In 2004 IBM, a global technology and consulting organisation, introduced a workforce management system that allows the company to oversee its global resources while employees manage their own careers.
Two-hundred fifty distinct roles (eg, project manager, IT architect) were identified across the global organisation and given descriptions. The descriptions comprise skills, which are also defined uniformly across the organisation. Each role description is “owned” by a practitioner of that job, who updates it as necessary.
The company’s 400,000 employees regularly assess their own skills, rating each on a scale of 1 to 5. Once approved by their manager, the ratings are integrated into an online tool. The tool collects other data, such as contact details, billing rates, home office and current project. For the 60,000 employees identified as “high potential”, additional leadership-readiness data are incorporated.
The tool can be used by employees to identify and apply for job openings worldwide, compare their skills against those needed in other roles and determine what skills they need to develop to move up the ranks. The tool is used by managers to assemble optimal project teams. And the company uses the tool strategically, for predicting workforce needs. Each business unit provides a quarterly trend analysis: which skills are hot, which are on the wane. By comparing the existing supply of skills and leadership against current demand and future trends, IBM can plan its hiring and training needs.
“The whole concept was to translate supply chain management thinking into the HR space,” says Frank Persico, vice-president of workforce learning and development at IBM. “It was a two-pronged impetus, both to better enable supply-demand matching, because you don’t want people underutilised or worse, a situation where we do not have enough of them. But at the same time, from the employee-centric view, we wanted employees to understand what they needed to do to be successful in the roles that they were interested in.”
