Inside-up guide

What is an inside-up approach?

A Grow Your Own program should not end once a local candidate is employed via an outside-in strategy. To create a sustainable local workforce pipeline, outside-in initiatives should be complemented by strategies to encourage and enable local employees to progress their careers within the organisation. These are what are referred to as inside-up strategies.

The following are core elements for building successful inside-up programs:

• obtain organisational-wide support for the program.
• provide job coaching for entry-level local recruits, map their career interests and identify potential career pathways.
• source available external funding for training or provide internal financial assistance.
• locate training on site or provide paid release time to attend training.

What does it involve?

An inside-up approach involves a set of strategies. Since health service providers vary in size, capacity and location your approach may not necessarily involve all of these strategies. The intent is to provide you with ideas and for you to select the strategies that may work best for you.

1.   Organisational strategies

• Obtain organisational-wide support for the program and develop a policy requiring managers, department heads and others with recruitment authority to consider local recruits first before looking externally.
• Provide job coaching for entry-level local recruits by mapping their career interests and highlighting possible pathways for them to achieve their career goals. Identify critical skills gaps and help find opportunities for them to acquire necessary training.
• Develop and maintain a record of local recruits, their skills, career interests, and any training they have undertaken, and make it mandatory for those with recruitment authority to review it when new positions become available.
• Develop an internal job posting process. If possible, design it so that they can set up an alert that will notify them when a job gets posted that matches their interest.
• Create a local advancement taskforce.

2.   Partnership strategies

• Seek and establish partnerships that can help you to build the skills and capacity of local recruits.
• Partner with local registered training organisations and /or a university to deliver training.
• Collaborate with other local health service providers with similar skill needs to develop a larger training cohort and reduce training.

3.   Program design strategies

• Investigate opportunities to provide on-site training. This will reduce time, make it easier for participants to attend, allow them to complete training during paid work time and improve familiarity with business-specific equipment and facilities. If on-site training is not possible, think about providing paid release time for employees so that they can complete training without it impacting on their wage or benefits.
• Create a cohort training model focused on specific, high-need positions to achieve economies of scale and reduce training costs.
• Offer the training cohort job shadowing opportunities, a separate application pathway and guaranteed interviews.
• Reserve positions for graduates.
• Collaborate with workforce partners to collect data, track success and measure impact. This helps to determine if an approach needs to be refined.

It is important to note that this is only a guide. It would be wise to consider an inside-up approach in tandem with other workforce strategies as it may not be sufficient to meet workforce demand on its own. 

Designing an inside-up workforce development program

Acknowledgement: The Democracy Collaborative, workforce toolkit for hospitals and health systems inspired and informed the Outside-in / Inside-up concepts and resources featured on this website. See: http://hospitaltoolkits.org/