Preparing Former Staff to be Future Ready at Vodafone
Vodafone NZ provides New Zealand customers and businesses with a world-class mobile, broadband, landline and TV network. At the fore-front of telecommunications in the New Zealand market-place, internal reorganisations are inevitable.
Disruption will always occur, particularly in large-scale businesses, but Vodafone NZ wondered how it could take an ethical approach to redundancy. With the help of Radically through the Future Ready programme, Vodafone NZ was able to offer staff displaced by internal structural changes a pathway to in-demand roles and industries.
Challenge
How might we re-skill staff who are displaced by company restructure into rewarding and relevant job opportunities?
Results
- Agile and Digital capabilities – All candidates gained foundational digital and Agile knowledge, leaving with ICP accreditation.
- Certified professionals – Over 70% of candidates passed PSM1 exam.
- Real-life experience – Candidates gained real-world experience during a three-week placement
Approach
At the beginning of 2019, Vodafone NZ had some tough calls to make. As a consequence of necessary cost reduction measures, a number of Vodafone staff needed to transition to new roles, with a portion of those staff moving on. Rather than offering traditional redundancies, Vodafone wanted to invest in helping impacted staff upskill in order to improve their chances of transitioning into new employment outside of Vodafone.
Luckily for Vodafone, they had already been in partnership with Radically for their Agile Transformation for some time, and the two companies sought to answer the question:
“How might we create a new & innovative approach to transitioning staff impacted by structural changes, into new, in-demand digital careers?”
Building digital and agile capabilities
From this question, a new programme run by Radically was born – Future Ready. The programme was an intensive 6 weeks of training, coaching, and testing, in order to push candidates to excel and familiarise themselves with change. The candidates were provided with digital and agile foundation workshops, a two day Professional Scrum Master course, a three-week practicum on-site to use their new skills, and of course outplacement support. Through attendance and active participation, every candidate of the programme received the ICAgile Agile Fundamentals certification. Candidates could also attempt the PSM1 certification offered by Scrum.org, as a result of the two-day course. Radically were proud to have the majority of candidates pass and become certified Scrum Masters under our coaching.
The outcomes of the programme were win-win-win
For Vodafone, they were able to hold true to their philosophy of “no-one gets left behind”, by increasing the knowledge and employability of Transitioners through new, relevant qualifications and strong outplacement support, as well as contributing to NZ corporations by adding to the pool of employable candidates available.
The programme also addressed a much wider issue – organisations are struggling to find coaches, facilitators, and Scrum Masters that fit their teams and bring the right skillset. The companies that partnered with the programme by hosting candidates for the 3-week internship portion, were able to assess if they would fit their current culture, at no cost to their company. Radically had built the foundational skills within the candidates, and it was up to the host company to discern the cultural fit.
At the end of the 6 weeks, Radically, through the Future Ready programme, had trained a new generation of Scrum Masters and launched them into an in-demand career with all the skills they needed to hit the ground running.
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