Whether an associate is twenty-five or fifty-five, they will always need to worry about where their career is going from today.

As they think about their career, most of the time they think on the following questions:

• In what way am I personally more valuable on the marketplace than last year?
• What are my plans to make myself more valuable on the marketplace than in the past?
• What specific new skills do I plan to acquire or enhance in the next year?
• What can I do to make myself (even more) special on the market place in the near future?
• What precisely, is it that I want to be famous for?

Under this view our work assignment system influences the "balance sheet" of our people. Skills, after all, are developed through experience, and assignments define the experience.