Career Development

At the beginning of your career with us (and each year after that), you will set personal business and development goals. Your personal business goals will align with IBM’s overall business goals and values. Your development goals will identify ways that you can improve to achieve your business goals.

These goals will guide you through each year and will be documented with your manager as part of our Personal Business Commitments program.

At the end of each year, your manager will evaluate how well you have achieved these goals compared with your peers, and rate your overall performance. This is a key factor in determining any performance bonus and future career opportunities. This framework is designed to reinforce our high performance culture and will effectively differentiate employees based on their contribution to the company. To sustain marketplace leadership, we operate in an environment where every employee is stimulated to perform at their best.

Where else in the world could you work and have so many opportunities? Learning to manage your career is one of the best investments you can make in managing your future at IBM. Your career does not just happen by itself; you must manage it, just as you would manage anything else that is important in your life. Working in IBM provides many opportunities and advantages to help you to take your share of the responsibility for your career and development.

Thus… what you want to do and how you grow over the course of your work life depends on your aspirations, your performance, your skills, and the needs of the business. To help employees grow their careers at IBM, career guidance specific to different types of work is provided in job specific development frameworks. Your manager is your first point of contact to help you get where you want to, but there is a lot more that helps you build your expertise…

So, you’ve set your goals and you’re on the way to managing your career. What happens next? We need people who will focus on building their expertise continuously in line with the ever-changing business environment. Continuous learning and development is therefore key for you and your career at IBM. As your career develops, you will use your Individual Development Plan to plan the learning experiences necessary for you to excel at your current job or pursue new opportunities. Part of this will involve not only understanding more about the IBM Foundational Competencies but focussing on developing these continuously both for your current role, career growth or both. Collectively these will give you a very solid base for continued development.

Staying on top of your game requires continuous learning. We have developed state-of-the-art tools to ensure you get this.

• Job role and technical training - In addition to top-notch professional skills, IBM focuses on in-depth industry and technical training to keep you up to date on emerging technologies and skills valued in the marketplace.
• Academic learning assistance program - IBM provides assistance for external education in addition to our internal training offerings to help you keep your skills aligned with our business goals.
• Global Campus - Whether you're looking for online or classroom courses offered by IBM's professional communities, you'll find them on the IBM Global Campus Web site. Universal access to thousands of internal e-learning modules is included, so you can take the courses you need at your convenience. Through Global Campus, you can also reference leading business and technical publications.

There is a myth that we only look for graduates with computer science degrees - we don't. We don't ask for a computer science degree for any of our graduate roles - just an interest in the area you are applying to - whether that be as a finance professional, a sales specialist or a business modelling consultant.

What is really important is that you can demonstrate that you have the attributes and skills that will ensure you have a successful career with us. We call these our 'core competencies'. The diagram below shows what these are. Select any of them for more information.