Member Login
North America
Asia-Pacific
Europe
Changing regions will empty your cart. Would you like to continue?
“We needed to find external resources happy to work with us despite our isolated location. Once we approached Infohrm, we knew we had the right partner to help us face our workforce planning for the next few years.” (Manuel Da Rocha, Assistant Director, Strategic Services, People & Learning Division, DET)
The Northern Territory is not just large geographically; it is also very diverse in terms of population and complex in relation to workforce issues. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (July 2008), the Northern Territory has 217,600 people in an area of 1,349,129 square kilometres.
Today, the Northern Territory Department of Education and Training (DET) manages a network of 184 schools and homeland centres, 42,670 student enrolments, and 2,470 teachers. One hundred schools and homeland centres have less than 50 students while 75 schools and homeland centres are located more than 100 kilometres from a city.
In 2007 DET began planning for the development and implementation of a comprehensive workforce analysis and planning project. The project was driven by the recognition of a range of emerging issues that would impact the department’s future resourcing.
These included a shortage of skilled teachers, an ageing workforce particularly at senior levels, and the changing nature of professional learning and continuous improvements shown in national and international teaching circles.
Paramount, however, was the increased resourcing required for schools in response to government recommendations including those set out in the “Little Children Are Sacred Report”, the Northern Territory Government Intergenerational Plan, and the Commonwealth Intervention.
The plans aim to increase the number of students at schools in remote areas to assist with the improvement of Indigenous access to education. 50 per cent of students in the Northern Territory are currently in regional and remote areas while the percentage of Indigenous students in remote areas is 80 per cent. To meet planning targets, an additional 226 teachers need to be recruited over the next five years. Not an easy task in a profession already scrambling for scarce talent in every state and territory throughout Australia.
DET recognised that all these issues were rapidly emerging and impacting the departmental workforce planning and resourcing and needed to be addressed.
“Planning is a rigorous process and requires the need to go beyond gut instinct and intuition to plan our future workforce,” says Manuel Da Rocha, Assistant Director, Strategic Services, People & Learning Division, DET.
DET decided on a two phased approach, incorporating analysis and then planning, in response to the issues facing the organisation.
Da Rocha explains, “A two phased approach would ensure that we could build in adequate time and consideration and take stock of where we were up to in our planning based on an analysis and evidence based approach. In other words, by finding out the facts on the ground first up we could then move ahead based on what the data was telling us”.
At this time DET recognised it would need further capability and capacity if it was to deliver the objectives of its Workforce Analysis and Workforce Planning project within the required timeframe. In addition to recruiting a locally-based consultant with public and private sector HR management experience, DET deployed the services of The Infohrm Group (Infohrm) following an extensive tender process.
DET recognised the commitment and enthusiasm of its HR generalist and business managers. However, to ensure a robust workforce planning framework was adopted and hit the mark, it required the assistance of specialists with qualifications in human capital metrics and analytics.
“We needed an external expert on workforce analysis and planning with extensive research capability and a recognised industry methodology to ensure we could focus on best practice in workforce analysis and planning and confidently identify future trends. Infohrm met this criteria and we liked their approach to working as a partner rather than a vendor.
“At the same time we needed to find external resources happy to work with us despite our isolated location. Once we approached Infohrm, we knew we had the right partner to help us face our workforce planning for the next few years,” says Da Rocha.
Infohrm and DET worked together from the outset to set the ground rules for the relationship including decisions on ownership on different aspects of the project, how the process and outputs would be branded, the level of resourcing required, and how disputes could be resolved.
“Being in Brisbane, confidence in maintaining a strong working relationship despite our disparate locations, was paramount to working with Infohrm in the first place,” says Da Rocha.
At the outset, DET worked with Infohrm to conduct a three month comprehensive workforce analysis exercise which reviewed external market factors affecting the attraction, selection, and retention of key education staff. This resulted in the identification of key job roles that DET needed to address in order to have a workforce capable of sustaining the department moving forward.
The process also resulted in a whole-of-organisation risks and implications analysis incorporating workforce profile and supply analysis and an external labour market analysis. The plan did not try to address all workforce planning issues although there was recognition that addressing the key job roles could have flow on benefits to a range of other positions.
Following internal consultation and stakeholder consultation, the outcomes of this first phase of activity were used to assist in the design of a department wide Workforce Plan for 2009-2013. The Workforce Plan set out to address these key job roles and included key themes and supporting objectives to underpin the effective selection, retention, and ongoing development of DET staff.
The draft Workforce Plan also included feedback from individual and group discussion with built in time to reflect how key themes and strategies would address government and organisational objectives for the education arena efficiently and effectively.
Moving towards an evidence based model required quality data. While the project team had anticipated a range of data challenges the data audit also provided the opportunity to identify the extent of its data gap.
Multiple sources and owners of data, privacy issues, data security, consistency and definitions, individual interpretation, manual extraction and mapping provided DET with its fair share of challenges in the deployment of effective workforce planning.
“At the outset of the plan, we identified up to five sources of data but then we found that we had to go to 12 different sources of information which had different ownership and privacy issues. We were beset with issues such as a diverse range of data definitions at both the local and national level.
“For example, if you only have one teacher at a remote school and the teacher leaves that school, you have 100 per cent staff turnover which then impacts the overall data that you are trying to assess. As a result, we had to find a way of presenting the information in a way which was relevant to the unit level, accessible and accurate.
“In some ways, our workforce and analysis project was both easier yet at the same time harder than expected. There were many data integrity challenges and although a number were anticipated it was surprising at times how difficult it was to overcome them. In some cases, our analysis had to be interpreted with awareness of these limitations in mind,” says Da Rocha.
In addition, DET discovered that by being focused on workforce planning rather than the broader issue of strategic planning ensured the achievement of effective results within a limited timeframe.
“As we were working within a limited timeframe we needed to ensure our consultations on the workforce plan included outlining the relevant people to approach, a methodology for consolidating the feedback that did not detract from the project objective, and a focus on the results of the workforce analysis phase,” says Da Rocha.
Another key learning was the need to invest time to reflect on the project. “We needed to make time for critical reflections and not just be output driven, particularly at key points when draft materials were developed and consultation was sought,” says Da Rocha.
DET realised that even with the additional help of Infohrm it needed to do a few things well instead of a lot of things poorly.
“Some aspects of the data were not going to provide a robust analysis without considerable work while we could not consult with everyone on everything, as much as we would have liked to on some aspects of the analysis and plan,” says Rocha.
With the draft workforce plan prepared and the success of the past year behind it, DET is now documenting in detail the strategies and activities that will be used to address the workforce plan themes and supporting objectives. It will also identify priorities for their implementation and incorporate this information into a detailed implementation plan. DET hopes that many of the initiatives identified can be commenced as soon as possible.
Importantly, the project team has had to continue to incorporate key government and environmental imperatives and to demonstrate how these are being addressed as they emerge as either a further driver or are recognised as increasing in importance.
“With Infohrm, we’re able to put the egos on hold and work in partnership with an organisation which understands the urgency of our situation and is able to share information openly and with mutual respect. At the end of the day though it is all about putting teachers on the ground and meeting the needs of all our community,” says Da Rocha.