Growing your own talent
Organisations that have the right skilled people in the right place at the right time tend to prosper. Some IT organisations are in a vicious circle: never enough time to do the job properly, never enough time to invest in skills development, never enough time to get better. Ron McLaren* says it’s time to grow your own talent.
e-Skills UK – the Sector Skills Council for IT – reports that “Despite the recession and a reduction in advertised vacancies, a lack of applicants for technology posts with the required skills, qualifications or experience is still a problem for many employers.” They go on to say that “110,500 new people will need to be brought in to the technology professional workforce every year until 2013.” In that sort of climate it’s important to grow your own talent!
Insight, innovation and professionalism should characterise the application of IT; architectures for enterprise, infrastructure and applications should provide a forward-looking platform to support business strategies. These are some of the things that crucially depend on a high level of competency. If an organisation is not in this happy state, it is unlikely to get there by stealth or by the actions of individual enthusiasts. Nothing short of top-level commitment and enforcement will cause the change. However, given that commitment, the organisation can build a consistent way of doing things, supported by a common language of skills, that encourages a sense of community and best practice, and that is a tool for the management of individuals and for the top-level management of skilled resources.
The Capability Management Cycle
The management of individual capability can be seen as a cycle:
- Human resources are acquired, either by recruitment, merger or re-organisation;
- People are deployed on projects or longer term assignments;
- Their performance is assessed;
- Development plans are produced and carried out;
- At some point in time decisions are made about reward;
- The overall resource management process plans for the future, and sets and enforces policies.
Integrating these processes into an effective scheme for skills management depends on the existence of a common set of definitions that represent the organisation’s common language of capability. Having a unit of capability – a competence – means having the appropriate behavioural characteristics supported by professional skills and knowledge. Experience is also needed, both to consolidate the fundamentals and as evidence that the competence is real; it can be validated by qualifications such as the CompTIA qualifications, university degrees, Chartered status, and so on.
The knowledge could be of technologies, products, techniques, methods, internal systems, corporate processes, and so on. Most organisations have their established way of looking at behavioural competencies – assertiveness, business awareness, communication, etc. For a resource providing the professional skills we need look no further than the Skills Framework for the Information Age – SFIA – that has become a worldwide phenomenon.
So we can prepare definitions of the competencies required (or acquired) by our people. But how will we use those definitions? Most of the stages in the cycle require detailed information about a person’s capabilities – either those currently possessed or those that must be developed.
The traditional approach would be to put those definitions into job descriptions. Typically, organisations have a large number of different job descriptions. They can be used as sources of information when recruiting, selecting people for projects, assessing them and making their development plans. But for someone trying to plan the organisation’s overall resourcing profile over the next year or two there is just far too much detail. Fundamentally, job descriptions exist to describe the liability – the work that has to be carried out. Resource planning is about managing the asset – the skilled people who will carry out that work. What is needed is an asset register of the skilled resources. To achieve that it helps to go a step beyond job descriptions – towards professional profiles.
Professional profiles
Professional profiles define a relatively small number of categories of IT Professional. It is a simple idea: we all recognise some simple terms, such as software engineer, service manager, architect, service technician, etc. Of course, the organisation probably has job descriptions with names of that sort, but we are not talking about jobs now; we are talking about people and their capabilities. We are talking about pegs, not holes.
The professional profile for, say, a service manager does not describe a specific service management job. It is a simple summary of the essential capabilities of any service manager, the key words being summary and simple. This is not meant to be a list of all the things a service manager should be able to do. It is something brief that captures the essence of service management. It probably describes more than one level of service manager, either by name (service manager, senior service manager, service director etc) or number (SM/1, SM/2, SM/3 etc). The profile contains a simple statement of the raison d’être of service managers and lists the core SFIA skills, knowledge areas and behavioural competencies required at different levels. This is then a standard, commonly understood throughout the organisation. We can now have an asset register, telling us how many people we have at each level of each profile. It is in those terms that we express future needs, and plan future resources.
Communities
The professional profiles effectively define communities. These could simply be informal arrangements through which people of the same professional profile share experiences and ideas about best practice and skills development.
Alternatively, those groupings can be building blocks of an organisation formed of communities of practice. In such a case, one practice is likely to contain people in more than one profile. For example, the Service practice might contain service managers, service technicians and service administrators. That group becomes the repository of the organisation’s collective wisdom on how to manage services, how to develop service people and how, for example, the roles in ITIL map on to the professional profiles.
Individual Capability
When recruiting people the professional profile forms the basis of the requirement, qualified by some specific needs, such as “with experience of retail finance” or “with in-depth knowledge of distributed databases”. If the recruitment agency has copies of the profiles, they can do a more accurate job of selecting candidates for interview.
Internal deployment in an assignment-based system is rather like recruitment. The need is expressed in terms of a professional profile with certain specific characteristics. What is not always exploited is the fact that deployment decisions are probably also the most important developmental decisions. An organisation based on communities of practice can provide the management focus that ensures the individual’s and the organisation’s need for capability development are to some extent taken into account: it’s not just a question of finding the right person for the assignment: whether it is the right job for the person is also relevant.
When assessing individuals we need to have the full details: they can be compared with the professional profile. At first it is likely that the individual does not quite match all of the core requirements – developmental actions will be needed. Over time, the individual’s profile becomes a superset of the professional profile, updated after projects or assignments, and reviewed in appraisals.
The appraisal reviews performance against objectives. The individual’s skills, knowledge and behavioural characteristics can then be used diagnostically to shed light on why some things were done well while others were done less well; this puts objectivity into the preparation of personal development plans.
When it comes to reward, the organisation can express its pay scales for IT staff in terms of the various levels of professional profile. This can help integrate IT pay scales into a corporate pay scheme.
The Asset
A set of professional profiles, broadly-based and probably numbering less than twenty, can be the currency in which the skilled asset is counted. It is also the basis of the common language that enables effective skills management. Managing the IT workforce as an asset transforms it from mere resource into a powerhouse of wisdom and professionalism based on best practice. The tools are available. It just needs a decision.
*Ron McLaren is a consultant in skills and capability management, specialising in improving the management of IT skills and capabilities in large organisations. He is a contributor to the development of the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) in his work as operations manager of the SFIA Foundation.
SFIA
Developed and regularly updated in a collaborative effort by organisations both providing and using IT, SFIA is the world’s preferred way of looking at IT skills, used in over 100 countries.
SFIA defines 86 professional IT skills across a framework of seven levels of attainment from 1 (“follow”) to 7 (“Set strategy, inspire, mobilise”). Each level has a full, generic definition. Each skill has an overall description and a differential description at each of the levels at which the skill can be recognised.
SFIA is owned and is the copyright of The SFIA Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation whose members are BCS, e Skills UK, The IET, IMIS and itSMF.
SFIA and CompTIA
Recently The SFIA Foundation has published a mapping showing the levels of skill that might be expected in people obtaining the internationally-recognised CompTIA accreditations.
