Skills-Data and HRIS Governance Leader — Renewable Grid Engineering

The mandate

The annual workforce plan had to be withdrawn when engineering capability counts differed by more than thirty percent across the HRIS, learning platform and project-resourcing tool. The people analytics director departed after an assurance review found self-declared skills presented as verified capacity, uncontrolled taxonomy changes and no accountable owner for integrations feeding board reports.

The interim is needed in Melbourne within four weeks for a fixed eight-month term, working three days onsite and two remotely, with monthly Sydney governance sessions and quarterly visits to the Bengaluru engineering centre. A permanent people-data leader will be recruited from month four and receive five weeks of structured overlap. The contract will end on schedule even if broader HR technology investment continues.

Handover is complete when priority engineering skills have common definitions and proficiency evidence, critical interfaces reconcile within documented tolerance, board workforce reports trace to governed sources, taxonomy changes follow an approved council process, privacy controls pass internal assurance, and the successor has run one full planning refresh. A visually improved dashboard without trusted source records is not success.

The appointee may suspend unreliable metrics, define data ownership, approve taxonomy releases, redirect temporary analysts and prioritise changes inside the authorised AUD 3 million envelope. Platform replacement, permanent director hiring, changes to enterprise privacy policy and investment beyond that ceiling require executive approval; the interim cannot use inferred skills for employment decisions until legal and ethical tests are met.

Payroll transformation, learning-content redesign and deployment of a companywide AI talent marketplace are outside scope. The leader must document dependencies with those programmes and may stop their use of unverified skills data, but does not own vendor selection or enterprise architecture. The work centres on data meaning, control, lineage and decision fitness rather than feature delivery.

Why this seat is open

The withdrawn workforce plan damaged confidence in both people analytics and the HR technology estate, prompting an immediate leadership change. Functional teams can repair individual feeds but none has authority to decide whose definition or evidence prevails across the enterprise. The executive committee wants a finite governance reset before installing permanent leadership or approving further skills-technology investment.

What you will own

• Establish the authoritative population, role, skill, proficiency and project-demand definitions, including owners, evidence classes and permitted decision uses.
• Reconcile priority skills across HRIS, learning, resourcing and identity sources, publishing root causes and tolerances instead of concealing residual differences.
• Decide which board and workforce-planning measures must be suspended, relabelled or reinstated based on documented lineage and control effectiveness.
• Build the taxonomy change process with proposal evidence, impact analysis, versioning, regional review, approval rights and downstream implementation checks.
• Introduce controls for employee-declared, manager-assessed, credentialled and inferred skills, with distinct confidence scores and privacy restrictions.
• Re-run the strategic workforce plan for grid engineering, power electronics, cyber-physical security and programme controls using the governed data set.
• Transfer the data catalogue, issue history, control tests, council calendar, talent assessment and source-system roadmap through a successor-led refresh.

Candidate qualifications

• Held people-data, HR technology, workforce analytics or enterprise data director authority in an engineering-intensive, infrastructure or technology organisation.
• Can evidence a skills taxonomy and proficiency model that influenced funded workforce choices after source lineage and confidence were independently tested.
• Reconciled people data across HRIS, learning, identity, project and finance platforms, including definition conflict rather than only technical interface failure.
• Established governance for employee-declared and AI-inferred skills with privacy, explainability, consent and permitted-use boundaries reviewed by assurance functions.
• Presented data limitations to an executive committee and suspended an attractive workforce metric until its population or evidence became defensible.
• Handed a governed analytics product to permanent ownership with control testing, change forums and planning routines continuing after the recovery team exited.

Non-negotiables

• Can start in Melbourne within four weeks and fulfil the stated Sydney and Bengaluru travel rhythm for eight months.
• Has no commercial interest in HRIS, skills-cloud, learning or talent-marketplace vendors that may be evaluated during the assignment.
• Will prevent unverified or inferred skills from driving employment decisions until approved evidence and privacy thresholds are met.
• Brings enterprise director or CHRO-1 authority over data decisions, not solely dashboard development, system configuration or data-science delivery.

1. 49 words maximum. State your earliest start date and the largest skills-data population whose reliability you personally governed.
2. 49 words maximum. Which evidence would make you withdraw a skills metric already used in executive workforce planning?
3. 49 words maximum. Describe one taxonomy decision where privacy or permitted use mattered more than predictive accuracy.