Rob Scott : HR Strategist
Against a background of almost 17 000 science and technology professionals (about one percent of the total science and technology workforce) emigrating from South African between 1994 and 2001 and a GDP growth forecast for 2008 and 2009 set at four percent and 4.2 percent respectively, HR departments are faced with an unprecedented task of managing scarce talent within their organisations.
The situation is exacerbated by a global shortage of skills and talent, and futher fueled by demand in markets such as China and India. For example, China is commissioning a new power station every week, which gives some indication of the number of engineering and related skills that will be absorbed into that economy in the foreseeable future. As a result, global mobility of talent is also a growing phenomenon.
So how are HR departments to manage these pressures? Companies are developing tool which will help companies have much more sophisticated and accurate information of their future talent requirements and which provides defendable information to formulate action plans to ensure that they have the correct talent in place at the time the talent is required. Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) identifies where and when organisations as a whole will be vulnerable to talent shortages or excesses based on historic organisational data and quantifies the critical skills that will be required in the short, medium and long term depending on the organisations strategy and external influences. These services combines HR Strategy, HR talent management and actuarial statistical and modelling capabilities. The statistical analysis of historic data and influencing external data to do predictive modeling is an extremely value adding advantage over normal supply and demand modeling tools.
Depending on the industry, turnover rates in some companies have reached levels of between 20% and 25%. HR departments need to interrogate their standing strategies to successfully operate in this environment and need something more that trend analysis based on historic data to formulate proper talent planning
Once an organisation has a good handle on their talent gaps for the medium to longer term, they can start developing plans to address these shortages – typically this will involve a holistic and creative view of talent attraction and retention as well as HR strategies.
In the wake of this, many companies have set up corporate universities to train up junior employees and ensure a pipeline of talent and stem the rate of attrition. Companies such as Deloitte has been successfully running the Deloitte Graduate Academy for the past three years to bridge the gap between tertiary education and the workplace.
These factors are all contributing to HR playing a far more strategic role within any organisation. New generations of employees with different expectations have meant that organisations become more flexible in their approach. Scarce skills demand flexible and innovative solutions! – the HR adage of 1 policy fits all, is a dying thought process.
