Telstra to adopt new Workday tools

Telstra plans to launch a career hub and talent marketplace as part of the ongoing development of its Workday HR platform. 

The telco first went live with Workday in August 2019 as part of a project to modernise its legacy HR infrastructure which was made up of 40 siloed bespoke systems.

Speaking on Deloitte’s On Cloud podcast Julian Clarke, group owner of next gen people practices at Telstra, said the telco will have early access to Workday’s career hub module which launches next year, that will organise performance, development, mentoring and check-ins under a single user interface. 

The second item on the roadmap is a talent marketplace, which supports recruitment and also offers employees ‘gig’ opportunities.

For example, an employee could receive notice of an opportunity to support a six-month role in another department based on their skills. 

Further into the future, Clarke flagged projects which would support “badging” and micro-credentialing.   

A by-product of Telstra’s new self service HR system is that the telco now has access to masses of data to analyse. 

“Managers can self-serve, employees can self-serve and the great thing for the organisation then is we get this huge lake of data that we can do other things with using our AI,” Clarke said. 

The two new items on the roadmap will support work Telstra is doing internally to use its database of skills to understand and prioritise demand for resources. 

Clarke said the group has spent a lot of time this year rewriting all of the role profiles in the organisation to align with the Workday skills cloud.

He described the project as a move away from a “competency model” to describing work in relation to skills. 

“That enables us as an agile organisation to match people to the right work a lot more quickly. Once we understand your skills we can then use AI to actually go, ‘Okay, well, there's somebody over here in business unit A who actually needs to be matched to some prioritised work over here,’ and we can move them around a lot more easily,” he said.  

Clarke said the system will help employees see potential career paths by showing them what are the skills needed for the roles they are aspiring to. 

Earlier this year, Telstra's digital experience principal Melissa Dorey said Telstra is continuing to integrate Workday with its internal systems. 

“As the core HR system of record, we provide data to so many downstream legacy systems,” she said.

“It was quite difficult to understand how ‘people data’ was used across all of those systems. So that was also a bit of a challenging component for us.”