Oxford HR team was in Bangkok, Thailand to attend the 4th Annual AIDF Asia Summit on June 20-21st 2018 (http://asia.aidforum.org/) . The forum brought together 250+ regional decision makers from regional governments, UN agencies, NGOs, intergovernmental and civil society organisations to discuss strategies around improving AID delivery and health resilience in Asia through knowledge exchange, collaborations and technology innovation.
Our team on the ground, Ana Fernandes and Gazal Srivastava, had some great conversations with decision makers about talent acquisition and management challenges in the rapidly evolving development sector of a highly diverse region, as economic growth performance in the Asia-Pacific region continues to improve. The sector is set for a transformation with changing funding patterns, greater interest in public-private partnership and rapid technological advances in program delivery resulting in an increased demand of leadership with unique skill to balance these priorities. Bringing senior women and national talent into leadership roles continues to be the priority.
As economies are strengthening and the regulatory frameworks tightening, more and more INGOs are focusing on decentralising program management and decision making to sub-regional or country level. This is also a result of the tremendous capacity building work that this sector been focusing on building national skills. Examples of such countries are Indonesia, India, Cambodia, China and Malaysia. This trend has a direct impact on talent acquisition and management where we need to focus search on national or regional talent with these leadership skills and complementing it with expatriate staff when this talent is not available – this seems to be the acceptable norm.
Oxford HR has a dedicated team working in and for the Asia region which is partnering with organisations through this journey. If you’d like to know how we can help you and your team, please don’t hesitate to get in touch:
Ana Fernandes – Principal Consultant, Asia and MENA (afernandes@oxfordhr.co.uk)
Gazal Srivastava – Associate Consultant, Asia (gsrivastava@oxfordhr.co.uk)
Authors: Ana Fernandes and Gazal Srivastava
