Personal Training and Development

I. Executive summary

« Since its inception Microsoft was appreciated for its employee friendly Human Resource practices. » Employee satisfaction was also afforded by the opportunity for growth, development also occurred by encouraging horizontal transfers, and employees were encouraged to develop themselves by switching jobs to gain more experience. However, during the 1990's as the company was growing rapidly in size, it lost the popular elements of its work and corporate culture. It was noted that a few employees left the organization by dismissal, with the majority leaving voluntarily. The concern over high attrition rates at a time when competent employees were needed led to surveys to find the cause of the cause of the problem and for changes to be implemented. One of the major changes was the requirement for top management to coach lower levels, assisting in their development by doing so. This became known as 'turning over the keys'. It was important for Microsoft and its employees because it allowed the employees an opportunity to develop. Also critical to the changes was the new focus of empowering people and of defining clear goals. These changes were all designed to increase employee satisfaction and commitment to organization, while trying hard towards maintaining the same spirit the small company began with.

In the year 2000 the software makers struggling to keep good people was nothing new. Increased incentives included extra vacation time and huge stock option grants as well as increased promotions, which include a generous increase in salaries. With rapid expansion levels corporate culture at Microsoft however was still not favourable and needed to be adjusted from the 90hour work weeks, if it intended to retain top managers who paid particular attention towards family priorities.

The greatest challenge as the Human resource director is identifying what causes an employee to transform from an enthusiastic newcomer to a disengaged job seeker. The difficulties that new employees especially recent graduates face vary within different divisions in Microsoft Corporation. The key to retaining these key graduates is first to understand the challenges they face as they manoeuvre around the workplace.

Our objective as Human Resource Director is to design a much-improved Graduate Career Development plan to retain our core talent both in the short term and long term. Our employees especially our graduates need to feel that they are part and parcel of the organization, in order for them to improve performance and not be influenced by the large number of our competitors. The general statistics or recent graduate in the 21st century as conducted by surveys from company's like Price Water House Coopers is the fact that a majority graduates want careers were they can travel internationally around the world, the opportunity to take part in training and improve performance, they want to be able to see a pathway of climbing the corporate ladder in the company, they need to feel empowered and be assigned to challenging tasks, they look up to coaching and mentoring from the older executives and employees, they want to relate and share experiences through teamwork with their co-workers and be able to balance work life and social life. In implementing our own career development program we will use some of these statistics conducted from other companies as well interactions with our graduate employees at Microsoft on their views of what will retain them in our company. To improve our Graduate Development Program and retain our core talent at Microsoft, we will in the Short term include training, coaching and mentoring, international transfers, team work and assignments, balance between work life and professional life, leadership roles and in the Long term we will include a balance in work and family life promotions, training, flexible work hours, create a family environment and we will evaluate with surveys on performance and our ability to retain our core talent at Microsoft.

II. Introduction of the company & situation

Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation. The history of Microsoft began on April 4, 1975, when Bill Gates founded it and Paul Allen Its current best-selling products are Microsoft Windows, Operating System and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. In 1980, Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowed them to bundle Microsoft's operating system with IBM computers, paying Microsoft a royalty for every sale. The company has now become largely successful. As of 2008, Microsoft has global annual revenue of US$ 60.42 billion and nearly 90,000 employees in 105 countries. It develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices.

Microsoft is committed long term to the mission of helping their customers realize their full potential. Microsoft is constantly updating and improving their products, Microsoft wants to continually evolve the company to be in the best position to accelerate new technologies and emerge to better serve there customer. Microsoft believes that they continued success depends on diverse skills, experience, and background that our employee brings to the company.

Microsoft gives its employee a lot of personal freedom over both the work and the work environment. The employee are given freedom to customize there own office, schedule there own business trips and meetings, and select there own training courses offered by Microsoft. This freedom is reflected also in the way people dress, there is no dress code, which gives the employee to come dressed as he feels to, always remaining decent. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer addresses of the press, but it are an open secret that all of the division heads (and their staff, and their staff) are top-notch. Given that Microsoft's been convicted of monopolistic practices. Microsoft's upper management is very ethical with there approach. The management is very trustworthy. Microsoft has a friendly relation with 2their workers and this proves to be helpful to them and also helps them making some important decisions for their employees. Microsoft's leaders are also very generous, and frequently encourage the rest of employees to make charitable donations (both money and time) a priority. Giving is a large part of Microsoft's corporate culture.

It's good to work in a company where you can trust the upper Management, who are smart, hardworking, and making right decisions at the same time.

Like most communities, Microsoft has its own language. One often-used phrase is "work/life balance," which has many nuanced meanings. Taken literally, work/life balance is about finding a healthy balance between the