Your Other BD Pipeline

As a consultant, I have the opportunity to get a bird's-eye view of trends and challenges across a variety of clients in the international development sector. I hope the Clubhouse has also been a window for you into these challenges, and you've seen that you're not alone in much of what you face!

One thing I've noticed is a significant challenge in hiring, training, and building a career pipeline for junior BD staff: you may call this position BD Associate, Proposal Coordinator, or something similar. For this position, most organizations are looking for someone with 1 to 2 years of professional experience so that they're coming into the role with foundational experience upon which to build a business development skillset. However, this is a very small and very in-demand pool -- many of you have commented in the past that there are few organizations out there with the systems in place to train first career professionals. It's also a huge undertaking to put in place all the training and mentorship needed to onboard staff to their first business development role, especially when most organizations are hiring one or two junior staff at a time and having to put together an entire learning process for just these one or two individuals.

At Bid Boss, we've been thinking about how we could create a training and mentorship program for junior staff so that this work could be shared across multiple organizations. By doing this, we can create an economy of scale and participants can also benefit from peer-to-peer learning.

We're in the very early stages of thinking of what such a program might look like, so here is where we're hoping to benefit from insights from the Clubhouse hive:

Hope to hear from you all -- if you want to talk more but you'd prefer not to share publicly, I'd also be happy to chat over email (sj@bidboss.org), Clubhouse chat, or a quick Zoom call!