Defining Cycle 1, Who?

I’ve been debating about which group of people to use. One of the hardest things I have had to do is to identify a question that would apply to all the groups of people I work with. That doesn’t quite capture the essence of the difficulties I’ve had. I guess it’s more like defining a question that would give me expertise that would be useful in all the environments I work in as well as provide a stepping stone for where I want to go. That is no small feat but I feel like I’ve done it. Although it’s taken me some extra time to get my ARP narrowed down, I feel like it’s been worth the extra time and thought it took me to get to where I am now. The next difficult part for me is to identify which group of people to use for my first cycle.

I’ve been leaning towards the group of people at my corporate client whom I trained last summer and will train them again in February. For a few reasons, they seem like a good group to use. I originally wanted to use them but was concerned that it wouldn’t work out to see them during their time here. It has turned out that it will work for me to spend time with them while they are here so I think they are my preferred group to use.

The reasons I feel they are preferred are 1.) the timing of their face to face meetings will fall into the first cycle; 2.) although somewhat stereotypical, most of this group is young and I feel that as a group they will have more of an open mind to this type of collaboration; and 3.) the position these employees hold, although demanding, is a lower level position so I think they are more likely to be able to have time to try this type of knowledge building.

I’m going to provide some background on this group. They are made up of approximately 40 employees, that represent around 10 offices nationally and 1 internationally. They are all newly hired as of last summer, the majority of them are fresh out of college with a few exceptions of people that have changed careers. All of the people in the program hold roughly the same positions throughout the company. The company is very committed to their industry training. Their first round of training included vigorous industry training as well as company specific training. This round, approximately 6 months later, is follow up and builds on what they were trained on last summer as well as the experience they have gained since then in their jobs.