Although ASA had no track record in career transition management, we pitched and won the engagement. I personally delivered about 80 percent of the training to the 150 candidates.  It was a very emotional, highly personal, and exhausting experience.  But our new practice was launched, and the CIO remains a dear friend to this day.

While my business partner regarded outplacement as a fad, my crystal ball said otherwise. For nine years, I grew the career transition management practice alongside the recruiting business. The trust we’d built among HR professionals on the recruiting side enabled us to become one of the few recruiters who made the transition successfully. And our specialty gave us an edge. Any firm going through downsizing would always have a segment of business for us.  And the market quickly came to value working with a firm that understood IT and how it fit into an organization and could speak the language of the candidates. By the time I bought my partner out, in 1990, we were hitting homeruns in outplacement as well as recruiting.

The Ayers Group, as we became known, went through its next metamorphosis in the mid-1990s.  We recognized that clients had other needs—for training and talent management.  We surrounded our success in recruiting and outplacement with the third key segment of our business: organizational effectiveness consulting. Clients have learned they can come to us to fulfill a variety of talent-management needs:  recruiting, IT and HR staff augmentation, career transitioning, coaching, training, OD consulting, and succession planning.

We’re now in the middle of strategic planning for the year that will culminate with our 30th anniversary.  Much has changed over three decades.  So many of our clients have themselves metamorphosed, through merger, assimilation, spin-off, or simply name change. But the HR people we’ve worked with have taken us from company to company.  In many cases, the relationships date back to our founding, or even before.  These relationships have created a legacy—one on which we intend to keep building.  

As we plan for 2005, we are talking about what’s important to you as you face an employment marketplace buffeted by economic cycles and altered by globalization, geopolitics, offshoring, and other forces.  As always, our objective is to anticipate and find creative ways to meet your needs.  If you have any thoughts about this, please call us.  We’re looking forward to continuing to work with you over the next 30 years.