For employers, professional development opportunities can be instrumental in building better teams, increasing employees’ skills and confidence, and highlighting the values of the organization.  

At the Lab, the need for professional development opportunities is increasingly important.  Currently, workforce data indicates that over 50% of the Lab’s workforce has worked at the Lab for less than five years. Additionally, this has resulted in a situation where there is an increased early employee need for improved mission connection.  

To address this increasing need for professional development opportunities for staff, the WFPO is implementing four key strategies.  

LANL has many long-standing and developing efforts to support the engagement of the whole employee.  WFO’s partnerships with LANL’s Employee Resource Groups  reflect our value for recognizing the needs and special interests of our diverse workforce. 

These efforts have begun by offering tours to LANL’s new employee and early career employee resource group, Connect.   Other efforts are in the early planning stages.

The WFPO has created and is leading a cross-organizational working group focused upon identifying, coordinating and raising awareness of the existing professional development and learning opportunities available throughout the laboratory.  The objectives of this working group are:

  • Build a community of people passionate about workforce development from major organizations across the Laboratory
  • Promote and facilitate awareness and sharing of professional development and learning resources
  • Identify and capture processes, best practices, lessons learned and needs
  • Advance integration and leverage related tools

Showing the importance of the mission to our new employees is critical. Equally important is highlighting how their job assignment fits into accomplishing this mission. This is especially critical as the Laboratory works towards transitioning new hires into a developing a career at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  

The WFPO is working with the CONNECT Employee Resource Group to sponsor current and future events that aim to increase the connection to mission. These efforts include Laboratory tours and a future seminar series.

Currently, workforce data indicates that over 50% of the workforce has worked at the Lab for less than five years.  Additionally, as parts of our workforce near retirement, WFPO has identified mentorship as an emergent need across all sectors of the Laboratory. We seek to accelerate the skills and knowledge of our workforce through the following efforts:

  • WFPO is in the process of developing a strategic unifying mission and vision for Division needs in mentorship programs across the Lab. We are currently in the data gathering phase of this effort and are meeting with Division offices.  
  • WFPO is initiating a series that will focus upon seminars, colloquiums and trainings that focus upon how to design your work life, how to understand the benefits of mentorship programs, how to be a better mentee and additional skills that will help all employees better benefit from current and future mentorship programs.