What does "career" mean to you? Is your work a way to make a living, or is it part of who you are? Do you want to follow a career path mapped by others, map your own path... or even leave the path completely?

Nortel believes in providing employees with the support and opportunities they need to help build their own paths. We know that everyone has a different perspective on what "career" means. Therefore our employees are offered a variety of career management resources such as assessment instruments, personal stories and guidelines to help them develop their own career paths.

• Education & Training Programs
• Career Management
• Informal Learning

Nortel supports a host of Education and Training Programs designed to meet the needs of specific businesses across the company and to ensure that employees at all levels have the skills required to do their jobs as effectively as possible.

Training available includes:

• Career Academies - a series of career development modules aligned to business needs and targeted to specific segments of the Nortel employee population.
  
  
• Training by Function - Employee training for specific business units such as Human Resources and Information Services
  
  
• Leadership Development - Nortel pays close attention to leadership development through formalized programs such as Leadership Edge (program that accelerates the development of high potential employees), Career Academies and On-Demand curriculum.
  
  
• Product Training & Certification - Provides employees and customers access to all product training, certification & technical documents.
  
  
• Nortel University - an on-line resource to help employees find all the latest sales training programs and materials to gain market momentum.
  
  
• On-Demand Professional Training - Nortel offers a suite of training and development programs targeted to develop specific skill sets, such as Leadership, Technology, and Sales & Business Acumen.

Continuing to learn and develop may involve taking on new roles that present greater challenges and responsibilities or even moving outside of a given field and developing new skills. Through JobShop, Nortel's internal on-line job board, employees can see what opportunities are opening up globally. Even if not actively considering a move out of their current positions, browsing Job Shop provides employees with ideas for continued development.

Nortel continuous performance management process can also be used by employees, to work with their managers in identifying their specific development needs, taking into account their skills, motivation and areas of interest. With these requirements in mind, employees can build their own action/development plans consisting of specific courses and learning programs geared to help maximize their contribution in their current roles, manage their careers, and increase the value of their resumes.

Nortel is a learning organization that provides continuous informal learning. Our employees have an opportunity to learn every day from some of the best and brightest people in the industry... each other! At Nortel you will often find employees gathering in numbers small and large to share knowledge. Small sessions often take the form of a "lunch and learn", a phrase that is well known among our employee population, while a speaker series may be arranged to address a larger audience.

A key example of employees sharing information and learning from one another is Tech Expo. Tech Expo is a global event for our R&D community. Various teams display the technology that they are developing in a science-fair-like format. All employees are welcomed and encouraged to visit the booths, ask questions, and learn about what other groups within Nortel are working on. There are also demonstrations done throughout the day that employees can view live or via webcast.