Filling Your Bench to Close the Skills Gap

By Alberto Violland, Global Senior Director, ClearPath Forward Services, Unisys

We understand the situation: As more and more of the team members you’ve trusted for years to manage every aspect of your ClearPath Forward® environment approach retirement, the pressure is mounting to identify and integrate skilled replacements capable of helping the business prosper for years to come.

That’s why, in 2018, we ran an article detailing the succession planning strategies your organization can utilize to reduce the strain retirements place on your operations, while making it easier to locate, hire, and onboard qualified replacements.

As part this overarching framework, we’re introducing a program designed to help you build a bench of skilled, qualified, well-trained staff you can draw from as your needs dictate. And just like the succession plans we detailed previously, this program is modeled after and informed by real-world challenges we successfully addressed within Unisys years ago.

When demographic shifts started impacting our engineering team, we quickly learned that it’s impractical to expect a new hire – no matter the qualifications – to immediately and effectively replace decades of experience and expertise. Rather, it takes a structured, formal process to build knowledge and familiarity: one that increases proficiency over time, takes full advantage of mentoring, and adds responsibility only after it’s been proven the individual possesses the appropriate skills.

Following this approach paid immense dividends in our engineering department. So much so, in fact, that we recently utilized it to great success within our Product Services & Support team.

And now, it’s your turn.

With our all-new Apprentice Program, you’ll be able to supplement the skills you have on hand today – and effectively replace any that may be departing in the future – with carefully vetted, expertly trained resources who understand the ClearPath Forward environment and how it’s utilized within your organization.

The Apprentice Program achieves this goal by following a formal, yet completely customizable, four-step process: Recruit, Train, Shadow, Deploy.

Here’s how the program takes shape.

Recruit

We start, naturally, by recruiting candidates on your behalf. The first step is to understand the level of skills you’re looking to replace – simple administrative roles or something deeper and more technical – if these individuals will be working onsite or off, and the timeframe you need them in place.

Using these requirements as a guide, we’ll start building a pool of candidates. We’ll look for a set of baseline qualifications across a combination of new graduates and professionals with experience in high-end enterprise server software and the related products, tools, and interfaces. We recruit on a global scale, and will happily work with partners to locate the resources that best fit your needs.

Train

Next comes the training. Though we make sure to tie training to the profile you recruited towards in the previous phase, every new resource goes through a combination of baseline foundational training and targeted specialized training. The foundational training focuses on teaching new resources the basics of the ClearPath Forward environment, while the specialized training goes deeper into the specific skills these individuals will need to serve as proficient extensions of your team.

So if you’re looking to fill simple administrator or operator roles, the training will favor foundational knowledge over more specialized matters. If the role will include detailed technical responsibilities, we’ll build an intensive program that includes substantial foundational and specialized training. And as the ClearPath Forward environment evolves, we’ll make sure our trainings keep pace, so you’re never struggling to fill gaps or stuck playing catchup.

Shadow

After the training completes, we’ll pair your new resources with an internal mentor who they’ll shadow for a pre-determined period of time. While the shadowing can be purely observational or a bit more active and involved, the goal is the same. We want to supplement and extend the concepts covered during the training with some real-world, on-the-job applications.

Knowledge capture is important here, too. After all, these resources may very well have to take over for their mentors, so formally capturing and documenting the insights residing in their heads will help any eventual turnover feel much more manageable. And with periodic reviews throughout this phase, you’ll be able to monitor progress toward key goals and objectives.

Deploy

The shadowing phase ends with a formal certification that confirms your new resources are ready to work within your ClearPath Forward environment. With this certification in hand, we’ll deploy them when and where needed, often as part of a team made up of other ClearPath Forward experts and Apprentice Program participants. We’ll emphasize knowledge capture throughout this phase, as well, so your new resources continue building their expertise after the training and shadowing phases.

And you’ll be able to execute annual checkpoint reviews to make sure these resources continue to meet your expectations while providing lasting value to your team.

Partnering to Drive Sustained Success

While the aim of the Apprentice Program is to provide you with a reliable pipeline of skilled resources, our goal is for it to feel like a true partnership every step of the way. That’s why we prioritize understanding your requirements at the outset of the engagement, and as it progresses from phase to phase.

This way, you’ll know we’re just as invested as you in making sure these resources are chosen, trained, and made available in a manner that matches your business needs, demographic considerations, and deployment timeline.

If you’re eager to learn more about the Apprentice Program, or want to launch it within your organization, please contact your Unisys sales representative or email Alberto.Violland@br.unisys.com.