Learning & Career Growth

Today's business environment demands that we become faster and more flexible in anticipating and exceeding the needs of our customers, shareholders and employees. Creating a high-performance culture built on continuous learning will help 3M achieve business growth for the company and professional growth for employees.

Each year, every employee creates an individual development plan that includes specific steps to raise the bar on his or her individual performance and skills.

Our Learning Environment

3M is a learning organization committed to continuous improvement in both the company's results and each individual's performance. A learning environment is more than a comprehensive training program. It's a philosophy that says that learning is a part of every employee's job every day.

Continuous learning gives all employees greater opportunities to realize their potential. In a learning environment, the role of the employee is to be a continuous learner, the role of the manager is to reinforce learning and model learning behaviors, and the role of the company is to create systems that allow cross-functional knowledge sharing throughout the organization.

3M supports learning through on-the-job training, traditional classroom settings, online learning and functional communities of practice. Each employee is responsible for his or her individual growth plan. The goal of our commitment to learning is engaged employees who understand how their actions contribute to 3M's success and make decisions as if they owned the business.

3M has offered suites of on-line supervisory/manager, business conduct and compliance courses; technical mini-courses in science and technology important to 3M; basic selling skills and product training; and on-line courses in giving and receiving feedback and coaching skills for all employees worldwide to develop competencies aligned to business needs.

Accelerated Leadership Development

3M views leadership development as a competitive advantage and is accelerating leadership development in a variety of ways:

• Our senior management team is strengthening our leadership talent by selectively recruiting proven leaders from outside the company for key functional and business roles to lead our businesses in new directions.
• 3M's senior management team has identified six key leadership attributes. All employees are expected to chart the course, raise the bar, energize others, resourcefully innovate, live 3M values and deliver results. These attributes have been incorporated into our performance assessment and development process so we can regularly assess the extent to which employees' behavior demonstrates these attributes to help them develop their leadership behaviors.
• 3M is identifying leaders and giving all employees the tools to develop leadership attributes throughout their careers. We are also investing in the development of leaders through the Leadership Development Programs, which includes Six Sigma training for all employees, supervisory training and several intense accelerated learning development experiences for high-potential managers and directors. Participants experience real-life learning by working on 3M business issues and presenting recommendations to senior management.
• Employees have access to an intranet site dedicated to their career and personal development. The site provides a strategic career planning process, information to guide employees as they set goals and document contributions, access to on-demand learning modules and suites of courses, mentoring guidelines and tips for aligning career goals to 3M business goals for greater success at 3M.
• While 3M leaders have always been known for sharing best practices, especially technological breakthroughs, today's leaders at 3M have a passion for learning and sharing ideas. There's an increased emphasis on action learning and "leaders teaching leaders" including teaching, coaching and mentoring by leaders at the highest levels of the organization.
• Learning has also taken a new place within the value chain for 3M businesses. Leaders are leveraging new learning technologies and blended learning solutions to improve employee access to learning content and performance support tools. They are also focused on decreasing the cost of traditional learning events and increasing customer and channel partner loyalty. Learning has become a more valuable and measurable business strategy.

Career Opportunities

3M supports and encourages employees in the development and advancement of their careers, and provides tools to support those activities.

Listings of open job opportunities are made available at all 3M locations and employees may nominate themselves for consideration.

Tuition Refund

In 3M locations around the world, employees are encouraged to continuously learn and improve their skills. In most countries where we do business, 3M offers, with management support, tuition reimbursement to encourage employees to upgrade their education to better meet current job responsibilities, prepare for future responsibilities and help qualify for changes in career paths within 3M. In countries providing state-sponsored education, 3M gives employees time off to complete training. In 2006, 3M expended $4,003,479 to support U.S. employees pursuing higher education through 3M's Tuition Reimbursement Refund Program.

Mentoring

3M encourages mentoring partnerships and provides training, tools, networks and consulting to support mentoring across the company.

Some organizations have assisted mentoring programs to help identify and recruit mentors to meet the needs of specific individuals. An on-line Mentoring Program Design Kit with guidelines for developing and implementing a mentoring program to support strategic business objectives is available to support organizations wanting to offer mentoring programs.

The Mentoring Special Interest Group (SIG), a volunteer organization sponsored by the Vice President of Community Affairs, matches individuals interested in being matched with a mentoring partner. The SIG provides a quarterly luncheon/kick-off session to launch new mentoring partners. Since 2001 the SIG has matched nearly 500 mentoring partnerships.

Self-directed mentoring resources encourage individuals to recruit a more experienced employee to act as an informal coach and counselor to assist with career development.

Since 2003, over 800 of our newly hired St. Paul based employees have been invited to participate in the new hire group mentoring program.

Job Transition Assistance

For employees whose positions are eliminated due to business needs, 3M offers a range of resources, based on location and availability, to help transition to employment in other areas of 3M or outside of the company. For example, 3M offers outplacement services to job eliminated employees on a worldwide basis. The services include assisting employees to develop their career transition skills and job placement opportunities. In addition, 3M has an internal, e-recruit web site that advertises current 3M position openings for employees to self-nominate.