Promote Yourself Week Kicks Off...

In September 2011, a group of Pinnacol's managers partnered with the Employee Services team (Human Resources and Learning and Development) to provide a series of training sessions called Promote Yourself Week to our employees with the goals of:

•Helping employees be better prepared for interviews

•Providing a platform for open, honest conversations about the hiring process

•Demystifying the hiring and interviewing process for employees

•Allowing employees to hear directly from people who have been promoted into leadership positions

Now, in 2013, we are doing Promote Yourself Week again. Monday was the kick-off with an overview of the hiring process, with yesterday's session covering the topic of how to prepare for the interview. Today's session is all about resume writing. Thursday we'll be sharing insights into Behavioral Interviewing and on Friday we'll touch on how to solicit, and more importantly act on, feedback after the interview.

As mentioned above, this event was really the brainchild of several of our managers, some of whom had themselves been promoted into their current roles. If you have interviewed with us in the past you know we talk about promoting from within whenever we get the chance and part of that involves helping our employees be as well prepared for their next career move as possible. Pinnacol offers its employees a multitude of Professional Development resources from training classes and seminars to mentoring and the ability to job shadow with people in other positions throughout the company. There are almost too many resources to choose from and Promote Yourself Week is designed to help guide internal  employees through some of those resources with the objective of helping them advance in their careers. Here's what one of our employees, Ken, said about some of the resources offered:


"Clarity. Efficiency. Guidance. If I had to sum up the value that I personally received from Pinnacol's professional and leadership development resources, I would use these words. These tools provided clarity for me in that I knew what professional competencies were valued by our leadership. With that information in hand, I knew where to focus my efforts. For me, step two involved finding educational resources to help me develop and improve in these areas, and that is where I noted the efficiency of the online tools. I did not have to spend a great deal of time locating my own resources. It had already been done for me by Amy and her team. What a great service. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I found guidance, and by that I mean I found people within our organization who were willing to help me grow. There were many such people who generously offered their time, knowledge and coaching skills, and I believe their efforts made a real difference in my professional and personal growth."

None of what we are covering is rocket science, and in fact most external candidates we see already know much of what we emphasize to our employees. Things like knowing what your career goals are, setting realistic objectives regarding your next career move, presenting yourself in a positive and professional manner, and demonstrating that you can add value to a team.

Anyone who has been in the job market over the last several years know how challenging it is to find a new position. Competition is fierce to say the least. One thing that never seems to change: the best prepared candidates, either internal or external, generally do tend to win out over their less prepared peers.