Today’s global marketplace is dynamic and extremely competitive, which puts new and different pressures on companies to remain relevant to their clients.
Twenty-first century clients expect and demand rapid response to their needs, and “good enough” service is just no longer acceptable. Solutions and services must be of the highest quality, and in order to keep current clients and attract new ones, organizations must aim to exceed client expectations.
While it is extremely important for global companies such as IBM to be attentive to the fluid needs of the marketplace, it is just as important to invest in having a portfolio of enduring skills and expertise within the company to satisfy the needs of clients regardless of where they might be located.
In fact, Thomas J. Watson, Jr. made it clear that vision, innovation, and inspiration are necessary to build an enduring company that will remain successful despite market changes and competition. In 1960 he stated, “Service has always been a hallmark of our company, and looking at the years ahead, I think that the margin between our success and failure will be measured more and more in terms of the service we provide. I am speaking not only of the service we agree to provide by contract but also of that quality of urgency expressed by people who desire to do a little more than is expected.” A company must make the investment to help its people acquire the necessary skills to deliver solutions that exceed expectations. IBM has a longstanding history of developing its people, not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because of the business imperative to do so.
IBM has reinvented itself periodically, based on extensive marketplace analysis and projections. In order for IBM—or any company for that matter—to compete and win in the marketplace, it must be proactive in restructuring and redesigning the way business is conducted. As companies conduct forecasting of business trends it is important to also engage in skills, competencies, and capabilities forecasting. The development of a plan to provide an end-to-end learning process is also critical and will enable employees to build multidisciplinary skills essential to the business.
While the twenty-first century presents a new set of business challenges, it also presents opportunities that are steadily unfolding over time. Employees who are fully engaged and share in this excitement are poised to continuously learn, refresh, and enhance their skills portfolios.
As a high-performing and globally-integrated enterprise, IBM has created a culture of continuous learning in which employees are given the encouragement and appropriate tools to share knowledge with their colleagues across business units, geography and culture. In order to achieve this level of collaboration, geographic and business unit lines of demarcation must be removed, as they serve only to create barriers and impede the easy flow of information and knowledge sharing.
IBM’s learning strategy articulates that “The globally-integrated enterprise will require fundamentally different approaches to production, distribution, and workforce deployment. The single most important challenge in shifting to globally-integrated enterprises, and the consideration driving most business decisions today, will be securing a supply of high-value skills across the world. Our people are a critical factor to achieving long-term profitable growth. Supporting our learning strategy is an investment in the future of IBM. The learning function’s role is to help our company learn, adopt, adapt and grow.” IBM has invested time and dollars in identifying disparate, disjointed, redundant and low-value processes across the globe. The goal of this investment is to simplify, consolidate, and reuse best practices in a purposeful manner across the globe. This approach also includes the way we deliver learning and train employees to enhance current skills and acquire new ones, enabling the company to focus on the demands of the marketplace by providing the right skills in the right place at the right time. This is why it is important that employees be fully engaged to build their knowledge base and skills. Furthermore, as employees grow capabilities over time, they should be held accountable for passing on this knowledge to anyone, anywhere in the business. As individual capabilities are built, organizational capabilities are strengthened. Once this occurs, the organization becomes adaptable to changes created by the marketplace.
An adaptive workforce is characterized by the skills and expertise levels that exist within the organization. Because of this, the enterprise is always in a mode of readiness to respond swiftly to the needs of its global clients. A by-product of a globally-integrated enterprise is that the leaders of the organization know who has the skills and where they exist, and they are in a position to unleash these skills to address global marketplace problems or to deliver solutions and services at a moment’s notice.
Agile Career Development: Lessons and Approaches from IBM is a timely book that is pertinent to any organization because it addresses a variety of topics that many companies are grappling with today. The core elements of the book illustrate in a practical manner the remaking of IBM’s career development processes to attract, retain, and engage employees through learning and development supported by a common, enterprise-wide career framework. The authors show how IBM developed a one-stop approach to career development tools and resources and in the process empower employees to use these resources to assess their skills gaps and develop learning plans to close the gaps.
Overall, IBM’s investment in career development is about workforce effectiveness and optimization, where expertise is a cornerstone that drives employee performance as well as organization performance. As IBM develops its Human Capital capabilities, it stands to reap dividends by providing ever-increasing shareholder value and success in the marketplace.
—Ted Hoff, Vice President, IBM Center for Learning and Development