Transforming the future workforce

Cheers, Johnny. Thank you very much. So, yeah, thank you for having me on the stage. So I'm going in. So I head up workforce planning, strategy and analytics for Transport for New South Wales. I'm going to be talking about a particular project that we have, but I'll just go through a little bit of background. I don't go far back. As Johnny just mentioned, I started in recruitment in 2001. I IPO'd my first recruitment agency in 2005. I then MBO'd our second agency in 2007, at which point the VC that backed that buyout said, no more agencies for you and my partners at the time. And then I went internal. I did international TA internal. Two big projects that I had before. The one that I'm on 53 country implementation with Orica and a 44 country implementation with Amcor, which leads me on to then 2016. I started with Transport for New South Wales, a $75 billion project. We don't necessarily staff that internally all ourselves. We do issue contracts out to the likes of John Holland, a Bechtel mtr. So when we looked at the tunnelling project in Sydney, we had to go under the harbour, which was in itself a major component of the $3 billion project that John Holland had. But soon as we issued that contract, they came back and said, chris, we have a perfect problem storm. And I was like, what? So we had a talent shortage. We also had bad conditions and they just couldn't fit within the staffing budget that we provided for them. So I was like, okay, I need to get to know this a little bit more. So I started creating a team. Anyone heard of the concept of a tiger team? Tiger team. So what we do, I do a lot of. So we inputted HBDI profiling into all of our workforce throughout Transport for New South Wales. So we would then create a team of, say, an architect. We would also get an accountant in there. We'd also bring along the students and obviously the project managers, just for diversity of thought. The reason I don't just bring talent acquisition or HR or learning and development into a room, because if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got. So these give different perspectives on problems for us outside of what we normally think. So what are the conditions? That was the first thing that we needed to understand. They came and said, no, we can't do this because of the conditions. So that was driving up the cost and the reason for that. So under Sydney Harbour, I don't know if anyone scuba dives. But we're digging at four Bar. Okay? So when you come back to the surface after digging at four Bar, it takes you a week to actually inoculise back to. To how we are today. So I was like, okay, so we've got a problem. And this was creating that we had 350 members of staff just purely for the harbour part of the project. I was like, wow, that's amazing. However, why can't we, instead of doing that, why can't we put a caravan in the middle of Sydney Harbour? We can pressurize it so they can stay down there longer than. So instead of just being two weeks, they can be four weeks and then they can have four weeks on, four weeks off. Kind of funny, everyone. And the beauty of having a diverse workforce thinking is not many people laugh. Apart from the TA people that I had in the room, they laughed. But the guy from MTR came back with something that looked like this. And he came to me a week later and said, chris, I think I've got the perfect solution. So it's not your caravan, but it is a cube, right? I was like, okay. He said, we can definitely pressurize it to four Bar. They can live in there. We'll have a little pod that goes from the cube into the back of the tunnel boring machine. And we can have two teams and they can go for four weeks longer if needed. I was like, excellent. Okay, so we've got. We're solving a problem there, right? So I was like, okay, that's fine. But what's the talent problem? So massive shortage, right? So when we issue our contracts, in our contracts, our contractors can't take off transport. So when it came about that we needed project engineers, John Holland said and came back with a statistic that we own 86% of all project engineers in New South Wales. I was like, okay, so what's going to be the solution? John Holland, massive international business came up with the initial solution of we'll go offshore. We'll go and get them from Crossrail, we'll go and get them from Hong Kong. So we started putting that together. I was like, I don't know. You know, I think that doesn't sound right. And it's expensive. We're in Australia, we've got to pay for a visa, we've got to pay for relocation. I just don't think that's right. But I don't think we have a talent shortage. And they're like, we do. I was like, no, because I understand now we did digging at Four Bar, which means there's a whole heap of people in Sydney at this moment in time that are jobless and they're scuba divers. I was like, we can retrain these to be project engineers and they're here and they'll be cheaper than actually paying for project engineers. These guys work literally for a few hundred bucks a day and I'm paying a few thousand dollars a day for project engineers. So we kind of solved that. We were like, okay, that's fine, not a problem. This is what we can do. So then we started doing what we've classed now as enterprise thinking, where we take design thinking, systems mapping, disruptive thinking, human centered design, and I've now created enterprise thinking for transport. And what does that mean? So thinking out the square, we have now inputted a technology stack to help everyone along their journey. Because once we knew that we could have scuba divers to become project engineers, we started thinking, can we do it with other skill sets within our organization? So we've built a whole tech stack around wellness, because obviously what we do we have to leave by safety. So we've built a whole tech stack to help them learn and supplement some of the skills that they don't necessarily have. And we do that on a 70, 20, 10 split. So 70% is on the job learning, 20% is learning from a mentor, and then 10% is actual physical learning that will take you up to the next level. So what does that mean? So also what it did was allowed us to diverse our workforce. There's a hell of a lot more female divers than there is female project engineers that want to work in a tunnel and they want to work right. So it was easy for us to attract a diverse workforce. We didn't have to stick to the norm. So it enabled us to do a diverse workforce and it enabled us to where we were at at the time. A 750 million dollar budget for staffing. We brought it down to 372 million dollars. Absolutely unbelievable. Saving that we get. And now John Hollander are taking this around the world. So what does that mean? As I said, we're now looking outside of what we can do. So we're looking at blending roles throughout our organization. When I'd got engineers into the room on the Tiger team, could an engineer be an L and D person? I don't know. You kind of look at what they do. Data analytics, product testing. These are really looking at a different way for us to learn as an organization. Instead of the normal L and D model that we've got. And also like HR data scientists, we need to do use our data points that HR don't necessarily pick up. I know that they do, but they don't use it in a way that we want to use it. As we diverse our workforce. So we're kind of blending all these roles as we're moving through to go, are we the same? Are we different? How does that transform? And this is at the beginning stage, at the moment where we're looking at cross training, cross functional across the whole organization just to see if we can diverse. Just thinking out the square a little bit more than what we have done recently. That is, I think that is me for what I've done. I'd like to see if there is any Q and A that you'd like to do around what we put in. If there's anything that you can think of if you're from a different organization, technology, would this kind of work? I don't know. No. Cool. Yeah. How did you manage to train the divers to become project engineer? So it all goes back to our learning platform that we've got. So they don't need to necessarily be. So you've got different grades of project engineers in what we do. We only needed them to be a grade two. So what we were buying in before was grade four because they needed to know all the electrical. So we would split the workforce 5050 so that they can pick up the lower level parts of the tasks and then the senior engineers will take on the technical parts. But through that journey of the next three years, hopefully they can go to a level three and then hopefully to a level four if they want to. It's all around what they want to. I love the way you were thinking creatively around how you can either transfer skills or think about people that can do other work. If you had any tips for us in any industry about where to start, really, if you've got a skill shortage, what would you suggest? So I would really suggest depending on what industry you're in. So say technology, you're in technology. So if you're looking for Java developers, what I would probably go back to the business and say, is it full on Java stack that they need? Might be. And really get to know is there any different technologies that can supplement that? Right. I don't particularly know. I've been in infrastructure for a while. But these technical gurus might think, well yeah, we've built everything on a Java stack before but PHP might be better and just make them think. Yeah, exactly. Challenge them, see if they is the right product? It might not be. I know Atlassian changed their tech stack a few times over the course of the time that they've been going. So does it work? Is it right? I don't know, maybe just challenge that way. So how did you decide or how did you figure out which roles to kind of put together and say, hey, this. This type of engineer could be this type of analyst or whatever. How did you break those down into tiny little chunks to see what was comparable? So we looked at what we wanted out of these roles. So the two that I just put up there. So learning, obviously, if we're going to take a scuba diver to become a project engineer, we need a different way of thinking because if we have an L and D person, they're just going to have a roadmap for learning for a project engineer. Right. We need them to diversify the way that they're thinking to train these people. So we were just like, okay, so we just need a diversity of thought and those two are the ones that we've thought about to start off with, mainly because we need data points on are we still keeping on track? Is everything right? And as we go through and I was just picking and choosing just different roles, like I said, I don't actually know if they're going to fully work out yet. Hopefully they will. But, yeah, that was how we just broke it down to take normal thinking of what you've got in HR and make it a little bit different to the outcome that we needed and that outcome. What's the gap? What kind of skills is that? So that's how we thought about it. It's a really innovative project, which is great. What kind of performance and metrics have you seen from the people that you've brought in? Have you had to go the extra mile with them to keep focusing, keep retention, that kind of thing? Yeah, definitely. I think the focus part has worked really well because it's a lot different to what they've been doing. Right. So it's really interesting for them to get right into the electrical or the mechanical or the comms part. So they're doing something different. So they are focused on learning. And that's why we then built out the LMS part of this tech stack, because they were really engaged and we've been able to really play with the tech stack that we've built up and go, you know, normally a project engineer might not like gamification, but these scuba divers go, oh, this is awesome. And they get really engaged and that might not work. With everyone. But it has helped their diverse of thought, has helped us in the way that we're now training people as we go through. So, yeah, it's been really interesting and fun to do.

Can I ask you, Chris, did you take all the population of scuba divers that were available? Like imagining the volumes are quite high in terms of the many people you hired. What did that look like in the first year, for example?

So in the first, yeah, we literally scooped up a whole heap of them. But not just in New South Wales. There was obviously Queensland that we flew them down from. Not so much in Melbourne, Perth as well. And then also with the mines because we've had a deterioration in mining over in Western Australia. So it was kind of a lot of different thoughts and what these. Yeah, so it's. We definitely, I would have said taken a good 70% of all these divers that were there that we knew of. Right. I mean, you can't find all of these people because they're not usually on social and this, that the other. But a lot of them are because they love taking photos of what they're doing. But yeah, we looked at the outreach that we had. I think we got about 70% interested and then put them through the test. Probably we converted about 62% of that. I know that was pretty specific because it was a Pacific, but yeah, so, yeah, we took a whole heap of them for sure.

Have you heard of other examples where this has been done with different professions? Since you started talking about it and sharing about it, have you come across other stories in other organizations where they've taken that same approach to retrain a completely different skill set into this kind of a scaled operation?

So that's kind of. So when I first started telling this story, when we did it, beginning of the year, a lot of people have come in and I'm now going to be consulting with Melbourne Metro. I'm now going to be consulting up in Brisbane. So people are adopting this thought and trying to think differently because we live in Australia, there's not much talent out there. So yeah, it's slowly, slowly. I just think the more I push it out there and we've got to think differently. I hope it does get adopted because I think it's a great concept.

That's brilliant. Chris, thank you very much for your time and sharing your story.

Thank you.