Useful Experience
- Focus groups: You should know the essentials of selecting participants, establishing the proper environment, facilitating, analyzing, and reporting on focus group sampling.
- Interviewing: The ability to conversationally and nonthreateningly interview anyone from a production line worker to the CEO.
- Surveys: The competence to understand what information is required for what end purpose, developing the correct instrument, administering, collating, evaluating, and reporting results.
- Facilitation: The ability to run a meeting without taking sides, to acknowledge and embrace differing points of view, to proceed sequentially through an agenda stimulating conversation while suppressing duplication and irrelevance, and to provide all participating with the beliefs that they were heard and were involved in honest debate. Good facilitators find cause not blame, and focus on future actions not past reprisals.
- Planning and project management: Both of these pursuits involve the organization and priority setting that propel and plan forward, anticipating and resolving roadblocks and resistance. Preventive actions should be in place to avoid trouble, but contingent actions should also be established to handle the unavoidable.
- Team building: The ability to set rules of engagement for teams, to support and develop team leaders, to identify and correct inhibiting behaviors, and to ultimately create selfsanctioning, self-directed teams that establish their own goals, priorities, and work flow.
- Coaching: The best coach can work with any level of individual, and establishes objectives for improvement, metrics to measure success, and an enduring discipline to reinforce new, positive habits and behaviors. Coaching should be confidential, tailored, and flexible. It’s more important to have trust and a firm grip on improvement objectives than is a certificate from a coaching school and an inflexible methodology to go with it.
- Training and development: The creation of learning objectives and course curricula and exercises to meet those objectives, including criteria to measure success. This may include selfpaced instruction, remote learning, and other forms of development in addition to traditional classroom training.
- Succession planning and career development: The ability to synthesize the top-down needs of the organization (succession planning) with the bottom-up needs of individuals (career planning). These two disciplines shouldn’t cross unaware, like ships in the night. A key is the identification of future needs, and not a reliance on yesterday’s demands.
There are other skills you may add to my list, but if you master my core assembly, you’re in fine shape. Note that specialties such as wages and benefits, relocation, recruiting, and so on are increasingly outsourced and of less value. You need to master the consultative side, not the transactional side.