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Career Development
You said: ISD needs to create more opportunities for learning and development to promote growth through well thought processes.
We were doing: Training and development opportunities were at times ad-hoc and variably taken up across the division without a foundational ISD wide initiative and process.
We did: ISD is pursuing more regular and consistent appraisals for staff which has resulted in a significant decrease in the number of overdue appraisals since the last staff survey. The direct benefit of the appraisal is to identify development and learning needs to help the appraisee identify opportunities and skills to enhance their career development. Line managers also have been encouraged to promote learning opportunities to all staff and staff have been encouraged to request learning opportunities. These include resources such as Lynda.com training and internal HR offered courses.
ISD has been promoting cross-functional assignments, secondments or shadowing to expand the skillsets of staff. There are now more opportunities for staff to move to different roles within the department to learn new skills and to promote the mobility of staff.
Staff have the opportunity to participate in working groups. There are always a number of initiatives around ISD at any one time where staff have the opportunity to register their interest in specific groups or topics. This provides greater strategic exposure when rolling out initiatives on a wide scale as well as the opportunity to work with people in other ISD functions. Examples of existing working groups include SLMS strategy implementation focus groups where staff directly participate in the formation of the implementation plan for their chosen theme.
ISD colleagues who have taken part in Hi5
ISD is in the initial phase of rolling out an internally developed staff development approach called Hi5. The objective is to provide ring-fenced time for staff to develop their skills or pursue self-directed initiatives to improve IT services at UCL. The approach provides protected time for staff to focus on development, innovation and career progression.
Where are we now? ISD has achieved significant progress to have more current and regular appraisals. ISD is also actively promoting its internal “training and development” offering through enhanced communication to staff. Examples include the ISD intranet, ISD newsletter, Group Manager Meetings, all staff meetings, regular team meetings and ‘brownbag’ sessions.
What we plan to do next: We plan to pilot the Hi5 initiative within ISD with the ambition of having a full buy-in from the rest of the teams at a later stage. In addition, the aim is to translate the efforts put into enhancing skillsets and training to create acting up opportunities and internal promotions.