The best employees need room to grow professionally, and they continually look for opportunities to hone the skills they have and develop new ones. Career development programs are a strategic priority at Cisco because they enable us to retain top talent and recruit the sorts of people who can help us stay competitive in the IT marketplace and move forward with our plans for transformative global networking.

By understanding the core skills of our workforce, we are able to develop holistic programs that help employees advance their careers and attain their professional goals. We also want to make sure our employees have opportunities to apply their capabilities in challenging assignments that may cross functional lines. These assignments broaden the scope of their experiences and prepare them for future career growth. In FY08 Cisco promoted 5722 employees to higher positions within the company.

 

Performance Management Reviews

The annual online review and development process called e-performance management (ePM) gives Cisco employees the opportunity to summarize what they have achieved during the past year and establish new goals for the coming year. Recent changes to the ePM tool make it faster, easier, and even more meaningful for employees and their managers. The new ePM form now takes into account inclusion and diversity goals, Cisco leadership development (C-LEAD) goals, and volunteer activities.

The ePM review provides the structure for conversations between employee and manager that enable the employee to identify strengths, challenge areas, and the next steps necessary to achieve career goals. The ePM process is also an important part of Cisco’s Total Rewards, a risk-tolerant compensation philosophy that rewards employees for their contributions to the company’s success.

 

 

My Learning Network

Cisco’s My Learning Network offers online education for all employees that is mapped to professional skills and job roles. Classes and information target new managers, manager development, people development, business essentials, and compliance issues (such as equal opportunity employment). The training activities have broad applicability across all business functions. As a result, Cisco employees receive a consistent training experience and can take full advantage of Cisco’s investment in learning regardless of their job or location.

Cisco employees can use My Learning Network to access online courses, remote labs, simulations, games, video-on-demand modules, and recordings of events. Dozens of live events are also broadcast over the intranet to employees, including departmental meetings and senior leadership presentations.

In addition, My Learning Network provides a guide called 3 Steps to Career Development that offers a set of tools to help employees define their career goals and align them with Cisco’s future business needs. The three steps are:

• Assess: Understand how personal goals align with business needs.
• Discuss: Validate goals using multiple perspectives.
• Take action: Create a strategy for continuous learning.

 

Mentoring Programs

Cisco supports a strong mentoring culture and has several formal and informal mentor programs in place across the company. As part of the yearly review process, employees are encouraged to identify a mentor within the company to help broaden their perspectives and increase business knowledge. A comprehensive mentoring website is available to all employees, providing information, guidance, and tools that support a range of mentoring approaches:

• One-to-one mentoring: Formally and informally matched pairs with a focus on development guidance, perspective, and support
• Mentoring circles: Network-based mentoring that brings people with common goals together to share business and leadership skills for mutual learning and growth
• Peer mentoring: Experience and information sharing between persons of disparate skill sets to help grow professional networks
• Reverse mentoring: Formal or informal relationships in which a junior-level employee mentors a senior-level employee

For example, Sales New Hire Mentoring is a three- to six-month structured program that increases the proficiency of new hires by matching them with experienced employees. The goal is to produce superior business results while smoothing the “on-boarding” process for the new hires.

 

CareerPath Job Search

One way Cisco can maintain a leading position in the industry and respond quickly to market opportunities is to connect the best talent to the right opportunities. CareerPath allows our employees to use a global database of open positions and career opportunities to match job openings with their resumes, helping them to spot hidden opportunities. CareerPath’s job agent feature allows employees to select and store criteria relevant to their career interests, then receive email notifications when career opportunities match their criteria.

 

Cisco Certifications

Cisco employees in support positions need the skills necessary to plan, design, implement, operate, configure, deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot Cisco products and solutions. So do technical staff members among our customers and partners. To develop and validate these skills, we offer more than 35 different certifications. Each certification requires candidates to pass one or more examinations, many of which include simulations that measure practical, on-the-job proficiency.

 

Career Development across the Company

Here are a few more examples of the many career development programs open to Cisco’s employees:

• Engineering learning: As a leading technology company, Cisco has a learning organization dedicated to offering a wide variety of specific development opportunities for our engineering community. Learning events are held periodically that allow engineers to share some of their expertise and insights with peers. Nerd Lunches, a Cisco tradition begun in 1991, convene every six weeks and now attract 150 to 200 technically minded participants. Internal Networkers is a four-day event hosting as many as 1200 Cisco networking engineers that includes keynotes, leadership discussions, networking events, and celebrations.
• Women’s Action Network Coaching pilot: In June 2008 we launched a pilot program for members of our Women’s Action Network that provides situational coaching and mentoring to women using Cisco TelePresence technology. Since the program’s inception, more than 150 women have registered for situational coaching.
• Cisco TV: We offer communications and training to Cisco employees, partners, and customers via live broadcasts and video on demand. The Cisco TV guide shows the daily live sessions available. Offerings include product updates and training, services training sessions, and application training sessions, as well as all-hands meetings and messages directed to employees within specific functional groups. With onsite studios and knowledgeable staff, together with self-authoring tools for creating desktop videos, employees have the means to produce virtually any type of video production. Employees can then post, view, and rate videos, photos, and podcasts on the internal C-Vision website, with submissions ranging from educational to entertaining.
• Web 2.0 Summit: On March 28, 2008, Cisco held the first Web 2.0 Summit focused on how collaboration tools are changing the way we communicate and gain competitive advantage. Attendees learned about the business impact of web 2.0, how to deploy web 2.0 tools in their organizations, how other organizations are using web 2.0 internally and externally. They also learned how to set up and use Cisco WebEx Connect collaboration technology, the C-Vision video blog, RSS feeds, discussion forums, and text blogs.
• External Training: Each Cisco business function has budget to send employees to external training courses or programs. These vary greatly depending on the function, level of the employee, and skills or expertise needed. Because Cisco executives are expected to communicate regularly to employees and customers, communication coaching and training sessions are popular.  Groups also bring consultants in to improve teamwork and collaboration skills, or to analyze complex business situations.