Umeme targets top local talent

The trainees at Umeme's academy in Jinja. The academy attracts top talent from Ugandan universities

Power distributor, Umeme, is consolidating its position as the top talent destination of choice through its comprehensive graduate trainee programme.

The giant utility is now among the top preferred destinations for young and talented graduates, according the recent the Federation of Uganda Employers survey.

The graduate programme aims at creating a pool of competent talent more than enough and ready to handle all the company's mainly engineering and technical activities.

Since 2007, Umeme has been running a graduate trainee programme where at least 20 fresh, but talented graduates from top universities' engineering departments are brought on board, further trained, given hands-on experience, taught about the company vision, mission, values and oriented to be customer-focused in their duties thereafter.

Academy launched
To execute all this, Umeme launched an academy in Jinja, specifically for this purpose.

Initially, the training lasted two years, but this has now been increased to three years to cater for the dynamic customer needs.

After the hands-on training or on-job learning, which covers over 80% of the training, the beneficiaries are incorporated into various operations of the company, including the mainstream engineering, maintenance engineering, customer services, operations engineering, project engineering and safety engineering.

"The idea is to build a total and an all-round technician with all the necessary skills. We take the recruits through all the core processes of the business as far as the technical and customer service aspects are concerned," Michael Bwisho, the Umeme talent manager, explains.

He disclosed that over 200 technicians had been recruited in the past two years in a bid to bridge the capability gaps as the giant utility scales up its customer experience.

"Our strategy is to increase the staff to customer ratio in order to be more proactive in responding to customer service issues and fault resolution timelines," Bwisho says.

"To date, most of our senior engineering and other technical staff are a result of this programme," Bwisho says.

"The whole idea of the programme is to create a pool of talent to ensure that our operations run seamlessly even in the event of some senior engineers retiring, and this is already working. It also caters for seamless transition," adds Bwisho.

He notes that the three-year programme in structured into the development path and experiences.

The experience represents milestones at different stages of the development expected of a graduate. These experiences will be delivered with various accountabilities and collaboration with various stakeholders. Other methods include workshops, self-development, connect events and coaching.

"You will notice that there are a greater number of interventions at the beginning of the programme, gradually lessening over the span of the three years. The key to unlocking trainees' personal growth is through discovering their unique combination of skills and strengths, so this allows more scope for them, and their line manager to really build an individual development plan that is right for them," Bwisho, explains.

Exciting opportunities
He explained that a career in Umeme offers numerous exciting career opportunities limited only by the candidates' potential and willingness to contribute.

Umeme offers various people opportunities, including direct recruitment of 1,470 current staff, 50 annual internship opportunities with option to stay, 720 current indirect workforces through contracting companies and 20 graduate recruitment across various departments annually.

A recipe for a successful Umeme career hinges mainly on building expertise in two broad competence areas of technical competence in function and leadership competence development.

Selestino Babungi, the Umeme managing director, says the number of staff has grown to 1,470 today, up from 1,351 in 2005. In essence, this means that there are 706 customers per staff today, up from 216 in 2005.

He says the utility is expecting to expand three times its current size with the coming on board of Karuma and Isimba dams.

"Our committed and engaged workforce has been at the centre of delivering our great performance over the years. We have continued to invest in skills development for our staff, while ensuring a conducive and safe workplace to deliver service to our customers and other stakeholders," he says.

In order to improve efficiency, Babungi says they had to innovate and make use of social media in order to keep in touch with their clients and also allow for quick response to customer complaints. "Over the years, we concluded the integration of our payment platforms with major financial institutions, mobile money operators and points of sale service points," he says.

This enables the closeout of cash offices within their retail outlets. This initiative not only improved operating efficiencies, but improved the customer experience in the retail outlets and freed some resources tied to cash management work stream. "We revamped our contact centre through deployment of a new call manager and provision of many online customer digital channels, including the UmemeApp. We have noted about 56% reduction in voice

calls and growth in other digital communication platforms," he added. The company has also improved its technical capabilities, organizational development, engineering, human resource and contractor capabilities.

"Human resource plays an instrumental role in securing the future success of Umeme by creating an environment where employees can thrive and are enabled to deliver sustainable organizational performance," Babungi explains, adding, "Umeme is an equal opportunity employer with a team of about 1,500 talented staff supplying electricity and delightfully giving care to over 1.2 million customers across our 45 service centres in the country.

We attract and recruit the best there is in our market with the potential, skills and experience necessary execute our mandate and grow the business sustainably. We run a transparent recruitment process focused on roles that drive the business objectives through the organisation structure."

He said the company will continue to replenish its talent pipeline with both experienced and fresh graduates through the graduate training programme. "We recruited 20 graduate trainees to the programme in 2017 across the business. Our structured programme encourages graduates to build on their passions and individual skills. The programme entails structured rotations, challenging assignments, learning and development; experience working on major projects and mentorship by management in the areas of expertise," he adds.

Improved service delivery
The utility has made tremendous improvements in its domestic and industrial service delivery with Yaka billing system, mainly for domestic, commercial and government customers, with up to 70% of the customer base on prepayment billing, cashless with over 15 partnering commercial banks, mobile money services, Eezymoney and PayWay.

Babungi says they have introduced intelligent network watchdog SCADA, which helps in detecting faults on the network and helping in quick supply restoration, reduction in outages, automated meter reading (AMR) for large consumer users, e-bills and SMS bills, all of which have offered customers a new lot of customer experience by giving them the power to manage and control their consumption and bills.