How do I ask my employer to provide all-round skills?

I used to work for a company that trains it’s employees to work in any section of the company. An accountant for instance can do HR or reception work. How do I encourage my employer to provide all-round skills training to employees? Christine

Dear Christine,
The experience you are referring to is a regular practice by many multinational corporations. It is how they onboard and develop potential talent ordinarily referred to as management or graduate trainees.

The graduate trainees are recruited not on the basis of their first degrees, but for the potential for performance that the recruiters have identified. They go through a rigorous resourcing process which sometimes would include assessment centres.

The assessment centres create as real as possible a workplace scenario or situation and then the candidates’ responses to the stimuli are assessed and scored by the trained assessors. The selected candidates are then appointed and begin their rotation or attachment to the different departments of the organisation.

They are assigned to senior staff who oversee their tutelage and, the period they spend in each department and what they are exposed to, is carefully planned. Multinationals take it a step further by exposing the trainees to the different countries where they have a footprint.

After rotation, the trainees would then be assigned where they best fit. Such development and exposure is intended to create the talent pool for selection of managers, Heads of Departments and even CEOs of their business units.

However, some organisations have tried to ape the above process and ended up by simply assigning people into different roles without proper assessment and a plan to manage the outcomes. Moving talent around without managing the process is always a recipe for disaster.

Moses Ssesanga
Head Human Resource
NMG - Uganda
[email protected]