Case Studies
FCDO Services: Career Conversations Training Empowers Managers and Employees to Have Meaningful Conversations
Key facts and figures
I loved the Career Conversations Toolkit. I'm going to start having informal career conversations. Hopefully, it will help me achieve a better outcome. Excellent course!”
Business priorities:
Managers and employees having effective career conversations
Sector:
Government Administration
Lead contact:
L&D Business Partner
Employees:
Up to 100 per year
Locations:
UK and International
Our client’s challenge
The Foreign Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) Services have a talent management process which relies on managers talking to all permanent members of their team on their career aspirations. This also feeds into the organisation’s succession planning process.
FCDO Services needed their managers to be confident at conversations with their direct reports on topics such as career goals and aspirations. They also needed their non-managers to take more ownership of their career and be ready to make the very most of a career conversation with their manager. Both things will lead to more consistent and reliable data, feeding into the organisation’s talent management and succession planning processes.
At the start of the programme in 2018, this was the first time FCDO Services had offered this topic of learning to their organisation. FCDO Services were looking for two separate, standalone sessions – one for managers and another for non-managers. FCDO Services have staff based overseas for significant periods of time so the learning needed to be conducted both face-to-face and digitally.
Our solution and results
FCDO Services wanted the sessions to be practical – with the majority amount of time dedicated to demonstrating what a good conversation looks like, and practice time for learners to try it out for themselves. FCDO Services needed the non-manager session to help them ask themselves the right questions before the career conversation with their manager.
Since 2018, we have delivered the Confident Career Conversations Workshop for managers and the Career Compass Workshop for non-managers. While we initially delivered the programmes onsite, the COVID crisis in 2020 accelerated the need to deliver virtually. Since then, we have delivered the programmes virtually over Microsoft Teams.
The programmes are consistently well-received achieving an overall satisfaction rating of 9.3 out of 10 in the past 12 months.
