Develop new leaders, faster.

Graduates in their 2^nd year of work who are looking to develop themselves further are not craving time management, team work and problem solving skills workshops. They want to move beyond ‘basic skills’ to ‘leadership-oriented’ skills. So what are we doing about it?

In the AAGE’s recent Graduate Development and Retention Survey for 2010, 1,754 graduate in Australia were asked what areas they wanted further education. Here were the top 10 results:

1. Technical Skills specific to my career: 45%
2. Business Knowledge: 45%
3. Industry and Business Knowledge: 40%
4. Influence and Negotiation Skills: 38%
5. Project Management: 34%
6. Analytical Skills: 33%
7. People Management: 31%
8. Relationship Building: 26%
9. Knowledge of Business Etiquette: 24%
10. Conflict Resolution: 24%

Leadership-oriented skills like these are what many top graduates are looking for. Not surprisingly; young, fresh new leaders are what many businesses are looking to their graduate programs to provide.

So my question is this:

Why not focus on these “leadership-oriented” skills in their 1^st year? Why wait?

The answer is because many 1^st year graduate development programs are too focused on ‘basic skills’ like time management, team work and problem solving amongst others. This means that leadership-oriented skills like those listed above often get held back until year 2 or 3 … or just get left out all together!

Here’s an idea … if the industry could find a way to effectively and efficiently empower graduates to self-teach the ‘basic skills’ BEFORE they arrived on day 1, wouldn’t it make sense to then focus graduate development programs on ‘leadership-oriented’ skills from that point onwards?

Let’s get a little clever and think carefully about this.

Employers recruit grads because they're smart, switched on and keen. Most 'basic skills' can be self taught with the right tools in the right environment by people who are … wait for it … smart, switched on and keen!

What’s more, an average 6 month gap between when most grads accept their job offers and when they actually start the following year could be a perfect window of time to provide them with self-teach tools to do it.

They’d turn up on day one job ready with the basic skills under their belt, and your entire graduate development program is 1 year ahead of schedule. Now you can develop new leaders, faster.

A focus on leadership development from the outset is already happening with some leading employers and it is fast becoming best practice in the industry. Why? Because it simply speeds up how quickly businesses see a return on their graduate programs in terms of creating a pool of new leaders … and does so because it invests limited training budgets in skill areas that provide more ‘bang for their buck’ long term.