People often talk about ‘big business’, but what does the phrase actually mean to you? Do you immediately think of a well-known name such as Shell or Vodafone? I suspect the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) doesn’t feature.
DIO is a substantial business created in April 2011 from a number of different parts of Defence and equivalent to a FTSE top 30 company such as the ones above. Managing the Defence estate and its associated infrastructure poses a unique set of challenges.
This is particularly true when you consider the sheer scale of DIO’s operations; a £3.3 billion annual budget covering the management of 45,000 buildings, 50,000 military homes and 135,000 single living bed spaces across 230,000 hectares of land.
As Head of Workforce Management, I lead a team that faces a particular challenge. We are looking to recruit some 400 new faces into the organisation. Why are we doing this? Well, we’ve restructured our operating model to ensure we have the right jobs with the right people with the right skills in the right locations.
Diverse Professions
We already employ just under 4,900 people from a diverse range of professions. Over recent months, internal recruitment has allowed many colleagues across DIO to develop and advance their careers. They have achieved this through promotion and moves into new and evolving parts of our organisation.
The level of change across the organisation was always going to require us to look beyond our existing workforce for new talented and skilled individuals while continuing to offer our own staff career opportunities. It also gives us an opportunity to recruit our future specialists and leaders by targeting those looking for a career in Defence Infrastructure.
In DIO, we’ve set ourselves the goal of becoming a world-class provider of infrastructure services. We’ve set out to do something pretty big; transforming a ‘big business’ and writing a 10-year road map in the footprint strategy, which will define where and how Britain’s Forces will live, work and train now and in the future to 2020 and beyond.
Talented People
The challenge now facing me and my team is to find the right people to join what is already a specialist work force and create a high-performing and innovative enterprise. We’re searching for talented people with key skills who can work in a team to deliver great results. We want people who can continue our close work with industry and commercial partners to deliver what our military customers need to do their jobs. As we explore the future and potential for working with a private sector partner, those industry connections may multiply and become stronger.
Ultimately, the people joining us will have the opportunity to play a vital role in supporting our Armed Forces by building and maintaining what the men and women who serve our country need to live, work, train and deploy on operations.
We now have vacancies available in many areas of professional expertise including quantity surveying, utilities and programme development – particularly requirements managers. We will also be recruiting a large number of unarmed guards across the UK. You can find out more by visiting Civil Service Jobs.
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