The nature of employment in the United Kingdom has been changing significantly in recent years and a number of Government-led initiatives have been taken to help people to adapt to this. In particular, individuals are increasingly expected to take responsibility for their own training and development and employing organisations are being encouraged to support them in this. Central to these initiatives is a new system of educational and training qualifications to which has been added a formalised scheme for action planning. This paper outlines these changes and reports on the introduction of the action planning scheme to management development training for senior police officers. Through this it has been realized that the new initiatives--and indeed career guidance in general--have a strong bias in favor of young people entering the world of work for the first time. A model was developed which was felt to be more appropriate for supporting those in mid-career. Whilst helpful, this was shown to have some deficiencies. Proposals are made to improve the original model. (Author)