HR Update - FY 20 Issue 01

Issue Date: August 26, 2019

In This Issue

• Workplace Alaska Got a Makeover
• Training and Development 2019-2020 Training Season
• Training and Development Courses on SharePoint
• IRIS Upgrade Announcement
• Photo: Change Management Training

Workplace Alaska Got a Makeover

By Recruitment Services

The State of Alaska (SOA) has always had to compete for talent. As the number of state employees eligible to retire increases and the number of applicants decreases the gap in job postings verses job applicants continues to widen significantly. The Division of Personnel has recently been collaborating with agency HR staff to develop ideas and solutions to address our recruitment challenges. Having an inviting and user-friendly recruitment site is a stepping-stone towards our ultimate goal of making the SOA an employer of choice. We are excited to announce that Workplace Alaska (WPA) got a makeover!

The newly updated WPA site serves a dual purpose of advertising the State of Alaska as a great place to live and providing applicants with some useful information on the benefits of working for the State of Alaska.

The new site has a more streamlined look on the main page, with the goal of getting job seekers to the job search pages as quickly as possible and ensuring all the links on the page are applicant focused. As part of this effort new pages have been added to share general information about State of Alaska benefits and what it is like to live in Alaska.

We hope that this change will help to improve the applicant experience with WPA and help attract quality applicants to State of Alaska jobs.

Hiring Manager Resources Moved and Updated

With the changes to the Workplace Alaska site to be only applicant focused that means that the link for Hiring Manager Resources and the login for the Online Hiring Center (OHC) are no longer available on the main Workplace.alaska.gov page. Instead a link to the Hiring Manager Resources page can be found under Recruitment Services and where a direct link to the OHC Login page will be available. Direct links to the Hiring Manager Resources and OHC Login pages will not change so any bookmarks or links that currently exist will still work moving forward.

The other piece is that since the Hiring Manager Resources is being untied from Workplace Alaska directly some updates have been made to make those pages more focused on resources for hiring managers. There might be some additional changes down the line, but the navigation bar links on the right have been changed to reflect the needs of hiring managers and not applicants. Hopefully, we can make additional changes to make this site more useful for our team of hiring managers throughout the State of Alaska.

Training and Development 2019-2020 Training Season

By Training and Development

Training and Development is proud to announce the online publication of the 2019 – 2020 training season course offerings. You can access course descriptions and enroll in online or classroom courses by accessing the Training and Development Course Offerings page and enrolling via the Student Enrollment/TrainAlaska link.

Please ensure the accuracy of your student transcripts by completely enrolling in classes or online modules and filling out completion forms as directed online. We are concerned when students complete the course work but do not get credit because they did not enroll or fill out a completion form.

Our motto: Get credit for the work you do, fill out enrollment and completion too!

If you run into any issues please contact doa.dop.doptraining@alaska.gov.

Training and Development Courses on SharePoint

By Training and Development

With the start of the new training season all online course offering from Training and Development have been moved to a new SharePoint site. The classroom courses and descriptions will still be available for enrollment on the Training and Development website.

Functionally, the process is similar to what it was before. Employees should login to TrainAlaska to enroll in a course and then they can go to the DOPLR Online Course list now on SharePoint.

Before accessing the courses on SharePoint, you will be required to login using your Employee Email and Password, the same information that you would use to access Webmail. Since the SharePoint site is part of the Office 365 suite, it uses the same login credentials as Webmail. If you use Webmail to access a shared inbox you will need to logout and log back in under your Employee Email to access the Training and Development SharePoint site.

Once you have accessed the site you can view any of the trainings available for either the DOPLR Online Courses or the Rapid Learning Courses. Upon completion of the required modules you will need to submit a completion form to get credit within TrainAlaska for completing the coursework. If you run into any issues please contact doa.dop.doptraining@alaska.gov.

IRIS Upgrade Announcment

By IRIS

The Division of Finance is excited to announce that a decision has been made on our upgrade path for IRIS. After months of consideration around the advantages and disadvantages of upgrading IRIS from version 3.9 to 3.11 or 4.0 and a review of IRIS user feedback, a decision has been made that it is in the State’s best interest to upgrade to version 4.0. All components of IRIS will be updated as part of this upgrade effort including Financial/Procurement (FIN/PROC), Human Resource Management (HRM), Vendor Self Service (VSS), and Employee Self Service (ESS).

The enhanced user interface and available features offered in version 4.0 were important deciding factors, along with the desire to upgrade to the latest version of the software product so we aren’t facing multiple successive upgrades. We are looking forward to diving into this project as soon as possible.

Initial planning efforts are just beginning, please stay tuned for more information including a project timeline in the coming months as we work through the initial Envision phase of the project.

If you have any questions regarding this announcement, please email IRIS Customer Support at IRIS.Project@alaska.gov.

Photo: Change Management Training

By DOPLR

DOPLR Training and Development Manager Tim Parker (middle), AKA Science Officer Parker, conducted a Change Management training this week (June 18, 2019) entitled “Trekking Through Change – Warping to Change Acceptance.” Tim, of course, as the instructor dressed the part as did some attendees.