CSC Smart Business UK Edition February - Vitality is vital
Vitality is vital
Regular strategic discussions between HR departments and boards is key to ensuring an organisation can develop the necessary skill sets to deliver the business agenda
All organisations need to be flexible enough to follow new strategies. If an agenda for change has any chance of success, though, the organisation needs to look to ensure its people have the skills required to follow the new direction.
If new skills are needed, the role of the HR department is vital in matching the workforce's talents with those skills to take the company forward. To achieve this, it is essential that open and regular discussions take place between the board, which is devising new strategies, and the HR department, which can look to ensure the right skill sets are in place to meet future business challenges.
This has to go beyond mere 'lip service', according to Bev Cunningham, HR Director of Talent and Learning at CSC. Instead there should be, in her words, 'vitality' in the relationship between the board and the HR department. This means conversations have to be lively and proactive. Rather than be seen as talent reviews that have to take place, the relationship should go deeper and see each side probe to ascertain where there are potential skills gaps emerging. The alternative, she warns, is a shallow relationship that will see skills pointed towards a strategy the company is no longer fully pursuing and risk the business not achieving its growth ambitions.
"Most HR organisations will have a talent review at every level which identifies talent and maps out their potential career path, detailing their qualities and skills and gaps where extra training might be needed," she says.
"The problem is, it can be just a 'list', unless there's real vitality in the relationship between the talent pool, the HR department and management. In fact, if there isn't this strong communication channel then it's a list that's soon out of date, meaning the HR department isn't able to respond to the direction the company is moving in. If you have vitality in the relationship you can build up a picture of where you are going and establish the skills your people will need and then identify the gaps."
IT at the forefront
This is crucially important in IT because technology is moving at such a pace that some roles will either not exist or be fundamentally changed within just a few years. It means that HR departments need to work particularly closely with IT staff to ensure their career paths can be steered towards the roles the company is going to need.
"The role of IT is fundamentally changing, particularly around people who have real in-depth knowledge of legacy systems," Cunningham explains.
"These people need strong support getting skills in the areas the company needs them so they're still relevant. IT is no longer going to be just about being very good at a particular skill, it's becoming far more about understanding the business you're working for and how what you're doing can add value. It's only if you understand the underlying business issues, for example, that you would know what to look out for in big data projects. If you're just making discoveries without understanding their value, there's no future there."
No pigeon holes
It is for this reason that flexibility in career paths, as well as recruitment, is vital. Organisations can no longer place staff in a position and expect that neither the role will change nor the person will want to progress their career in new areas. So, finding technical staff who can evolve their skill sets with the shifting requirements of the organisation and learn new systems, as well as take on leadership roles, is going to be key.
This not only means that technical staff, with the correct leadership attributes, are actively considered for managerial roles but also graduates with both technical and non-technical backgrounds are actively sought for careers in IT. For organisations to build teams which have deep skills in both technical expertise and commercial understanding, the 'them' and 'us' split between IT staff and business leaders has to be challenged.
"The worst scenario is that people feel they are considered technical and so can never progress all the way to the top," Cunningham warns.
"Organisations need to have career paths which can take anyone to the board. Of course, you need to carry out the relevant assessments of skills and capabilities to establish the leadership potential of your staff to see where their strengths lie and whether they have natural leadership skills which could be developed. You also have to be very transparent with people about how they are performing and what their potential is so they know if they are capable, in the organisation's eye, of becoming a future leader.
"With IT now central to delivering the requirements a business needs to fulfil its strategy, companies should bring in graduates who have, say, studied subjects other than computer science. Organisations need a mix of skills and backgrounds and so it's important IT doesn't just keep on hiring technical people with technical backgrounds and then telling them they can only ever have a technical job with no chance of leadership progression."
Young hopefuls
A new source of employee Cunningham feels has often been overlooked in IT are apprentices. It is wrong not to consider a school leaver as having at least as much potential as a university graduate because, in some ways, they could prove to be more flexible.
IT services companies should actively consider apprenticeship schemes because, in her experience, school leavers can often have more realistic expectations about the speed of their career development. An apprenticeship scheme will never replace a graduate recruitment scheme, or industrial placement programme, but will instead provide a balance in the variety of backgrounds and qualifications of people brought in to work for the company.
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