Andy Hamilton is a Training and Development Manager as well as a seasoned Retail Specialist with over 15 years’ experience working at Vodafone NZ and more recently Vodafone Retail New Zealand. His main focus for his career has been on building a learning and development culture to help people grow within the business.
Before Andy reached out to Skills Base, skills and competencies were generally managed in a manual, spreadsheet orientated way. This caused training to be slower with limited visibility into the competency of his team. Career development was also open to individual bias and subjectivity where HR didn’t have an understanding of who was ready to be upskilled next and so some employees would often slip through the cracks.
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Implementing a cloud-based skills management system
By implementing Skills Base, Andy and his team have been able to move away from Excel and pen and paper to a centralized skills management system. Having this in place enables a holistic view of the organization that anyone can access. Everyone from the CEO down can log in at any time and view the performance of an individual employee, team, role or store location.
Having this greater view of the skills and competencies of each individual also allows any new employee or existing team member looking to upskill or reskill to be trained a lot faster. This means Andy is now able to get the highest performers into the right roles quickly and at the same time get the most out of his team.
Not only does this enable far more targeted and efficient career development, the organization can move away from the traditional vertical career development process. Staff can select roles they’re interested in and can progress towards them horizontally and diagonally, giving them a lot more freedom and control over their career development.
At a planning level Andy can now also take advantage of the Skills Matrix to easily spot the skills gaps and opportunities. For instance he can now immediately see areas in need of development for specific store locations and can get his sales coaches to review the skills matrix to identify employee skill gaps before they visit a store.
How has Andy and Vodafone Retail NZ benefited from Skills base?
When Andy and his team hires someone into the business, from day one they get inducted into Skills Base and are given the skills they need to work through. By doing this they can get staff ready and productive sooner, and have been able to reduce the initial training from 6 months down to 3 months.
Skills Base also provides a source of truth that anyone can access and focus on. Meaning everyone has ownership and can be self directed in their learning and development outcomes which can be now done in a more effective and accelerated way.
How did Andy get started with Skills Base?
When seeking a skills management system Andy had a clear goal. He knew the ideal platform would have to be flexible enough to accommodate Vodafone Retail NZ’s existing data structure, including mapping skills, roles, teams and locations. The platform would also need to be able to update this data constantly as a part of the new team members’ onboarding process.
As Andy began evaluating Skills Base he took advantage of a free trial account where he spent time to initially test and play around with its core features. This gave him the ability to get his head around the platform quickly and was able to see the benefits and how it could be utilized.
By working closely with our customer success team he was then able to ensure that Skills Base would be a good fit for Vodafone Retail NZ. He was also able to learn from us about some skills management best practices that we’ve picked up over the last few years.
Kudos to Andy for innovating and looking to better support his team around their learning and development goals and build a culture that Vodafone Retail NZ can be proud of.
