Subject: Developing talent in our sector: ideas and inspirations

The sector needs to offer/raise awareness on  more programmes like charity works thus setting the third sector as a career path.  

The sector needs to retain staff and to utilize people with skills than to bring external people to take up the top jobs.  It should offer shadowing to allow people to know what the job entails.  This is cost effective.

Charity Works has provided a new and exciting route into the third sector for graduates, recognising the important role that talented young people can play within the sector. It also creates a new vision for growing talent, where charities work together to develop individuals within the sector, providing "3D" career paths. Going forward Charity Works needs to think about how we further open up the third sector, looking at how talent is identified, harnessed and developed from non-graduates and those at or leaving school.   

As someone who came through the higher education system including sixth form within the last 10 years I agree with memorymasundas point about raising awareness of the Third Sector as a career path. I attended one of the UK’s original academy schools and entrepreneurism and career planning were encouraged, however the Third Sector was never presented as an option to us. Talking to secondary school careers advisers about our sector would be a great starting point, i think because the breath of the work our sector carrys out it is often very hard for a careers advisor to set out succiently what a career in our sector could entail. 

Laurie your point around better engaging students Pre University is a good one, the real challenge however lays in breaking down barriers to entry in the sector. Sector norm currently is to get a role working for a non profit organisation you have to done some volunteer work or an internship to be considered for a post.

This could mean our sector is missing out on excellent talents from less priveledged backrounds, you simply havent had the financial support to spend time on a internship little or no money. If we are able to support young talents from all backrounds in breaking into the sector we will end up with increasingly dyanmic and innovative workforce in the future.

Here are some of the discussions that I noted from our different “speed-dating” groups (so not all my views):

Issues of retention within the sector are impacting development as many people leave the sector when they are reaching their peak performance so there are fewer experienced people to learn from.  Having a senior role in many charities is overly demanding and incompatible with having a family and it is not uncommon for good people to leave the sector to get a better work-life balance.  We may be ambitious for our charities on behalf of our beneficiaries, but we all have a role to play both in planning realistically and in being aware of cultures and pressures within our organisations to make our sector a better place to work.  Retaining good, experienced staff will have a positive impact on the development of all in the sector and better for our charities in the long term.

We should try to attract experienced people from other sectors to diversify skills in the sector and support development within the sector through these different approaches.  Unless you are from a specific profession (eg Accountants) or have volunteered in a charity, working in a charity can be inaccessible or you may not be aware of the roles and opportunities.  Short conversion courses may address this – for example for sales people to Fundraising, retail managers to branch/operations managers.  Although Working for a Charity provide some placements, if you are working full-time then you can’t do them.  Other schemes such as Charity Works are targeted at graduates.  There may be benefits in schemes encouraging more experienced people in.

Personal and organisational development could also come from a greater exposure to other charities, perhaps through shadowing opportunities.  As an observer there are opportunities to reflect on personal styles and learnings for your organisation.  There is a role in facilitating shadowing “swaps” between charities – perhaps linked with brief management training to maximise the opportunity and to encourage greater sensitivity to observations to maximise the experience – but the scheme needs to be cheap enough for participants to be accessible.

There is more that we can all do to facilitate our own development and that of the people we manage and work with by ensuring that time is made for skills and knowledge sharing and keeping up to speed with sector issues and discussing them.  Teams can make skills development and skills sharing as part of team meetings and individuals can sign up to relevant new alerts to stay up to date with issues and get ideas of current practice – see http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/register/ or http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/account/ as well as joining other sector networking groups specific to the role and charity

Internal secondments/rolling roles in different departments in larger charities would be of benefit to expose people to different roles so they can make a more informed career choice based on their skills set but also develop people to have a more rounded understanding of how charities operate, even if they go on to specialise.

Here are just a few other points to add to some great ideas from everyone who have posted comments above. In our speed dating group, we talked about ensuring we retain our staff and encourage a career path for them including those who go on maternity leave. We also talked about empowering people through soft skills development (ie. becoming/being assigned a mentor/ career coach. It really is down to us to voice this through our organisations and have the willingness to share ideas of which maybe one or two may get listened to by the right people..I suppose it will be interesting for others to add who they think are the 'right' people. 

More on shadowing: I'd love to hear from those who have experience of either being shadowed or shadowing: what does it take to make it work as a learning experience?  I love the notion that we could set up exchanges in this kind of way.  We can do that without much core cost or organisation: exactly the sort of thing our sector could benefit from without too much investment.

Some great ideas have been posted!

I also think there are opportunities for us to develop in the job we currently have rather than always expecting to go on to something else to get that development or a more interesting and challenging role … something that could be even more important in today’s climate where there are likely to be fewer job opportunities available.  This could be by seeking out challenging new projects, volunteering to work with different people/teams, identifying people with skills or knowledge we don’t currently have and setting up official or unofficial mentoring partnerships at work or outside.   And if you have the opportunity to be coached, take it up!  

What can we do for ourselves?

The ideas that I logged as observer in the speed-dating session that Caroline ran included:

• make sure that we keep accessing new learning 
• look for opportunities for informal learning - they are likely to be pleasureable and may be  'left field' and may be low cost or free
• get smarter about  'exchange learning' and other wasy of developing ourselves
• help people in small charities to 'do their development for themselves'

I really hope others who I met in the session post their notes too - there were some really interesting ideas; one I remmeber is training line managers to pre-brief and de-brief staff who undertake professional development, so that the intention to a) maximise the learning and b) work out how others can  benefit is built in there right from the start.