Diversity in Recruiting, Diversity in Training, Diversity in Skills?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Talent Management  

I’m using this month’s ProjectManagement.com theme of talent management to explore elements of PMI’s Narrowing the Talent Gap report. That’s how important I think it is, and it also covers a wide range of topics, so there’s a lot to write about. In this piece, I want to consider the idea of diversity. PMI makes the point that there needs to be an increase in the active recruitment of diverse candidates, and that there needs to be more focus on upskilling youth—particularly from underrepresented communities.

I couldn’t agree more, and while I share PMI’s disappointment that it isn’t happening to a greater extent already, I believe that the wheels are in motion in many organizations—it just takes longer than all of us would like to see results. The need to recruit to fuel the global economic recovery from the pandemic—and to replace people leaving the workforce—will help accelerate the search for talent (wherever it is around the world) to address historic inequities, and to look for opportunities to grow and develop people “in house.”

However, those efforts will still need to overcome historically inflexible hiring and development practices that have been in place for so long that they can’t simply be replaced overnight—especially in large organizations. Simply put, you need to …

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