The Big Problem with Self-Service Career Development

It’s a workplace problem a lot of talent managers would love to have.

Vanguard is one of the world’s largest investment companies with 30 million investors, but it also has 17,000 crew members (that’s how Vanguard refers to its employees) who have an unusually long tenure at the company because they connect closely with its mission and purpose-driven culture.

The challenge that Vanguard’s management team struggles with is this: Career development at Vanguard has traditionally been very self-service and organic, with Crew members navigating their career based on conversations with other employees about how they managed THEIR career.

That’s a very personal approach, but the reality is that to hear how someone steered their career development 10 years ago is great — but doing the same thing 10 years later doesn’t make a lot of sense. And, it doesn’t help them to develop the new skills they need to both help Vanguard AND to propel their career ahead.

That’s the big challenge with self-service career development, as Nate Prosser, Vanguard’s Head of Learning & Development, described it at last Fall’s FuelX New York conference.

Here’s the crux of what he said:

“There are three pieces we need to develop our workforce for the future. The first one is to up-skill our crew to transition to new ways of working. So, this is essentially a core academy where we’re building new ways to work — things like tech acumen, outcome orientation, and data-driven decision making. (It’s also about) advising our Crew on how to take the “in demand” jobs. This is very much about using the Fuel50 platform, flagging the jobs that are going to be important, helping people to navigate and have the mobility so that they’re not blindly just talking to their network but they understand the whole organization, and where the in-demand jobs will be going.

We also want to do some powerful re-skilling where we’re taking Crew and members of the organization that we might need to divest in the next several years and pushing them to other places. This is something like taking someone who’s currently in operations and helping them move on to a second career within Vanguard — something like IT, data analytics. Doing those things and anchoring it with the power of Fuel50 by using the “reflect-explore-plan” framework is our intention going forward.

There is a lot of work to make this happen but we’re really proud of where we are and where we’re wanting to go in the future. We feel great about the business strategy that we have anchored in a world class client experience with low cost advice. And we also feel great about our talent strategy that’s about a great Crew experience with solid career advice.”

Helping your workforce to grow and navigate the rapidly changing workplace will be THE big challenge over the next decade. Even if you have good people and great retention, the rise of Artificial Intelligence and other cutting edge workplace issues are going to make many of their current skills irrelevant — unless you’re planning, as Vanguard is, to help re-skill your workforce now and in the years to come.

Self-service career development may be the way things used to be done, but it won’t get you very far in the months and years to come.

Vanguard’s Nate Prosser summed this up pretty simply, “We’re all trying to solve the same problem: We’re trying to do right by our employees and we’re trying to do right by our business. … There is work to make this happen, but we’re really proud of where we are and where we want to go in the future.”