As the University's Secondment Initiative nears the end of its second year, Becky Allen explores its positive impact.
Secondments cause a daisy chain effect... so we want to encourage departments to use these positions to generate more secondment opportunities.
Miranda Carr, of HR Division's Personal and Professional Developments team.
Two years ago, Cambridge Judge Business School (CJBS) HR Adviser Laura Whitehead took up a nine-month secondment in the HR Division’s Equality and Diversity team. After working at CJBS for six years she was keen to develop new skills and broaden her HR experience.
“The secondment appealed to me for lots of reasons,” she says. “It was an opportunity to develop skills I’d identified through the Career Pathways process; it was a chance to gain experience in a different part of HR, a niche specialism; and because it was two grades higher.
“It meant I could find out what it’s like to perform at a higher level – but within the supportive structure of a secondment.” Whitehead was one of the first members of staff to benefit from the University’s Secondment Development Initiative, which was launched in 2013 to widen access to secondments among administrative staff.
According to Miranda Carr of the HR Division’s Personal and Professional Development team: “Secondments are widely used among administrative staff at the University, but they’ve tended to be local, informal arrangements. We wanted to give more people greater access to these opportunities and encourage departments to use secondments more, because they are a brilliant way to fill short-term vacancies at the same time as giving staff a way of developing their professional skills and experience.”
The initiative works by collecting and circulating details of potential secondments, and supports staff – and departments – interested in secondment.
“The initiative isn’t about matching a discrete set of secondments with a select group of staff,” Carr explains, “but staff who are interested in secondment can join our secondment ‘pool’, and we’ll keep them informed about secondment opportunities or short-term vacancies that could fit the profile of a secondment. That means people in the pool don’t have to trawl the jobs site – we do that for them.”
It also offers practical help with the process, from advice on how secondments can support personal development plans to tools designed to help staff and their managers ensure that secondments deliver their development goals.
“If people come to us we’re able to reassure them that they will have the opportunity to return to their substantive position on completion of the secondment unless they’ve agreed otherwise,” she says. “And as this is a University-wide initiative encouraging departments to support secondments, we also want to give staff the confidence to approach their manager to discuss secondment.”
And there are good reasons for everyone to support the initiative, because everyone profits. “Secondments benefit staff by developing their skills. The host department benefits by being able to fill a short-term vacancy with someone who knows the University already but can bring a fresh approach, and the home department benefits when staff return with experience from a different environment,” says Carr.
Secondments are also good for the University as a whole, she believes: “Retaining people is a major plus. When people want new challenges, they often look for jobs elsewhere, so secondments mean we don’t lose their expertise and knowledge. We have so much talent in the University; the fact that we can harness it in different environments is a great way of managing that talent.”
Whitehead’s experience is a case in point. “It’s been very positive. I’ve grown in confidence, and it’s raised my profile – particularly with senior staff in the HR Division – so if other opportunities arise I’d be able to take advantage of them,” she explains.
“I also got experience of project management, which I’ve used since I returned to CJBS. And because I came back with more confidence and a different outlook – the things you get from working in a challenging environment – my manager can delegate more to me.”
There have been knock-on benefits along the line too. Whitehead’s role at CJBS was covered by a school’s HR administrator (who has since joined CJBS’s HR team permanently, thanks to the experience she gained via the secondment), while the school’s post generated a third secondment opportunity, this time for someone in a finance role who wanted to try a different specialism (one which she found suited her better).
According to Carr: “The interesting thing about secondments is that there’s a daisy chain effect; you have someone taking up a secondment and that means their post is available, so we want to encourage departments to use these positions to generate more secondment opportunities.”
Administrative staff, however, aren’t the only members of the University using secondments to widen their horizons. From 2010 to 2013, Dr Catherine Rae of the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy was a Royal Society Research Fellow, spending 50 per cent of her time at Rolls-Royce in Derby.
Unlike many academics, Rae is not new to industry, having collaborated with Rolls-Royce since 1982. For her, the Industrial Fellowship was about building on a long-standing relationship and getting under the skin of Rolls-Royce as a business.
“It was more about deepening that relationship and seeing Rolls-Royce from the inside rather than from the perspective of a researcher,” she explains. That insider status – and the insight it affords – proved invaluable. According to Rae: “It gave me the opportunity to sit on more nuts and bolts committees at Rolls- Royce, which let me see the complexity of a business that produces one of the most complex manufactured items in the world.”
And although the experience wasn’t without its challenges – not least the amount of travel involved and issues associated with teaching and study leave – she believes it transformed the way she sees herself.
“It gave my self-confidence and my career a great boost. Being granted an Industrial Fellowship was probably the deciding factor in applying for a Readership,” Rae says. “And when I look back at the things I’ve achieved over the past five years, many of them stemmed from that.”
And for industrial colleagues, spending time in University departments through secondments can be equally productive. Dr Gary Tustin, scientific adviser at Schlumberger, spent a year in the Department of Chemistry in 2012.
Through the secondment the company built a long-term relationship with the University, paving the way to sharing equipment as well as raising the profile of Schlumberger – a local employer – among staff and students.
Now back at Schlumberger, Tustin says he wouldn’t hesitate to recommend secondment to others. “Even though it was weird going to the pub with 23 year-olds – who do lots of discussing of their projects over a pint – it was lovely to be in that environment again,” he says. “I got much more out of it than I thought I would. I got a whole load of interesting new ways of looking at, and doing, things. We all develop habits, and it’s only by being in a new environment that you learn there may be better ways of doing some things.”