Why is Strategic Workforce Planning important for the IT organization?
Strategic Workforce Planning enables a demand-oriented and future-oriented identification of necessary skills for the sustainably successful provision of IT services. Necessary prerequisites for this are a defined service portfolio and a coordinated sourcing strategy for determining the vertical range of manufacture (internal vs. external service provision).
Our approach is based on an analysis of the service portfolio and determines the skills required for service delivery at the service level. Standard frameworks, such as the SFIA Framework (Skills Framework for the Information Age), can be used to map the required skills and derive standardized job profiles. These can be adapted to the customer's IT organization and extended to include additional customer-specific skills perspectives. In addition to a purely technical focus, soft skills and compensation components, for example, can be linked to the skills and the various skill levels. The bottom line is that the preliminary work will enable a consistent and competency-based determination of employee requirements for each service, on the basis of which a realistic overall picture of employee needs will emerge. The procedure should be reviewed cyclically, taking into account the current service portfolio, and adjusted as necessary.
How can the required skills in the IT organization be continuously secured?
Once the basic skills required to provide IT services have been determined in Strategic Workforce Planning, measures for execution of the strategy are defined in Workforce Development. In order to do so, employees are first assigned to the defined job/skill profiles to be able to identify possible needs for action. This also includes an assessment of the individual employee's development opportunities and areas of interest. The identified need serves as the basis for a continuous development of competencies within the IT staff (upskilling). Based on the skills and the different skill levels, training concepts, contents and processes are set up and established within the organization. Individualized training plans are created for employees, which serve as a basis for tracking development and can be used by HR managers to jointly define development goals.
How can applicants be attracted to the IT organization?
In addition to the development of the existing IT workforce, it is also necessary to recruit qualified personnel. IT organizations must position themselves as attractive employers via innovative channels and events in addition to traditional channels such as job advertisements and job fairs. It is also important to understand and actively address the requirements and needs of the individual target groups. A study conducted by 4C shows that IT talent should be recruited as early as possible, for example by offering dual study positions, final theses and student trainee positions.
The key to success is that IT managers actively participate in the recruiting process and work with HR to develop suitable measures and regularly review the success of the measures taken. This proactive approach enables personnel requirements to be identified in good time, applicants to be recruited in a targeted manner, and understaffing to be reduced.
Our consulting services at a glance
We support you in developing a strategic target picture and a roadmap derived from it for the transformation of the IT workforce based on implementation-proven role and job profiles. Based on this, we work together with the contacts in IT management and HR to develop measures adapted to your organization for operationalizing the transformation roadmap, which we carry out together as an implementation-experienced partner. In addition to control-oriented, value-based project management, we place particular emphasis on ongoing change management. To this end, we support you with tried-and-tested approaches that increase employee acceptance of the changes. For more effective management, we also support you in conducting transparent benchmarking of IT personnel costs and work with you to implement defined levers for cost reduction.
Why 4C?
We advise decision-makers in the CIO area on management-related issues and are a strong partner for our customers from the conception phase through to implementation. The combination of experience, quality and implementation orientation is the basis for a successful cooperation with our customers. We measure the success of our work by the sustainability of the changes achieved.
