Over the past several months, we rolled out ProValues to several corporate teams, MBA student groups and alumni organizations. Though there remain signs of a softening labor market, forward-thinking leaders continue to explore how to improve retention of their key talent.

My first meeting with a career coach years ago was deeply painful. Less than a week after being totally blindsided by my company’s decision to forgo a promotion (which meant I was required to transition out), I was expected to start the hunt for something new. Diagnostics. Strengths assessments. Vision statements. Career inventory. Values sorts. Each one offered new insight into choices that I would need to make.

Over the past few months, the team has been hard at work implementing feedback from ProValues users who offered their perspectives on how to make the tool better than ever. We're excited to release several new changes that we hope will improve your experience, including....

When people graduate from college or graduate programs, compensation is often managed to align with industry or functional expectations. Parity, right? That perception holds until you have your first conversations with peers in the workplace, and realize that not everyone has the same compensation, especially at the 12 to 18-month mark as people begin to explore new paths and options. Compensation can be a deeply personal topic, one that is almost always filled with uncertainty and speculation. Forums like Blind and Glassdoor can provide some datapoints, but inconsistent opinions from anonymous sources, wide compensation ranges, and lack of verifiability of user-reported datapoints can lead to more questions than answers. This is particularly true in 2021, when the job market is overheated and compensation trends are fast-changing.

Failure is tough on all of us. Whether a missed shot to win the game, a bad grade, or unrequited love, failure triggers emotions like sadness, fear, and anxiety that we generally wish to avoid in life. However, in seeking to avoid failure, we all risk curtailing our successes as well. Many people we work with remain wary of failure (we're sometimes scared of it too), leading some to pivot to their backup plans (e.g., returning to their pre-MBA industries) before fully pursuing their goals. While doing so might protect you in the short term, the long-term costs of opportunities lost are immeasurable. Perhaps you could have launched your software idea and gotten funded. Or scaled your existing restaurant business nationwide. Or established your African VC firm. Why not take some risks, especially when you're young?