You will need to understand your organisation well and its vision, mission and goals, in order to develop an appropriate human resource strategy for the organisation. In this unit, you will learn about one approach of analysing your context to understand how to position your organisation and its business in more strategic ways. This approach is called SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis involves conducting a thorough examination of your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
SWOT Analysis.
This is a diagrammatic representation of a SWOT analysis.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWOT.jpg CC0 1.0
- Based on your understanding of your organisation, follow the guidelines below to do a SWOT analysis of the organisation, writing down key points under each of the four segments:
- Draw a large version of the SWOT table on a piece of newsprint, or create a digital version. You can do this alone or with your colleague.
- For the first quadrant think about the internal strengths of your organisation and write them in the block.
- Then move on to internal weaknesses such as lack of technical expertise to manage technological infrastructure.
- Opportunities and threats are usually factors external to the organisation. So, now think about what opportunities there are in your context for your organisation to use to your advantage. What threats do you perceive?
- Share your analysis with one or two of your peers to evaluate how well placed your organisation is. Consider adding some of the factors you may have overlooked in the analysis of your own organisation.
The analysis you did helps you identify how your organisation can be deliberate about improving on weaknesses to take full advantage of existing opportunities. Some of these weaknesses can indeed be human resources related, like poor recruitment strategies, poor staff retention, and lack of staff development initiatives. The following questions may help you use the SWOT analysis to strengthen human resources in your organisation:
- What strengths do we have in terms of staffing to roll out sound open schooling?
- If there are gaps, where can the open school draw staff from?
- How can we retain good staff?
- How competitive is our staffing position?
- Which staff needs to be developed and in what areas?
- Which organisations are likely to attract our staff once we have developed them and how can we avoid such staff drain?
- Given our environment, what threats do we face in terms of staffing?
Discuss with a colleague human resource (personnel) challenges you face in your organisation. List the challenges you identify. Post your list in the discussion forum on QA4ODFL2 Discourse site.
- Read responses posted in the forum by your peers as well.
- Imagine you are requested to give recommendations that help address those challenges. Compile a short document which is not more than one page suggesting what the organisation can do to address the challenges.
