Week 7: 12th - 18th June (Activities: 3.5 & 3.6)
In the last activity you read about the challenges faced by a team of HRD practitioners in a difficult organisational context. We now step back from this detailed, practice perspective and review the advice provided to HRD practitioners on developing a strategy.
Harrison (2009) describes the steps in what she calls a ‘textbook approach’:
- allocate responsibility for strategy development
- clarify organisational mission
- explore core organisational identity and values
- carry out SWOT (see next section) or STEEPLE analysis to identify the strategic issues facing the organisation
- agree an L&D strategy
- produce a strategic plan.
Such a textbook approach, while useful in offering an overall framework for discussion, might appear to be too simplistic to be of practical value. Mayo (2004) offers some further detail. Picking up our opening theme of strategy as choice, he identifies a number of professional ‘choices’ that will drive the development of HRD strategy. These include:
- Approach to learning: determining key principles and learning philosophy, constraints and requirements (e.g. professional and regulatory).
- Populations: who, how many, how are they differentiated (are certain groups selected for focused effort, e.g. an exclusive talent approach?).
- Methodologies and processes: detailed approaches for clarifying and assessing learning needs at both an overall strategy level and from an operational perspective – how do these fit with other HR policies and practices (such as performance management)?
- Resources and funding: the range of resources required to successfully generate the benefits arising from the selected strategy.
- Marketing and communication: how HRD will be sold to the organisation.
- Monitoring and evaluation.
A further perspective which takes a process orientation to HRD strategy development is offered by the CIPD (2014a). Situated firmly within an economic perspective, the CIPD suggests the key questions to ask are ‘how can we enable our people to help us in achieving sustainable growth, and how do we know it’s working?’ (2014a, p. 18). This report goes on to outline a data-driven approach including the three stages of framing, analysing and evaluating, as shown in Figure 3.7.
Figure 3.7 - Executive approach to human capital analytics (CIPD: 2014)
From a similar data-driven perspective but drawing on the idea of a competency framework, Clardy (2008) proposes the following process, as shown in Table 3.3:
To a greater or lesser extent, all this advice regarding the development of HRD strategy will need to be adapted and refined within the local context under consideration. These broad approaches can also be supplemented by the use of specific tools, examples of which are considered in the next section.
