Each associate’s opportunities for career development and growth begin with a development plan that aligns the employee's experience, knowledge, skills and personal goals, with corporate goals and core competencies.

At MDCO, all career paths are as unique as our associates. You ‘choose your own adventure,’ and we can offer structured learning as well as flexible development opportunities to accommodate your individual needs. Once you join MDCO, the learning and development possibilities are tailored to each individual, including an evolving portfolio of opportunities.

Components of our overall Talent Management and Learning structure at MDCO include:

Career Management
Career Advancement at The Medicines Company is defined through opportunity creation, where tools such as competencies, lateral moves, skills and knowledge attainment dominate over defined leadership roles or titles. Under this approach to career management, each associate is responsible for defining what their path forward looks like and attaining it.

MDCO allows and expects it global associates to take ownership of their own careers. We provide managers with the tools and guidance to develop their skills as leaders, providing their employees with courageous, direct, and meaningful feedback.

Learning
Through our formal and informal learning strategies, we recognize our learning moments and capture that content, understand how our knowledge and learning objectives uniquely position us to complete in the global marketplace and produce life-long learners who leverage their knowledge on a daily basis.

Because each career path is distinct for each one of our associates, we have developed multiple formal and informal learning tools to personalize each associate’s learning pathways. MDCO offers the ability to attain knowledge on a vast range of subjects, from analytical tools to scientific training on our products. We also leverage web 2.0 technologies through blogs, forums and virtual workspaces.  Internal-based course offerings offer the chance to learn alongside your colleagues all over the world.

Performance Management
We are a firm of global entrepreneurs and, therefore, associates act and are rewarded like owners.  We provide highly competitive compensation vehicles and create opportunities for each associate to generate individual wealth through equity.  In return, we demand a high level of performance and accountability that we believe is commensurate with employee ownership.

At MDCO, progress is based entirely on merit. Our system of twice-yearly reviews ensures that all associates are evaluated against their individual goals and competency development while providing constructive feedback to ensure professional growth.
Every year, each associate sets personal goals that directly link to the top Corporate Goals for the fiscal year. At the end of each year those goals are measured alongside our corporate performance to help determine performance reviews and corresponding merit increases.

Leadership Development
MDCO strives for a comprehensive and systematic approach to internal training and development of its top executives as well as its future leaders.  This is done through supporting continuing education  of all associates across the globe. We also build shared language wherever possible; therefore, ‘out of the box’ education is rarely used and instead custom or internally developed programs have the highest success rates within the firm.