Setting a Develop Discussion

The Develop module on Mesh makes it easy for organizations to plan career advancement for their employees.

But before your employees can even start having their career development conversations, platform admins need to define the function and role specific competencies on Mesh. Only after this, employees can add Develop action items onto their agenda. This is done so that you can have a 2-way conversation (even your manager can setup a Develop discussion with you) on how you will track the personalised development plan of the individual against competencies that are expected from the role.

But before you can even start having these development conversations, your role and competencies need to be added to Mesh. This can only be done by your admin. So your Develop section will look different if these haven't been added.

When your role hasn't been defined,

When your role has been defined (the highlighted portion) but competencies are yet to be added,

Once the aforementioned steps are taken care of, the following is how the employee view of Develop would appear,

Let's look at how the Develop module works for creating personalized Individual Development Plans (IDPs).

Step 1: Click on the "Add Develop Discussion to Agenda" CTA. This will notify your manager of your desire to discuss about your career progression.

Step 2: Click on either "Focus on your current role" or "Work towards a new role" depending on whether you wish to excel in your current role or plan for the next step in your career.

Step 3: A right-sided panel will open up where you'd be required to select the function (department) and role you wish to pursue, from the respective drop-downs. Hit "Save & Close" to close the panel.

Once you've decided on the role, this will also change your Develop homepage view, with two important additions. 

• Mesh Recommends
  Mesh will recommend the next best action to users on all the competencies that they're working on, based on the risk estimation and past activity. For example, for a competency with incomplete tasks, Mesh will recommend you to complete the task, or for a competency that hasn't seen progress in the past 30 days, Mesh will recommend a few actions to help drive progress on the said competency. 
  
  
• My Competencies
  This section lists down all of your company's competencies along with your respective progress on all of those, the target date (time until when you're supposed to excel at it) and the respective risk estimation (we'll talk more about it down below). This will be useful for employees to keep a track of as well as understand the pace of their progression. 

Risk Estimation

These competencies sections consist of a column called Risk estimation, with different risk estimates assigned to each competency (a cumulative risk estimation will also appear for every direct report working on these competencies). This is based on an algorithm that takes into account recent progress and activity on a particular competency to arrive at one of the below estimates,

• Needs attention - For competencies where employee needs to perform an action

• Progressing well - For competencies where there is good progress

• Deferred for later - For competencies with a future quarter target

• Completed - For competencies that have reached excelled

• Not Applicable - For competencies that are marked as not critical

Note: Since not all the competencies will be relevant to what you're pursuing, the way to de-select any competency is to click on it and then under progress, select "not critical" from the same dropdown. This will remove the said competency from being considered in your progression.