Word of the Day...

I was at a meeting today that touched on how Pinnacol can better help employees develop their skills so that they are continually ready for whatever changes their career might bring. From promotion within their current job family, to being able to step out of their current role and tackle something completely different, Pinnacol, as I suspect is true of most employers, expects people to have the foundation of basic skills that make them mobile in terms of growth. If they don't have the basic skills, career mobility is limited. In the 'olden days', they referred to this as the Peter Principle - where people were promoted to the level where their incompetence would suddenly manifest itself and curtail further advancement.

We do all sorts of assessments at Pinnacol. Some are done to determine if employees are ready for a move into another position that is currently open. Others are done to help the employee become ready for a future move. This second type of assessment is developmental in purpose. Given the debate about educating our children and the quality of education in America it should come as little surprise that we find many employees who struggle at some level with even the most basic math and verbal skills. Most companies seem somewhat weak at helping employees develop these skills deficits once they have been identified.

Thus the purpose of the meeting I was attending. Our Learning and Development team has a Development Page on our company Intranet, and the outcome from today's meeting is that we believe we can do even more to help our employees as they aspire to bigger and greater things.

You'll notice that I've added a new widget to the right side of the blog called Word of the Day. I believe that great things start small and that something as simple as helping employees increase their vocabulary is one small step in that journey. The first word that came up is nepenthe - a word I candidly had never heard before. Yet before ten minutes had gone by I had a fellow employee tell me a story about this great little restaurant in Big Sur, California named Nepenthe. Its really a clever name for a restaurant (see the definition under comments below if you don't already know it!) and if I'm ever out that way, I plan on visiting.

Until then, we'll continue to add additional resources, big and small, to help our employees develop their skills. And so that you don't fall too far behind, we'll continue to share the Word of the Day with you as well. Now if I can just figure out how to use the word 'nepenthe' in a sentence...