Shaping careers and fostering joy: a recap of ASOS’ ‘Shape Your Career’ week
In an ever-evolving professional landscape, the need for continuous learning and career development has become paramount. Recognising this, ASOS recently dedicated a week in January to foster personal and professional growth through ‘Shape Your Career’ week. This was a direct response to feedback from a survey conducted last year, where our employees expressed their desire to commit to internal career development and learning opportunities.
So, a small but mighty project group set out to do just that! After lots of research from internal feedback, they decided on four key pillars —
- Mindset
- Leadership
- Support
- Toolkit
But what do these mean?
Mindset
The Mindset sessions were designed to get ASOSers thinking differently about growing in their career. We had talks from Jamie Gill (The Outsiders Perspective) on his personal career journey, the LinkedIn master himself Elfried Samba gave us insight into what it’s like starting your own venture, and (a personal favourite session of mine) our very own Emy Rumble-Mettle spoke about fulfilling work-life harmony and how surrounding yourself with the right people makes a big difference.
Leadership
The Leadership sessions were all about giving the know-how on what good leadership looks like, and how to support and empower teams’ growth. Our Learning team delivered a great workshop on Self-Leadership to help ASOSers confidently lead self-development through mindset and practical skills. The Talent team delivered a Hiring @ ASOS session providing the tools and expertise to hire and attract talent with a focus on the importance of diversity in the business, creating an inclusive workplace, and ensuring an equitable process.
Support
On to Support, which was all about helping ASOSers figure out how to learn and grow. This covered neurodiversity, parenting in the workplace, and the Many Faces of Success delivered by Alice Olins (founder of The Step Up Club). She explored the narrative that we’re conditioned to believe that success is to constantly move upwards, and highlighted how success can mean different things to different people, giving a new understanding of progress.
Toolkit
And finally, Toolkit. These sessions were designed to bring together the learnings above and put them in to use. ASOSers were advised on how to smash the internal application process, navigating a squiggly career, and how to hack LinkedIn’s sneaky algorithm.
So, what did the team think?
Lauren Crawford — Recruiter
We aimed high with this one, and I think in all honesty we’re still relishing in the success of it all!
In a bid to offer our ASOSers more opportunity to explore internal career progression and be empowered to really drive their careers, we set out to offer them a dedicated time focused purely on doing just this!
We wanted to ensure we had something for everyone, so from how to navigate the internal application process to finding joy in your job. I feel we put on a brilliant variety of inspirational sessions for people to choose from including small bitesize workshops, interactive sessions and inspirational talks from external speakers.
It was amazing to be part of a small project team quietly working away in the background to make sure this was pulled off as seamlessly as possible.
I think for me, the detail in the beginning planning stages was key. How do our ASOSers really feel at the moment about their career at ASOS, what is their motivation, what is the daily drive, even looking at what is lacking, what blockers are they facing? Gathering insights from genuine feedback enabled us to offer up the right tools, resources and mindset support that we felt they needed. At the end of the day, we can offer this opportunity but the real purpose was making sure they were walking away with a new attitude and inspired mindsets. We wanted our teams to have a new outlook on what they have available to them to really drive their own career and realise their own potential and opportunities for growth.
Of course, we’ve taken away some improvements we can work on for the next time (that’s right, we’re planning on an annual return!) taking on board feedback from attendees and discovering along the way where we can do better to offer an improved experience next time. Massive, massive thank you and appreciation to everyone we had supporting us from Tech and AV support, to catering and internal comms!
Slight event organising anxiety, but I thoroughly enjoyed being part of the birth of Shape Your Career! Here’s to next time!
James Langham — Senior Talent Partner
We spotted an opportunity and we took action, delivering a three-day event focused on all things growth, development and support for ASOSers in their career.
We delivered talks and content in mid January to 1,600+ of our people who signed up to listen. Speakers ranged from both internal and external, some of our leaders and PX team with a mix of in-person and virtual talks, across our global office locations.
Salma Sodawala — Talent Acquisition Manager
Where do I start. We had to really think about what we were trying to achieve and how we wanted ASOSers to feel when attending and leaving the sessions, along with how we could be as inclusive as possible for our global teams.
Having decided upon the time slots for each day, my challenge was then working through slotting the sessions into an agenda. This involved agreeing on them, rejigging them, agreeing again, rejigging again, re-agreeing them, a bit more rejigging, and then locking them in over the course of three days! We used a good old spreadsheet and I nearly had a meltdown when it reverted back to an old template when we were three quarters of the way through finalising the sessions😓 Luckily we could retrieve the previous days version and all was not lost (including my sanity…) We then worked with our brilliant audio visual team to let them know what we needed, and apart from a few tiny technical hitches, it all went swimmingly.
Two highlights for me were sessions that really got you thinking — Joy in the Job and Autism not your (neuro) typical person. Both were motivating, honest, inspiring and delivered by our own brilliant internal speakers.
What now?
By nurturing a culture of continuous learning and support, we set out to empower ASOSers to shape their careers and contribute meaningfully to ASOS’ success.
‘Shape Your Career’ week received some great feedback and served as a catalyst for ongoing initiatives. Watch this space!
I’m Leah, and I work as a Recruiter for Tech & Ops at ASOS. When I’m not playing supermarket sweep at a sample sale, you can find me watching true crime documentaries, walking along Brighton beach, or choosing my next travel destination 🌏
Check out our vacancies here https://www.asoscareers.com/
