It’s easy to assume you need ‘new’ people to deliver digital and data work – and while for specific skillsets that may be true, with the right leadership, coaching, development and support, for some roles you can truly ‘grow your own’ and you’ll end up with employees that are even more loyal because of the investment you’ve made in them.
As an example, we know councils who have adopted lower code technologies and created service design frameworks to support service changes, opening up both business analyst and configuration roles to employees organisation wide.
Why ‘grow your own talent’?
While guardrails and support have been needed as new team members get up to speed, a combination of formal learning, side by side delivery and pairing of resources with different experience levels has led to in-house teams developing new capabilities, and avoiding redundancies that may have happened in other services in the process.
There are genuine success stories across the sector of HR Administrators becoming Business Analysts and of Customer Service Advisors becoming Business Change Managers for example.
At Socitm Advisory we support organisations with business change. We recommend the best way forward in a bespoke way and focus on building capability within an organisation for their long-term success; we don’t just implement solutions.
Four key considerations for talent development
If you want to build capability in your organisation right now, and have an identified skills gap, here are some key considerations to ‘growing your own talent’:
- Think about the roles you most need but don’t have right now.
- Engage with experts who can support you to upskill your own staff-
- Procure your skills ‘as a service’ so you only buy what you need, when you need it
- Consider how your learning and development plan will work, and whether you might need some support designing and implementing it
‘As a service’ resource
There are two ways you can ‘grow your own’. Some councils have procured Enterprise Architecture ‘as a service’ from us meaning we provided an Enterprise Architect as and when they needed it. This comes with the obvious cost saving of not needing to employ an Enterprise Architect full-time.
Coaching and mentoring
On the other hand, other councils have worked with us to ‘grow their own’ talent. In this instance our own experts, work closely with the councils team, and through coaching and mentoring support the knowledge gap to ensure over a longer period of time, skills and knowledge are transferred.
Interested to find out more?
We can talk through these specific case studies and more. To find out more contact us now.
About Socitm Advisory
We help organisations delivering public services to thrive.
We’re a transformation partner, working with public service leaders to improve the services they deliver. We maximise organisational efficiency and effectiveness and help create customer and employee centric services by embracing people change, technology, data, innovation and modernisation.
We take a partnership approach to building capabilities within the organisations we serve, to support their own continuous improvement.