Managing the disparity of opportunities between junior and senior roles while also improving retention

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Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Sähkötekniikan korkeakoulu | Master's thesis

Date

2023-06-12

Department

Major/Subject

Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Mcode

SCI3039

Degree programme

Master's Programme in ICT Innovation

Language

en

Pages

74+3

Series

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the process delivery teams can better allocate their junior and senior engineers to client projects. The focus is particularly on improving allocation practices for junior engineers. The studied company has noticed an increase in the number of unallocated junior engineers, leading to a feeling of dissatisfaction as well as to a drop in motivation. Similarly, on the other side of the spectrum, there is the possibility for burnout among overworked senior engineers, which started as one of the main assumptions of this thesis. The first issue identified is the inefficient use of human resources in assigning projects to engineers of different seniority levels. At the time of writing, senior engineers are often assigned most of the work, while junior engineers remain unassigned. The lack of planning and strategy when it comes to staffing newcomers leads to a sense of not contributing to the company's goals and dissatisfaction with their work. This, in turn, can lead to the loss of highly experienced talent. A better strategy for the allocation of the personnel might therefore be needed to maintain work-life balance and keep experienced talent in the company. The research objectives are to revise and collect information about current allocation practices, identify their barriers and blockers, assess employee perceptions and ideas, collect information about best practices, and about talent retention strategies and turnover avoidance. To achieve these goals, a preliminary literature review will be conducted, followed by interviews with the employees to collect their perceptions and ideas on the allocation problem. Finally, their input is requested for finding out possible solutions to the issues mentioned. The study will also collect information on best practices for efficiently allocating talent to client projects. Overall, the aim of this thesis is to provide a better understanding of how to efficiently allocate junior and senior engineers to client projects and to identify strategies for retaining talent and avoiding turnover in the company. By doing so, this research can potentially improve the allocation practices of the delivery team and contribute to the long-term success of the company.

Description

Supervisor

Holmström, Jan

Thesis advisor

Rehman, Basharat

Keywords

workforce planning, talent management, junior engineer, senior engineer, staffing, workforce agility

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