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Knowledge Transfer
Ram Murthy has spent a lot of time puzzling over that question. As director of application systems, he oversees a staff of 17. Last year, almost all his most senior workers left the Corps when their tours were up.
The mass exodus sharpened Murthy's awareness of how important it is to plan for personnel transitions. After he filled the vacancies, he reorganized his staff to better cope with turnover. "Especially when people get around to their second tour, I try to make them more mentors rather than directly be the task producers," he explains.
Mentors like Hays don't drop their current projects -- but they don't take on new ones, either. Murthy's hope is that they can spend more time coaching, "trying to dissipate knowledge" before they go.
Currently, it takes Murthy three to four months to get new hires up to speed, partly because his group "is still maturing in our documentation practices," he says. Next year, he plans to install better information access tools so that the group can treat all information like source code, checking it in and out of a structured directory. "That should eliminate some of the problems for new people when they come on board," Murthy says.
At the same time, he and his staff are developing and documenting procedures for everything they do, including change management, software releases and quality control. "If I can turn it into a boot camp," Murthy muses, new hires might become productive in a mere month.
For Murthy, the five-year rule makes staff development critical. He uses training to meet the evolving needs of the agency and to retain workers who might otherwise be tempted to job-hop before their time is up. But he also does it for the sake of his workers. "I want to get them to a place that when they're ready to leave the Peace Corps, their skills are marketable," he says.
If Murthy can help the Peace Corps earn a reputation as a good place to get training, that will make it easier to recruit staff. (And yes, the five-year rule can be a deterrent; Murthy remembers two candidates who politely thanked him and walked out of interviews after learning about the rule.)
In fact, the place does have the aura of a university where all workers are expected to "graduate" into their next lives. "Things are more open here," says Hays. "It's just assumed that everybody's leaving."
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