One of the real challenges for recruiters filling roles in the field of SharePoint and associated Microsoft technologies is the strange situation regarding protected sectors. Now the term ‘protected sectors’ is my invention for the purpose of this article and is referring to those business sectors who absolutely insist for no apparent reason on long term or recent in-depth experience of a particular industry sector.
Those most guilty of this are the merchant and investment banks and the health sector, particularly the NHS in the UK. Occasionally you will also witness this regarding public sector. Most commonly a client in these sectors will absolutely insist that a SharePoint role must be filled by someone who has specifically worked in this field before which implies that knowledge of investment banking or healthcare is critical to a successful SharePoint deployment.
The following examples may be familiar to SharePoint contractors, permanent job seekers and recruiters alike:
“You will have recent strong investment banking experience”
“You will have been involved in a number of full lifecycle NHS implementations”
“You will have previous experience of working in a law firm”
Now let’s get to the point. Every business sector without exception has specific challenges, unique requirements, particular and knowledge needs. This is a given. There is absolutely no sector that is any more challenging than any other in the world of SharePoint. Designing a SharePoint environment for a global airline has as many challenges as for that of a local hospital. I think it is true to say that often a client is scared of receiving so many applications that it simply uses a natural filtration process through criteria that sieves out the wheat from the chaff (I hate that expression!). They do it because they can. It is as frequent when clients specifically ask for Prince 2 practitioner rather than Foundation – in practise it means absolutely nothing; Practitioner is just another multiple choice exam two days after the foundation. It doesn’t tell me if anyone is a good and experienced SharePoint project manager, whatsoever.
Therefore we often see the essential criteria of a SharePoint job description is actually nothing more than an ideal wish list. Well we can argue that in the current market with ever increasing numbers of job seekers looking for work that clients can choose to be highly particular. Absolutely correct of course; But that doesn’t change the number of skilled SharePoint talent available, it actually reduces it to them, and often dangerously so. Even more bizarrely I have recently witnessed new Microsoft partner start up companies specialising in sectors such as healthcare based on the belief that this is a highly specialised market that most other partners have no way of entering. All this is doing is perpetuating the myth about protected sectors having unique requirements.
Generally speaking, due to the nature of the product experienced SharePoint consultants will already have worked across a number of business sectors and are uniquely skilled in understanding how businesses and institutions function, how businesses share commonalities, how businesses wish to grow and transform, what users will require to engage and how this relates back to SharePoint, no matter what the sector is.
I have worked across a large range of sectors with SharePoint and Microsoft technologies, from Government and public sector, through global commercial firms, higher education and even airlines. I have yet to find any sector that is so unique that my knowledge would not translate and that is true of all the professional SharePoint consultants I know, without exception.
So the question is what is really going on here? Well we could argue that the ‘protected sectors’ themselves unrealistically take the view that they have such specialist requirements that it is not financially viable to bring in a generalist who would take months to understand the sector they have entered. Bonds, derivatives, futures and hedge funds are so difficult to grasp that a SharePoint professional who doesn’t know how investment banking works couldn’t possibly be able to cope with designing an effective SharePoint strategy, programme or solution. To take such a view is to ignore the value of experienced SharePoint professionals who know exactly what works and what doesn’t as witnessed across a wide range of existing clients.
Perhaps it is arrogance, though I hope not. We all know that some sectors have traditionally protected themselves from ‘intruders’ and banking, law and health have often been the most active in doing so. The perpetuating myth that these sectors are in some way different from everyone else is at great odds with emerging globalisation, cross skilling and sectors beginning to merge with each other in terms of common services. Retail food stores are becoming banks, health companies are offering legal insurance, banks are offering ‘product sales’, trust hospitals are run as commercial enterprises. The new generation of technical platforms such as SharePoint demonstrate to all sectors that best practise is best practise, the technical challenges are the4 same, integration occurs everywhere, that business transformation has the same challenges whatever the sector, that training staff requires a proper strategy whoever you are and that whatever sector you need the best skills you can afford.
By being so specific about previous business sector experience, these protected sectors are cutting out a currently limited SharePoint talent pool, they may be setting unrealistic expectations about what they can achieve, they are limiting their own access to extensive SharePoint knowledge and skill sets, and as importantly they are hindering knowledge growth and cross fertilisation within the field of SharePoint itself. Protected sectors can dangerously perpetuate a silo mentality, and perpetuate a ‘differential’ factor which is wholly untrue. From a personal perspective having worked in banking, finance and insurance I have found absolutely nothing that makes these businesses different from any other sector, they have exactly the same challenges as everyone else.
I don’t have the answers for recruiters but what I can ask is that SharePoint recruitment companies represent to their clients the dangers of missing out on an extensive talent pool where the selection criteria is far too severe. If companies in these sectors truly wish to succeed in deploying SharePoint successfully then they need to start to widen their horizons and realise that if they wish to harness the benefits of collaboration, business transformation, integration and business intelligence – all the things that SharePoint affords them - then they need to take the same proactive stance with their recruitment processes as they are with their solution strategies and undergo recruitment transformation.
My advice is start talking to a specialist SharePoint recruitment company from the outset.
