Environment Protection Authority (EPA) Victoria is using SAP SuccessFactors to underpin a strategic workforce planning initiative, assembling a “talent pool” capable of meeting its current and evolving staff and skills needs.
People systems and reporting lead Angus Morrison told the SAP HR Connect conference in Melbourne that strategic workforce planning was an early goal in its SuccessFactors adoption.
“We like to throw around the term strategic workforce planning, really thinking about how our workforce is going to change over time, because you’ve got people today, but their roles aren’t going to be static,” Morrison said.
“They’re not going to want to stay in the same place, and the requirements of those roles may change.
“We’ve really started a process of mapping skills to positions and then learning content to those positions as well.”
Just as role prerequisites can be split into ‘must-have’, ‘good to have’ or ‘nice to have’ categorisations, so can learning opportunities that align to the organisation’s direction and future needs.
Given the compliance nature of regulatory work, a must-have might be gaining “certificate A to perform role B,” Morrison said.
“At the same time, there’s significant capacity for growth [of] employees,” he said.
“They can really look to pick up another certification, another sort of tick in a box, and it allows them to progress to a particular role.”
Morrison said there was considerable “appetite” internally for staff mobility – moving from one part of the organisation to another.
Ideally, EPA Victoria wanted to be able to maintain a “full skills and capabilities matrix” to manage its internal talent pool and stay on top of evolving skills requirements.
Morrison said that the visibility of learning journeys available to staff and their managers through SuccessFactors is assistive in enabling the organisation to achieve its ambitions.
He also said that the authority had conducted some recent work to make learning content more engaging by stripping back some unnecessary detail or complexity.
“We’ve recently done quite a significant piece of work looking to strip content out,” he said.
“I know it’s always appealing to put more stuff in, but in our experience, the shorter and easier we make it for people to do what we want them to do, the more likely it is for them to do it.”
Morrison added that an “interplay” of SuccessFactors modules is ultimately required to realise opportunities from a strategic workforce planning perspective.
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