Architect Fast-Track: Personal Mentor and Coach

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Training Services Overview

Architect Fast-Track
Personal mentor and coach program

Many businesses already know that senior management takes special talent and skills and invests heavily in developing and nurturing that talent. Architecture forms the platform for strategic advantage. A business that wants to lead into a new era of strategic advantage through architecture needs to pay the same kind of attention, make the same kind of investments, in its architects. It is not enough to have a program for identifying junior architects and helping them to transition into that role. We need to groom talented architects for senior architect roles that are as demanding as executive management positions in terms of their "soft" skills, yet also require technical depth and systems design experience and talent.

We are offering a fast-track program for architects that is analogous to programs that are offered to promising managers being groomed for the executive track. It requires the commitment of the business to nurturing its architect talent, and commitment from the architect to stretch beyond current job demands to learn concepts and skills that will help the architect do better on the job today, and advance to senior architect roles with broader and more strategic scope of impact.

We are offering a limited number of mentoring opportunities to individual architects. When you sign up for the mentoring program, you will be assigned a personal coach. Your coach will meet with you and help you assess your strengths and weaknesses, and set goals for your professional development. These goals will help you and your coach tailor a program that will help you move closer to your goals, enhancing your on-the-job performance. Your coach will review and give input on your current architecture work, and help you look more broadly to develop skills you need to advance as an architect. Your coach will help you sort through what to read, where to focus, what to practice, and give you safe, private feedback that will help you see and value your strengths so that you can lead and empower others.

This program is most helpful to architects who want to advance more quickly to senior architect positions, and senior technical management positions with an architectural leaning. We have created this program because quite a number of architects that we have worked with are now in chief architect, CIO, and CTO positions. They have reached these positions because they have the right qualities for these roles, not because we "retrofitted" them with these qualities. But at the same time, they have found our architecting process and our focus on architects skills to have been most useful to them, and they are strong advocates of our work within their organizations.