Question

Employment Experiences

The majority of employee development occurs through job experiences that include the day-to-day activities that employees encounter in their work roles. Job experiences can be used for employee development when they involve enlarging the employee's current role, job rotation, transfers, promotions, downward moves, temporary assignments, or sabbaticals.

The following activity will walk you through the job experiences of Maria Antonio. Follow along in the case study as you learn about the activities and assignments Maria encountered and the decisions she made throughout her career at an automobile insurance company. After you read about Maria's experiences, answer the questions about each of Maria's experiences as she advanced in her development.

Read the case below and answer the questions that follow.

Maria Antonio recently graduated with an undergraduate degree in psychology. She could not wait to finally have some real-world experience, and could barely hold back her excitement when she was finally offered a job as recruitment coordinator for an auto insurance company. As recruitment coordinator, Maria will be reviewing thousands of résumés and selecting a portion of them to pass along to the recruiters. She will also be in charge of setting up interviews and coordinating schedules between recruiters, managers, and potential employees.

During Maria's first day on the job, her manager tells her that she will spend the next couple of weeks doing a series of assignments in human resource areas throughout the company, including recruitment and selection, compensation, training, and legal issues. These assignments are designed to provide her with a good sense of the culture and HR system within the company. After a few weeks of moving from one role to another in her initial training, Maria returns to the recruitment and selection department to officially begin her role. She is really enjoying her job as recruitment coordinator and quickly becomes successful and known throughout the department.

One of the top recruiters, Tom Fields, is overwhelmed by his workload. He notices that Maria is doing a great job in her role and sees that as an opportunity to lighten his responsibilities while increasing her learning on the job. He decides to ask her to conduct prescreening interviews with potential employees for positions for which he is recruiting. Maria accepts this challenge right away. She is thrilled about it because she is the only recruitment coordinator given this additional responsibility.

Tom was not the only one who noticed Maria's success in the position. A little after a year in the role, Maria's manager offered her a position as a full-time recruiter. This advancement would put Maria in the position of having the other recruitment coordinators screen résumés and schedule interviews for her. She could not be happier—things were going better than she could have ever imagined at the insurance company!

After several years in the role, however, her mood had changed significantly. She was tired of recruiting and dealing with applicants. She wanted a role with more interaction with internal employees. Maria talked to her manager, and he suggested a move to the compensation and benefits department. Because she did not have experience in this area, however, she would have reduced responsibility and would have to begin her role as a benefits administrator. Maria took the opportunity for a fresh start.

It turned out that she was actually quite good in compensation and benefits. Within a few years, she was a benefits manager in charge of health-care benefits for the organization. She worked closely with a clinic in designing benefit packages that would best suit the insurance company's employees. The clinic was so impressed with her work that they offered Maria a short-term role in implementing a similar benefits package in their organization. Thus, for six months Maria remained on the payroll at the insurance company, but worked full time for the clinic. Once the benefits program she designed had been implemented at the clinic, Maria returned to her role as benefits manager.

After all of these challenges, Maria was ready for something new again. She thought about making a lateral move, and applied for and received a position as a general HR manager for the IT department. It involved similar pay and responsibilities to her current position, but allowed her to deal more directly with employee issues. Being an HR general manager was great! She loved the interactions with employees and day-to-day challenges of the position. She continued in this role for several more years, until she felt that her talents could be used more effectively in other parts of the organization. After 15 years with the company, Maria felt she could share her experiences with others by being a trainer. Training, however, would require an entirely different skill set. Maria talked to the HR executives and determined it would be best to take a leave of absence from the company to return to school full time and receive her master's in education and training. Two years later, Maria returned to the company as a lead trainer. She continues to grow and build development experiences in this new role.

1.When Maria completed a series of assignments in various HR areas to learn more about the background and culture of the company, she was experiencing a Multiple Choice job rotation. promotion. job enlargement. transfer. demotion.

2. When Maria increased her job responsibility by conducting prescreening interviews for Tom Fields, she was experiencing Multiple Choice transfer. promotion. job enlargement. job rotation. sabbatical.

3. When Maria was offered a full-time position as a recruiter, she was experiencing a Multiple Choice job rotation. demotion. transfer. job enlargement. promotion.

4.Upon moving to the compensation and benefits department, Maria took the role of benefits administrator. This is considered a(n) Multiple Choice temporary assignment. externship. promotion. transfer. downward move.

5. When Maria worked on the clinic’s benefit package full-time but remained on the payroll at the insurance company, she was experiencing a(n) Multiple Choice externship. sabbatical. transfer. job rotation. downward move.

Answer 1

Answer 1. Job Rotation

Job Rotation refers to a technique or process that employers use to shift new employees from one job to another job within the same organization to understand all verticles of the organization. This help employee to understand and experience new skills with new job responsibilities. Maria has done the same in the organization as she was shifted from one job to another to make her understand new skills before joining her original position.

Answer 2. Job Enlargement

Job Enlargement refers to a technique where an employee faces a horizontal expansion of job roles and tasks within the organization. In job enlargement, the number of tasks related to one job position increased to add more skill and experience to the employee.

Answer 3.Promotion

Promotion refers to the technique where an employee moves from the current position to another position that has higher pay and higher responsibility and status in the same organization. Basically Promotion is a vertical upward movement of an employee within the organization.

Answer 4. Temporary Assignment

Temporary Assignment refers to assigning new tasks within the same department or another department within the organization for a short period of time to provide new skill or development to the employee. Usually, the temporary assignment would be provided to 6 to 12 months to the employee.

Answer 5. Externship

Externship refers to allowing the employee to work in other organizations for a short period of time for a specif task. In the case study, Maria was working on implementing a benefits package for the clinic and returned back to her current organization. This is an example of an externship.