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The center’s Learning Circles are unique forums for accelerating learning through collaborative sharing of practice insights. Our distinctive interactions offer professionals opportunities for exploring strategies and experiences, stimulating dialogue and development from awareness to action.
Business leaders across sectors often face connected issues, but there is often not enough time to do intensive research and analysis to uncover/evaluate the variety of available options. Our approach is that as issues emerge, awareness is best facilitated by mutual contributions, and solutions are best reached through highlighting connections across practice communities.
In our Learning Circles, participants work with a dedicated staff member at the center along with a community of professionals to explore critical emerging issues, surface promising practices, and share examples of how their organizations are addressing these concerns. This structure allows participants to both reflect on the mutual contributions of fellow business people while addressing the immediate issues of individual organization and planning for action steps.
Each year, the center invites Learning Circle members to complete a short priority assessment; the results of this survey determine the two content areas that then become “Strategy Pods,” or the focus for the Learning Circle over the coming year. The Strategy Pod concept was developed to provide an opportunity for employers to target the participation of individuals with functional expertise/interest in the area of exploration.
Currently, our work is focused on: Talent Management and Health & Wellbeing.
For more information on the Employer Learning Circle, please contact Pamela Woodnick.
strategy pods
Each year, the Employer Learning Circle identifies up to two emerging issues of interest. The result is one or two Strategy Pods to explore the defined issue(s). Learning Circle members then designate representatives with functional expertise/interest to participate in the Pods.
Additional organizational representatives are always welcome to attend or participate in any seminars, or other scheduled events.
June – December, 2009 - TALENT MANAGEMENT POD
Because of the changing age demographics of our workforce, organizations today need to start thinking differently about important Talent Management concerns such as:
- Who should we hire for the jobs of today and the jobs of the future?
- How will we onboard, train, retain, motivate and continually engage our new and current employees?
- What systemic changes will need to be made to address these issues?
As part of the Talent Management Pod, participants look at their systems and processes through the prism of age, determine where there are gaps, and start thinking about how to meet those gaps.
For more information on our current Talent Management Pod, click here »
January – June, 2009 - HEALTH & WELLBEING POD
Health & Wellbeing programs, while always important to employers and employees alike, have become a significant driver of employee engagement in the 21st Century. Leading employers are offering innovative health & wellbeing programs as a way of distinguishing themselves as employers of choice.
As part of the Health & Wellbeing Pod, participants looked at what role age played in program development, and how relevant their strategies are across the life and career spans of their employees.
WORKPLACE BENEFITS
The Sloan Center’s Employer Learning Circle was created to facilitate the development of innovative and strategic approaches to enhancing the quality of employment for employees across all age categories. The center leverages both rigorous data on demographic trends and workplace responses to inform strategic organizational decision-making. In addition, the Learning Circle offers its members the opportunity to network and benchmark with other participants in order to learn from their experiences.
Participation offers many benefits:
- Assistance in scanning your environment, and assessing areas of strength and potential vulnerabilities
- Leading research on critical emerging issues
- Opportunities to ask probing questions of lead researchers
- Tools designed to guide you in scanning and evaluating your organizational environment, to inform decisions and improve practice
- Workshops including virtual seminars and live meetings
- Cross-functional dialogue with workplace decision makers from a variety of companies
- The sharing of promising practices, published by the center as Executive Case Summaries
EXECUTIVE CASE SUMMARIES
The Sloan Center on Aging & Work has developed the Executive Case Summary Series to provide members of Learning Circle with current information about workplace strategies, policies and practices established for today’s multi generational workforce. The cases have been prepared to foster the sharing of information among talent management experts and to accelerate just-in-time insights about employer-response to the 21st century workforce even as strategies, policies and practices are just emerging.
The Case Summaries contain confidential (and in some cases, proprietary) information about organizations. Therefore, the center provides these cases only to organizations that are Learning Circle members.
The center is currently working with the members of the 2009 Learning Circle to explore options for creating a companion searchable database of promising practices and emerging strategies built from the information gleaned during all of our case study interviews.
Excerpts of the cases are featured in the center’s e-newsletter, Stages.
Interested in additional information about the Executive Case Summaries? Please contact Kathy Lynch at lynchks@bc.edu.