Jean Clendinning, Head of Organisational Development at WSP works with the Learning & Development team to facilitate professional development at every level, and make sure that WSP's people will have the skills they need to succeed. She shares how a clearer and more transparent conception of skills could change how we view careers and professional development.

What motivates you in your career, and what drove you to be in this field/ role? 

I was driven to work in Organisational Development because I wanted to make a difference and give back. Being able to contribute to an employee’s development and ultimately their career allows me to do this. My motivation comes from my team, and from keeping abreast and ahead of changes in the industry. Working with a collaborative and fun group of people who think outside of the box to deliver the best client outcomes is exciting, and we are always looking for ways to innovate and improve.

What is something you would like to see change in your industry?

It would be great to create a commonly understood and agreed upon language surrounding skills, as this would allow roles to be filled based on the required skills, rather than prior experience in that specific role. This kind of system would have to involve an analysis of skills, a pure definition of what a skill is, a method of identifying recognised skills, consistent assessment of skills, and the collation of skills assigned to roles and positions, but this would allow us to all speak the same language and help to ensure we have the right people available at the right time.

I’d also like to see the industry generally be more focused on the professional development of all learning & development consultants to agreed competency and skill levels, and thus consultants would be able to provide more relevant development at varying career levels. We also have a lot to offer in the ‘change management’ space, and I’d like to see this function embedded into the learning & development capacity, rather than being a separate role.

How would this change impact people or society? 

Having that skills framework would assist people to identify the skills they require for the roles and career paths that meet their strengths, passion and sense of purpose. This will help them seek the correct development opportunities, apply for the right roles, and join organisations that are clear in their expectations of employees and what they have to offer. This ultimately should have a good impact on an individual’s Mental Health and Wellbeing.

Having defined skills and roles helps our business to be Future Ready. Unless we clearly can articulate the skills we need for our engineers, scientists, analysts, and every other role today, tomorrow and thereafter we cannot adequately have a skilled and available workforce. This means we need to have a common language around what a skill is, its proficiency level; know the appropriate adjacent skills to the main skills and map them. Then we need to identify who and to what proficiency level they exist in our business coupled with the experience of our people. This enables us to view the gaps across the organisation and not just by individual business group so that Skills Succession Planning can be undertaken. From this Workforce Planning can focus on skills and not roles or positions and broaden the methodology to focus on upskilling, reskilling, and new skilling.

What are some of the barriers to this change, and how are you/your team working around them? 

The language used around skills can be unclear, for example the word skill could mean capability or competency, and these are actually different things. Making people aware of the skills available across all off WSP, rather than just in one area of the business can also be tricky. In our work we are trying to educate and embed these changes and remove some of the barriers, but it needs to start at a technical level. This is where we can help, support and provide tools for our technical professionals to find the right skills and people to carry out each role.