Career Advancement Skills as a Strategic Adviser

Gamify your career: come and play this business simulation and learn new skills to help you advance your career.

It’s a paradox that the skills we learn at the beginning of our career can sometimes get in the way as we get more senior. This immersive experience – called Corporate Snakes and Career Ladders – will help you think about how you can go from being a great market researcher to someone who can advise and counsel senior leaders.

As you grow your career, your internal colleagues or clients will judge you less and less on your pure market research or analysis skills (after all, you are the expert and they may have no way of immediately validating your work). Instead you will need to create an impact via your counselling and advisory skills, how you influence others and how you link your work to wider strategic issues. This course will help you learn new skills and give you a chance to practice in the safe space of a business simulation. Will you be able to advance up the career ladder while avoiding the snakes?

Career Advancement Skills as a Strategic Adviser

Who will find it useful

The simulation is aimed at mid to senior level researchers who are making the leap from pure research delivery roles to ones where advice is key. This will typically be people with 5-10 years of experience who want to take their career to the next level, where they are likely to be managing a team of researchers. Anyone, whether in-house or agency-based who is finding their role is changing away from a purely technical one, will learn new tools and techniques to make an impact.

Objectives

• Learn what it takes to go from technical expert to strategic adviser
• Develop your skills to make the transition
• Explore the elements what it means to be a trusted partner to senior leaders

Learning outcomes

By the end of the day, participants will know:

• What the five different types of strategic adviser are and how to recognise them.
• The six different influencing styles and be able to flex their approach accordingly.
• Know the element of the “Trust Equation” and be able to apply this in improving relationships with key stakeholders.

Trainer

Stephen Welch

Stephen Welch CMRS is a Director of Archetypical Ltd, a company that develops and delivers new approaches to training and learning to help people improve their impact.  Stephen started his career in Canada and then moved to London, where he worked at MORI (now Ipsos-MORI) for six years. He then moved into consulting and was a partner in a global management consulting firm. Now he focuses on helping people in functional or technical roles learn new skills to go from expert to adviser. Stephen is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and is a Council Member of the Public Relationship Consultants Association. He holds joint Canadian-UK citizenship.