DXC Tech asks staff to profile their skills DXC Technologies employees fear a company request to profile their skills on a new management portal will be used by top brass to elbow them out of the door in the next round of compulsory redundancies. Staff were given two week deadline to complete their “individual profile” on the Saba Cloud, a new “skills management system …
like all those in South Asia do on their CV's. After all those of you in DXC are competing with them for your jobs aren't you?
DXC must have been using the same HR consultants as IBM in recent times. This reeks of the same sort of thing as their AI system that was mentioned here earlier this week.
What's even more farcical is the broken comms over yet another skills database.
Not everyone received the email telling them about the new skills system, but everyone did get the "you only have 3 days left" reminder, so you can imagine the number of "WTH?" conversations that were going on yesterday afternoon.
Plus the title of the email is brilliant, "blah blah skills update #2" er what? Where's number 1?
In update #2 it tells us there will be two more emails, email #1 (shouldn't that be #3?) and email #2 (Er, I thought this was number 2?) that will tell us how to fill in the skills database, which is good as update #2 doesn't even have a link to the skills database, it's more be prepared there is an email coming sort of email. Shame that the follow-up email with the information, never turned up for some.
Confused? Welcome to DXC!
..a load of bullshit "soft skills" course (the ones that say you completed the course while the video plays in the backgrounds) and you'll be fine.
Effective Time Management
People Centric Solutions
How to maximise your potential
Advanced Ass kissing
Blue Sky Thinking - A executive guide to holistic and organic growth in data-centric, agile cloud, dev-op, AI environment.
It's the same crap that senior management pay £1000 a day for. You know, where you sit in a Holiday Inn conference room, while a bloke who also sells timeshares, fires out a million buzzwords that tick all the boxes while actually saying nothing.
Forget the real work skills, they are no longer required.
..a load of bullshit "soft skills" course (the ones that say you completed the course while the video plays in the backgrounds) and you'll be fine.
I'd follow the KISS principle:
Job skills: Indispensable Knowledge of systems. But I am willing to contract at 170X my current salary to come in and fix it when things go south, if laid off.
If you're in charge of a team that's doing anything remotely critical, conspire so that everyone has a current CV available at all times. Loudly and defensively reassure the bastards in management that this is "normal" and not a prelude to massive synchronized resignations. Watch executive paranoia start to eat Swiss cheese holes in their little brains.
conspire so that everyone has a current CV available at all times.
You shouldn't need to conspire for that in this day and age, just a quick reminder to ensure everyone is on the 'same page' and off you go. Anyone who doesn't have an up to date CV ready to go needs their head testing - especially in some of these high churn outfits!
I used to work at a small company where we all had to do various chores around the office. I for example had to clean our break room every week.
We had another guy whose chore was watering and tending all the plants around the office. When he eventually left the company, he put out a resume with a joke entry for "Plant Manager" about how he had managed over a dozen plants spread throughout our corporate infrastructure.
I remember that we started to get calls from companies like Dow Chemical, Ford, etc. all wanting to talk to the "Plant Manager".
(Just throwing that out as an idea on how to approach this assignment.)
You jest, but don't forget the Dunning-Kruger effect. The clueless will put "Plant Manager" on their CV, whereas the botanists will put something like "Biomass Operative" and only get offered sewage worker jobs.
When CrapGemini went through this many years ago, I rated myself as 4/5 for HP-UX skills, as I was comparing my sysadmin & troubleshooting skills with the mission-critical support guys at HP. One of my end-users rated himself as 5/5 because he could usually manage to log in and follow written instructions.
But my favourite part of the exercise was the email from Manglement exhorting us to fill in our profile. They forgot to delete the email trail, which started with the HR director telling managers that staff "couldn't sell water in a desert".
The legal disclaimer has been on all DXC vaguely HR-related emails ever since the parochials in the US discovered Germans and other Europeans did not live in a "hire at will" or "change your Ts&Cs at will" jurisdiction (i.e. were shocked to discover that non-US countries actually have employment legislation that protects employees - in some cases to labyrinthine levels of detail) and probably got told so in no uncertain terms by relevant statutory Works Councils, or other such bodies. Every time an HR email of a global nature leaks out of HR's arses, they probably get shouted at by said Works Councils unless the legal disclaimer is there. It's only purpose is to stop Works Councils sending more irate emails to HR central.
The legal disclaimer is a lesson learned anew every time an American C-level HR person with no international experience gets appointed to a multinational corp and thinks that local country HR leaders are only there to do the centre's bidding rather than advise the centre on what might or might not be done, BEFORE policy is made.
The lesson they never learn is that national diversity means each such global missive would be better sent and filtered via local HR. Diversity is a good thing, isn't it? I think there's a DXC policy that says so, but no, 'one size must fit all'.
'Twas ever thus.
Harmonisation.
It's good way to tell if a "leader" is worth listening to, if they use the word Harmonisation they are lost, just another soulless corporate mouthpiece, if they refuse to use that word, then this is a chance they might (repeat might) be worth listening to.
This will contain lots of drop down boxes with all the products and skills included.
You will have to tick the ones you have skills in. At this stage you will realise how little you
actually know about anything current and how its difficult to represent anything you actually do
even though you are very good at it.
The best thing to do is have a thrash through and claim knowledge of things you thing you can
get a good grasp of before you are challenged to prove it.
Good luck.
DXC must have employed some ex IBM beancounters. This is what IBM did before launching mass redundancies years ago.
Look out DXC staff, next thing you will have to enter your time utilisation into 3 different systems because the beancounters can't work out how to match the time billing system with your utilisation and with your percent of "extra" work you perform with no pay - yet another brilliant IBM scheme because they are too cheap to integrate your hours claimed with some metrics system they can use to give you the chop.
Management by metric is generally doomed to failure, because you end up rewarding people who are good at gaming the system, and getting rid of people who are crap at this sort of thing, but rather good at their specialisation. Essentially, management are trying to use this as a technological 'fix' to avoid actually having to do their jobs as a managers - which is to know your team.
What should be happening is that managers should be completing the skills inventory for each of their team members, and each completed inventory should then be reviewed by the team member - not the other way round. The manager's manager (and HR) then gets to see the result, and managers who produce inaccurate assessments are dealt with.
Self-assessment works well for people who are good at trumpeting their skills. It's not so good for the less outgoing people who quietly get on with the job.
Getting subordinates to complete self-assessments just gives managers another sick to beat people with: have you completed your self-assessment yet? Any problems with it are your fault/responsibility etc etc.
Of course managers don't want to complete the assessments themselves: its a lot of work when done properly, and subject to tiresome grievance processes when you get it wrong. It's entirely understandable they want to shift the responsibility downwards. And wrong.
... he rated some of my abilities as 'towering intellect'
I would never have rated any of my abilities like that. It's not just the DK effect, but the general cultural difference between "I'm not too bad at ..." which translates to American "I'm really good at ..."
Joined CSC over 2 years ago as a consultant. (Now DXC)
I have not yet had an assignment. I have had numerous different manager.
Im getting £75k a year + bens
I dont even know who my manager is now lol.
I spend my days trading forex whilst waiting for someone to contact me.
I book all my time to study, how im not redundant i do not know, but sod it I will now take as much money out of DXC as i can.
Living the dream
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
