A workforce skilled in Risk Management
Hello and welcome to this session. Today I wanted to talk about something I have observed over the last few weeks, where I have been called to a business to do some onsite training. What struck me is although some organisations have a well-developed structure in some cases of risk or enterprise management within risk framework, the level of skill, and the level of those who are charged with the responsibility to implement it, was less than perfect. One of the things you need to think carefully about, is the development of your framework, it is one of the key elements around the success of any framework is to make sure that at the time you are implementing it, is that you have a workforce that is skilled in the identification of risk and the management of risk. You can’t assume that there are inherent skills around risk management.
There are people who will say they are skilled with risk management, they say “I have done a one day course,” or whatever. But you really need to make sure that everybody at all levels of your organisation that has some sort of input into that framework have the necessary level of skill. I am not saying everyone needs to come and do a Paladin course, but of course if you wish to, that’s fine. But the reality is you need to invest, time, energy and money in making sure that your workforce have the relevant risk management knowledge and skill to be able to implement your framework. Because if they don’t have the necessary skills and experience it will fail because how are they going to find the inputs necessary to you to make the risk informed decisions, I’ve talked about in the past. They are going to be flailing around not knowing what is wanted in a risk register, what is the information needed in reports so that you, at the top of the organisation, if that’s where you are – can make those risk informed decisions. You need to make sure that they have the skill.
One way you can ensure all employees have the skills is by developing a training needs analysis. A training needs analysis, for those who have never seen one before, identifies what are the skills sets that are required at every level of the organisation, in relation to risk management. “What are their information needs?” What you do is take that information need and you tailor your training packages to meet those. What we see, is the training package that is given to the board or to senior management, has to look different to what is provided to your risk coordinators or to those people down on the floor who are simply working in the organisation. It is not a one size fits all approach to training so you need to take the time to identify those information needs at all levels of the organisation, tailor some training around it whether it is in house or provided by a third party and then follow up those skills.
You will need to evaluate those skills at the end of the training package but at some point we need to validate that there has been an assimilation of those skills. The maintenance of skills around risk management is absolutely critical. It is worth the time, energy and money to invest in that training. So many organisations have done it recently with Paladin, and I know that they are going to reap the benefits of that. That’s all I have got for this session, so as always, let’s be careful out there.
