On behalf of the Grow With JMP team I would like to say a big thank you to everyone that responded to our survey.
Nearly 100 people gave us their opinion, mostly from Sales, Marketing, and R&D in the Americas. We have a good range of experience, with 19 newbies in their first year at JMP and 9 veterans with 20+ years’ service.
One of the reasons for the survey was to find out how often JMP people are meeting with their managers to discuss careers, goals, personal and professional development. As we suspected, there is a lot of variation:
On the theme of Nurturing Growth, we are working on a process to ensure that we all have regular and meaningful dialogue with our manager to support our growth with JMP.
We also asked you to tell us to what extent you agree with certain statements:
It was not a surprise that most of you agree or strongly agree that personal and professional development are important to you.
In the first meetings of this Grow With JMP workstream we talked about a need for more clarity about promotion within role or paths to progress into other roles in JMP, which you confirmed in this survey. This was a typical comment:
“Clear career paths and promotion criteria would be extremely helpful.”
The team that is working on our Growth Paths theme is looking at ways to more clearly define expectations for each level and role to guide growth towards career goals in JMP.
We can also make it easier for people to find the best resources. The people working on the theme of Conditions for Growth are looking at how to make it easier to get to the best resources for personal and career development.
We also wanted to know what types of development activities people would find most useful.
Technical and business training are probably what most people think of as professional development, and these are the activities that you think are most useful. It was nice to see from the survey that people also value the opportunity to work on projects with colleagues from different groups and other parts of the world. Many of the Grow With JMP team have told me that they are enjoying the teamwork aspect of the project and the chance to make new connections with their colleagues. This survey respondent agrees:
“I really like opportunities to work on projects with colleagues from different roles and regions - seems like a great way to learn about different functions across JMP, develop leadership and collaboration skills, while also accomplishing something important for JMP.”
Our Growing Together team are looking at other ways to connect with our colleagues. Mentoring was mentioned a lot in the early discussions and featured in many of comments in the survey, like this one:
“I am a staunch advocate for the mentor/mentee relationship… I see it as a vital element in both teaching and learning for holistic growth/development.”
We are planning a pilot mentoring program for the second half of 2022 with the aim of making it available to all of JMP early in 2023.
We will continue to dig into this data to guide the efforts of the Grow With JMP team for the rest of the year. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.
…And we can’t go without showing a nice word cloud!
