Career development is a key plank in many organisations’ attraction and retention strategies. The public sector has it harder than most in this area, however Centrelink has taken definitive and positive steps to address this. David Hovenden reports
Career development is a key plank in many organisations’ attraction and retention strategies. The public sector has it harder than most in this area, however Centrelink has taken definitive and positive steps to address this. David Hovenden reports
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the cat. “I don't much care where,” said Alice. “Then it doesn't matter which way you go,” said the cat. “So long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the cat, “If you only walk long enough.”
Lewis Carrol’s famous exchange from Alice in Wonderland, where Alice meets the Chesire Cat at the divide in the road, points to a time when simply going somewhere was enough. Today, people have a far more focused approach to their careers. Employers unable to provide this level of planning are likely to miss out on the best people. With many predicting a labour shortfall as the baby boomers pass into retirement, career development plans are vital to attracting and retaining good employees.
Centrelink is a government agency delivering a range of Commonwealth services to the Australian community. The agency is a statutory authority responsible, through its board, to the Minister for Family and Community Services. It operates under the Commonwealth Services Delivery Agency Act 1997, and is overseen by CEO Sue Vardon.
Employing around 27,000 staff, Centrelink operates 1,000 service delivery outlets and the country’s second largest call centre, second only to Telstra. It has more than 30,000 desktop computers, services 6.3 million customers, pays 9 million entitlements annually, sends out 100 million letters and makes 22 million phone calls each year.
Around 16,000 staff are engaged in customer service delivery. With its 1000 outlets, the agency has around 400 physical sites that customers can access its services through.
As part of the Australian public sector (APS), Centrelink has normal role classifications, which set out articulated career paths, both within the agency and across the APS.
Centrelink is set apart from other APS organisations, however, in that it offers a career that is portable across different geographical locations, as well as the ability to move up via promotion.
“Careers within Centrelink are usually very rewarding and very long,” says David Wilden, assistant national manager workforce capability for Centrelink’s People and Corporate Performance department. “If you want to move towns, for example, there’s a very good chance that Centrelink has an office there.”
Segmentation of the workforce within Centrelink means that there are several major areas such as family, retirement or youth. Workers are able to move within these segments with the appropriate reskilling.
“Those informal constructs and the ability to provide those opportunities through our large organisation are very valuable to us.”
These opportunities are currently being translated into some fairly impressive statistics for the organisation. It averages a staff turnover rate of around six per cent overall, and less than 10 per cent within its 1800-strong IT section – an industry with very high turnover traditionally.
Wilden attributes this low IT attrition figure to the advantages that come with Centrelink’s size. Operating an extremely large mainframe computer system – the largest in the country – IT people who like this sort of work are drawn to the biggest player in the country. “We’re an employer of choice in this regard,” says Wilden.
Career pathways
One of the more innovative programs that the agency has embarked on of late is its Career Pathways initiative. Running through the various segmentations of the organisation – the business side, the customer service side, the IT side – it articulates from the entry points up to the executive, what the various career paths are and the sort of qualifications staff could seek to attain those career paths.
A part of the pathways is a map showing crossover points between the various business sectors, so that an individual in IT, for example, can see how they can get into the main business, or indeed what options are available purely within IT or other functions.
Training requirements such as diplomas, certificates, degrees or even MBAs are all clearly mapped out.
“We’ve found this to be really useful because by pursuing a process of accreditation, we’re actually reinforcing the validity of the skill-set we believe people bring. Organisation-sponsored accreditation is viewed as a reward for the skill-sets they bring.”
A registered training provider, Centrelink has its own ‘virtual college’, which is sustainable simply by the size of the organisation and the enormous amount of training it needs to deliver.
The college has an infrastructure to sustain the pathways roll out. One of the key capabilities is actually getting the tens of thousands of people through the program. The blend required is both local and national. Locally, managers look at who their priority people are, and the infrastructure is in place at the college to ensure these high potentials are able to access the training they require through the college.
Based on its national people plan (see table), the career management strategy is closely aligned to the organisation’s business strategy. It gives the HR people the ability to focus on what it needs to develop that will in turn develop the organisation’s capability.
Arresting hotspots
Constantly looking for turnover hotspots is a full-time job for Centrelink’s HR staff. So far, the one to three year employee range is showing up as one of the areas with the highest levels. Call centre employees are another hotspot, however this is typical for call centre work.
Centrelink is currently analysing how to optimise the experience for its younger employees. However the organisation is only in the investigative stages of putting measures in place to track why people leave. Rather than simply asking staff why they’re leaving as they head out the door, it’s also asking them why a few weeks later. This allows for more informed decisions to be made with regards to investment in retention strategies.
In what amounts to good news for Centrelink, early research is indicating that many of the younger staff are leaving for personal or generational reasons rather than a dislike for Centrelink. Therefore an open door policy is currently being employed for retaining people to have a career with the agency, albeit in stages.
“If people want to go travelling for a few years, for example, we’ve got an open door policy, so that they can come back and start working for us again,” says Wilden.
With such a large workforce, Centrelink is also in a fortunate position in that its age profile is around five years younger than the average for the APS. This means that the organisation is in a better position than most to handle the baby boomer retirement bulge.
Centrelink is not short on keen applicants either. Pointing to a recent example, Wilden says that a newly created role of ‘personal adviser’ required a large number of appointments across the country, and generated around 25,000 online applications.
Induction processes are also of a high quality with the agency. Again using the newly appointed personal advisers as an example, they received 13 weeks induction prior to commencing their roles.
Impressive as this length of induction is, it’s no wonder given the enormous complexity of Centrelink. Simply looking at where the agency has come from in the past 10 years, with its origins in the departments of Social Security (DSS) and Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA) is a good case in point.
Pragmatic skill development
A pragmatic approach to skill development is one of the key challenges facing any organisation. This is owing, in part, to the amount of crystal balling required to determine what skills will be valuable in the future and what current skills will be taken over by technology, for example. As with all predications, the need for flexibility is obvious.
“We’ve got a pretty good idea as to what our core competencies of the future will be and a fair idea as to what our change program will mean for our skill-sets,” says Wilden.
“A lot of those we believe we can reskill internally, because our recruitment patterns now look much more towards people who have the ability to adapt and change.”
While some things will change, others are more obvious. Centrelink is predominantly a customer service organisation and will always need people with strong customer service skills. It’s always going to need people that can work with technology to provide better customer service, and is looking to manage the careers of staff with those skills.
Similarly, it needs to look for people that embrace Centrelink’s central strategy, which is shifting from payments administrator to solutions deliverer. This requires a cultural shift, which is more attitudinal than skills based. It’s within this framework that Centrelink develops its people strategy.
As a consequence, many Centrelink staff are motivated by the desire to help people. This in itself is a career development strategy – providing a vehicle through which people can achieve their higher motivators.
“As an organisation you need to understand what the drivers are for people. A one-size-fits-all approach would fail in most organisations, but particularly not in one as big as ours. People are driven by different things. We certainly know that in the workforce that some people are driven by security, others are driven by the personal satisfaction, while others are driven by opportunities for advancement.
“In that respect, we like to think of career management in the broadest terms. It’s not just about the vertical climb, because in a normal organisation with normal control issues, there’s strong competition to get from point A through the various layers to the executive level. There’s a lot of people who aren’t interested in that.”
