Hi Mike, could you start by telling us a bit more about Personal Development Conversations?

Certainly. Personal Development Conversations (PDC) provide an opportunity to talk with your manager to reflect on your achievements over the past year, discuss any challenges you may have faced, set new goals, and ensure you’re well supported moving forward. It’s a chance to discuss development opportunities, share feedback and ask questions regarding hybrid working.

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What’s different about the Personal Development Review (PDR) process this year and what are some areas of focus for PDC's?

This year, it’s all about the conversation. There'll be no paperwork, so this will give you the chance to talk and listen to each other, celebrate our achievements over the last year, and talk about what's possible moving forward.

We also have a new Moodle module, Warwick Principles and Social Inclusion, that everyone needs to complete. This will help ensure we all have a shared understanding of what we expect from each other as members of the Warwick community.

When completing your PDC, try to think about how your work is supporting our University strategy. Whilst this might be easier in certain roles over others, it's important to highlight the important role every one of us plays in delivering the strategy.

You can also try thinking about what ‘stretch’ goal could be for you – this can help you think about ways of improving how we work, considering innovation or use of technology.

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What support is available to managers in preparing and holding a PDC?

The key support document is the PDC Line Manager's guide. It’s a quick start guide and has everything you need to know to have your conversation.

If you need some further help there’s lots of support tools available:

• A comprehensive ‘how to’ guide for managers with everything you could possibly need to know about the process; sample goals, guidance on development planning, as well as some techniques to help with the conversation.
• A ‘top tips’ Moodle course for managers that only takes about 8 minutes to complete. It covers how to prepare for the conversation, as well as providing some skills in Emotional Intelligence, listening and questioning- all useful tools for a PDC.
• An ‘Effective Feedback and Development Conversations’ training event which is useful for those managers new to the process. It covers the skills needed to conduct the conversation. Our next event will be on 7 July.
• Contact us! Feel free to ask for help if you have a question or need any guidance. You can contact us at lmd@warwick.ac.uk. We’re happy to answer any questions by email or through a Teams call.

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What are some of the ways people will benefit from taking part in a PDC?

With everyone being time poor, having some dedicated time for a conversation with our manager helps us make the time to discuss our roles, what we’re focusing on, our career aspirations and any support we might need. If we’re always task focused, we rarely have opportunities to reflect on how we have supported the department aims and wider strategy. This is your opportunity to talk about what you like, what you don’t, what you’d like from your role and what help you’d like with your career planning.

For managers, it gives you an opportunity to take a step back and consider how your team are contributing and what new goals and aspirations you might have for the team in the next 12 months. Also, if you’re not currently able to have regular one-to-ones with your team, the PDC is a great opportunity to find out how your people are feeling right now.

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How are HR looking to develop the process for future years?

We’ve completed our new People Strategy, which formally recognises what we already know- that the most important asset of the University is its people. The Personal Development Review is a hugely important part of ensuring that we have a process that allows us to talk and listen to each other about what we’re here to do, how well we’ve done it and what skills, knowledge and behaviours we need to develop to continue being as successful as we strive to be.

The People Strategy will inform what future changes are needed to the PDR process so that it’s working for us as a University. We’ve received much feedback already about the PDR process and we’ll continue to listen.

Whilst it's always going to be difficult to meet everyone's needs when creating a process for all of us, we'll certainly do our very best!

Look out for more about the People Strategy as we begin to work together to put it into practice.

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