UK 
United States
As someone who was inspired to get into HR in the first place by a career services manager who spotted her talent, and suggested she move into its diversity and inclusion team, perhaps it’s no surprise that Lorraine Kelly, Deputy Chief People Officer/Director of Culture & Talent at King's College London (KCL), specifically prides herself on how she can now develop the careers of others.
And so it was, that after joining KCL, one of the first big really key pieces of work the former careers assistant at Kingston University did was to create a staff experience hub, designed to help facilitate staff development.
Lorraine Kelly
Deputy Chief People Officer/Director of Culture & Talent, King's College London
But when you’ve got more than 10,000 people working for the university, that’s a lot of careers to manage, and so as an ongoing concern for the past five years Kelly has been quietly working on ways staff can be custodians of their own careers more easily – but with HR support.
It’s a philosophy which has seen her (together with training partner, Let’s Talk Talent), develop a career mapping solution, to really hammer-home the idea that anyone can succeed if they want to. In parallel to this though, it has also been rolling out a methodology to help build up management and leadership capability.
Says Kelly: “The idea of our careers mapping work [see later] has been to create an organisational-wide philosophy about what careers mean to people; what people can expect from their current job, but also how they could access mentors and development to take them to the next level,” says Kelly. “But at the same time, the organisational development team – through our annual engagement survey – also realised that our management population had identified that they were missing management development.”
We realised that our management population had identified they were missing management development
According to Kelly, the management development work has really taken the front seat, because staff feedback revealed that the roles of managers were complex, with managers having to take on multiple identities. Her endeavour was to bring a far more consistent approach.
Understanding what it means to lead
“The overall sense was that newer managers didn’t truly understand what it meant to lead at KCL,” says Kelly. “This was impacting our consistency of approach. Development areas identified included management style, coaching ability, and communication skills – which the partnership with Let’s Talk Talent sought to address.”
