Crowd sourcing the planning survey

Going to have to try something new because I’m about to break a promise and get on the plane tomorrow without finishing. There just haven’t been enough hours in the day but I know you guys understand. I thought perhaps the best thing to do was share some of the info I already have compiled and ask for some help in thinking through stuff.

I’ve already decided to change some of what I “report” this year. Because of the number of people participating has grown so much, the final doc could easily be 100 pages. I want to keep it around 40 so I’ve decided I’m going to make this more of a living thing than only a once a year report thing. There will be a report, but I’m prioritizing the key money stuff for the US, Brazil, UK and the best I can do in terms of sharing ranges from other countries. By adding countries, it multiplies the number of hours I’m sitting in front of my spreadsheets, so some of the things I’ve done in the past like comparing NY with the rest of the US (which I don’t think is that fair of a comparison anyway) and the male/female (which I do find really interesting) will wait and be blog entries.

I’m also asking for help/conversation on the open-ends. I’m going to post all of the open-end responses on slideshare in word documents. If you’re up for it, I’d really love your interpretation in the comments section here on the blog. You can download these documents – you don’t have to look at it through slideshare unless you want to.

First up are three questions I only asked the planning directors. I asked them to help tease out what the different skills are among levels by telling us what skills they would need to see in an assistant planner to promote them to a planner (or what you would look for in a planner level hire) and so on for senior planner and group planning director. So let the games begin…