organization – Resource Library

The Year 2017, is now in our rear-view mirror and for Federal Human Resource practitioners, it was a year of highs and lows.

At the end of 2017 HR practitioners were still trying to create innovative ways to deal with leadership turnover, technology upgrades, the streamlining administrative systems, labor and management concerns, and employee demographics shifts, employee retention/engagement, to highlight a few.

Every one of us has a certain number of years to invest in working and making a living. Having a job is fine, but creating a meaningful career will maximize your opportunities for success. To have a successful, fulfilling career requires that you continually plan, execute and review your career management strategies. You may be like many people in the workforce who only think about your current role or your next desired promotion. However, given today’s changes and uncertainties in the Federal workplace, you need to broaden your short term thinking and how you manage and grow your career.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading the recent studies from Gallup, SHRM, and the Rand Corporation that describe the current experience of employees in the American workplace. The results from these studies present an interesting and contrasting, portrait of work in the U.S. today.

If you take a quick look at Glassdoor.com and their “50 Best Jobs in America” for 2017, you will notice that Data Scientist ranks at #1, among several other “data/analytics” titles in the list. Although this is evidently a highly desirable job, there appears to be a large talent gap in the field. Recent research by McKinsey Global Institute has projected that by next year, the US could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 professionals with deep analytical skills, i.e., advanced statistical training and knowledge of machine learning. What exactly is data science? While not an entirely new concept, the terms “data science” and “data scientist” have exploded in popularity in the past 5-10 years. At its core, data science is about using scientific methods along with new technology systems to gather insights from massive amounts of heterogeneous data.

Organizational life in all sectors is feeling a lot different these days, but it is hard to pinpoint exactly what is different about it, let alone what to do about it. What is clear is that organizational life has changed, and it’s still changing.

The quest to improve management of change in public sector agencies is by no means a new one. In 2006, Frank Ostroff, writing in the Harvard Business Review comments, that “the greatest challenge in bringing about successful change and significant, sustained performance improvement in the public sphere is not so much identifying solutions, which are mostly straightforward, as working around the unique obstacles” that are found in the public sector organizations.

Tag: organization