll want to examine what skill or capability do you or the person you’re developing lack to be able to fully take on the work described in the 70% Experience section. This can include needing to learn a new way of thinking, acumen at using a different tool or technology or even building credibility with a new audience.

The goal should be to identify the need and then determine the formal education needed to gain the foundation of that skill. This can be through courses, certifications, seminars or even shadowing and mentoring. It’s all about the individual being developed getting and absorbing new information.

This is often seen as the whole of development when it is really just the beginning stage. But if it’s not tied to an end goal the education may never get applied and the learning is often forgotten by the student. This is very common in professional setting. Managers will send their employees to a workshop and then feel like the development box has been checked. This lack of real impact is also why development is often not seen as having a tangible or reliable return on investment.

The Role of Exposure (20%)

Finally, you’ll want to explore how to connect what’s learned through the formal educational events to the ability to being applied on the job through informal experience. This is where the role of exposure comes in. This is the opportunity for the individual to practice what they’ve learned, watch it being modeled within the workplace and receive feedback on how well they are demonstrating the new skill or capability. If the education is the foundation, exposure is the glue.

This is the element that is often completely skipped over. The idea of many workplaces is that someone should go to a class and come back ready to apply and do what they’ve learned with a level of expertise. But just like learning to walk or ride a bike, we need a safe space to practice, fall and continue to get back up and try again.

The learning curve here can be strengthened by ensuring the company and team culture invites, reinforces and celebrates the messiness of this chapter in learning. Mistakes are not the enemy here. In fact, mistakes can be what speeds up the learning process.

Research from Johns Hopkins University reveals that making mistakes during a learning task can actually lead to faster learning. When individuals make mistakes, their brains not only remember the correct information better but also learn faster from those errors, even in completely different tasks. This enhanced memory of errors helps the brain generalize from one task to another, making it more likely to retain and apply the correct information in future situations.

Creating development plans that are created in the order of 70:10:20 and then implemented as 10:20:70 end up drawing and building upon the elements of formal and informal learning in ways that ensure that the individual is able to positively impact their careers, as well as the capabilities of the organization t