CIO Executive Council —

Scenario: Looking for strategies to enhance staff skills

We are just finishing a two-year redesign of our job families, and we’re now ready to look at other support structures that help lock in both technical and soft skills. I have a variety of pilot mentorship programs and am starting two summer projects to create a development activities guide and an improved onboarding program. The last piece in the puzzle is an experiential job rotation program for my 300 staff and managers. For staff, rotating to a different job for a set amount of time could let them practice new skills and get a realistic preview of what a new job would entail. For managers, job rotations would give them greater appreciation for the challenges of other parts of IT and foster more efficiency when working across teams.

To keep things simple, I’m planning to keep the rotations within my IT department, which is still large enough to have dozens of different jobs. The current sticking points are the many logistical considerations to making this kind of a program a reality, such as back-filling positions, finding the optimal length of a rotation, and differentiating the staff- and manager-level programs. After we have an IT job rotation program in place, I want to consider additional experiential learning opportunities.

Advice: Provide a Safety Net for Trying New Roles

We rolled out a career matrix last year that highlights every existing and potential position in IT. It maps to a competency model that defines skills that are required for each role in the matrix. One way that staff can expand their skill sets is through position transfers to a different role on the matrix. For example, a desktop technician may move into a business analyst position, or a business analyst may opt for an internal audit role. Between three and five people participate annually. This model differs from job rotation in that it is not a formal rotation program and people are not required to return to their original position. If the new role is a good fit, they can remain there. However, if after an agreed-upon amount of time the staff member decides to return, their old job (or a similar one) will be waiting. The key thing to remember is that no one is penalized if the transfer doesn’t work out, and the individuals end up with the job that is the best fit for them.

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