What Does Tim REALLY Do?

I managed to fall into a profession that is somewhat mysterious. It seems like everyone wants to know what I do, but when I start to explain their eyes glaze over and they start thinking about things like food, football, or shopping.

For the record:

I do learning and development for Clyde Companies Inc. a $700M construction company with 2,800 employees.

Learning and development has the responsibility of providing our organization with things like performance management, knowledge management, and talent management. What are these?

Performance Management -- Making sure that employees set, work towards, and are evaluated on performance goals. We help them achieve their goals through interventions like training.

Knowledge Management -- Making sure the best information makes it into the organization, kept in the organization, and is delivered to the right people in the organization. We do this through resource libraries, discussion boards, podcasts, videos, and various other learning aids.

Talent Management -- Engaging, developing, retaining, and progressing the organization's talent pool. We do this through career planning, skill gap analysis, training, and succession planning.

I have my hands on all of the things listed above.

All in all we feel that we expedite the means by which other units in the organization achieve their ends...money. We help an organization run smoother, happier, more profitably, and more enlightened.

So if people ever ask you what Tim does or you're thinking to yourself, "What does Tim REALLY do?" Now you have a digestible answer.