Description
The MITRE Corporation is a not-for-profit that operates seven Federally Funded Research and Development Centers. Most of their 8,000 employees have an engineering or scientific background.
Five years ago, MITRE began updating the nature of their Employment Value Proposition. A cross-functional team created CLEAR Conversations (Communicate, Learn, Evolve and Achieve Results) which focuses on career and personal growth, replacing traditional performance management practices.
Simultaneously, MITRE implemented “Careers in Motion.” This new career movement approach was designed to move from a traditional rectilinear mindset about career paths to an agile approach recognizing the quantum realities of modern work. Employees curate their own careers via expanded awareness of growth experiences, which is assisted via on-going developmental discussions and personalized career coaching.
Contributors
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Dan L. Ward, Chief Workforce Economist, The MITRE Corporation
Dan Ward led the design and deployment of MITRE’s CLEAR Conversations™, which migrated traditional performance management practices into a neuroscience-based focus on individual growth. Tossing out traditional career ladders, Dan’s team also introduced Careers in Motion which helps employees clarify personal goals and create career strategies that align successive experiences with future workforce opportunities.
Ward was the senior editor of AMACOM’s 2013 book Positioned: Strategic Workforce Planning that Gets the Right Person in the Right Job. As the senior editor of Best Practices in Human Resource Forecasting and Modeling (1994), Ward wrote articles that provided equal employment opportunity and diversity modeling guidance adopted by many Fortune 100 corporations. He received HR People & Strategy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016 for his long-term contributions to the field of Strategic Workforce Planning.
Dan previously held leadership roles at EDS, Texaco, and GTE. He began his professional career by developing workforce simulation and diversity modeling for AT&T/Western Electric/Bell Labs. During the Vietnam War era, he traveled the world performing with the U.S. Navy rock band - Fly in the Soup and the U.S. Navy jazz band, the Ambassadors.