GSK Finance’s focus on research and development is reflected in its finance transformation. The project started with a comprehensive internal and external benchmarking project that explored structures, models and capabilities. From this, the management team began developing and seeking approval for a robust transformation proposal.
Building capabilities is an important element of the transformation programme. GSK’s finance capability framework mapped and aligned new and existing roles across the organisation and assessed them from a present and future capability perspective. By creating ‘job families’ and competency levels across the internal finance function, the company wanted to create job paths based on technical, business and leadership competences.
GSK has structured its resources around capabilities. It does this by using the 70:20:10 model, in which individuals obtain 70% of their knowledge ‘on the job’ through experience and workplace support, 20% from social interactions with others and 10% from formal educational events and courses.
An internal finance career path portal has allowed staff to assess their skills and competency levels against their current and desired job type. This was combined with their manager’s assessment to form a new competency profile. This profile forms the basis of all development discussions around skills or competency gaps.
Employees can use the portal’s search function to explore all organisational job paths by job family, location or competency level. It gives them clear oversight and understanding about the skills, experience and competences they need to progress along their desire pathway. An example of this would be a financial analyst in the corporate team wanting to become a finance director in the commercial team. Using the finance director profile and their own competency profile, they will understand their position and development needs. This makes subsequent discussions with managers and resulting development plans more targeted.
As well as focusing on capabilities, the portal contains resources relating to personal development, including mentoring, coaching, interview techniques and how to facilitate a good development plan discussion.
‘Transforming finance is not just about changing job roles, ways of working and processes, it is about transforming a culture. In order to do that, every Finance employee needs to build the capabilities that will set them up for success in the future’.
Riccardo Calliano, Head of Finance Capabilities Development and Talent Pipeline
