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Roisin Foley, HR Manager, OpenHydro, outlines how the tidal technology developer became the Engineers Ireland CPD Company of the Year 2011

OpenHydro was established in 2005 with three people – CEO, CFO and chief engineer.

In the six years since then, the company’s workforce has grown in line with the commercial demands of the projects won by the company. Through this period, the company has transitioned from being an R&D company, designing and building test turbines, to a commercially-focused organisation, designing, building and deploying turbines at commercial scale internationally for global utility companies.

The speed with which the company has grown, and with which the technology and market is advancing requires robust recruitment, orientation, performance management and development programmes. All of these systems allowed us at OpenHydro to fast-track our engineers into senior, responsible, international roles. Within the company, we have recognised the importance, even as a small organisation, of investing in CPD for employees to support both their development and our growth.

Business context
Having started as a small-scale R&D company with unique expertise, the challenge for the organisation in recent years was to transition from an R&D organisation to become a commercial business capable of supplying turbines at volume to satisfy the demands of international energy providers.

This had to be achieved while, at the same time, delivering the business plan and our shareholders’ return expectations. This transition required the implementation of a simple, yet robust, practical framework.

That framework now ensures that the organisation finds and fosters the necessary expertise to be able to design, build and deploy turbine systems at a commercial scale internationally in some of the most challenging geographic environments in the world.

To enable this ambitious company-wide transformation to take place, CPD was central in meeting five objectives: a)ensuring all employees within the organisation had clarity and alignment behind the overall strategic goals of the organisation; b)aligning the training and development plans for our employees with the strategic imperatives of the organisation, with a particular focus on commercial-awareness, project management rigour and financial management during the crucial growth and expansion period; c)scaling the team while ensuring no compromise in the integrity of our culture and the quality of the new recruits; d)facilitating the efficient integration into the organisation of new recruits; supported, guided and mentored by their peers and colleagues to ensure that they optimised their capabilities in the shortest possible period of time; and e) building succession planning into the business ensuring that we are developing tomorrow’s leaders for OpenHydro today.

The overall strategic goal was to move from being solely an R&D operation, building turbines for test purposes, to being a supplier of turbine systems at commercial scale and volume by 2013. During that time, we would have to demonstrate the following: an ability to design and manufacture turbines at scale; the development of a commercial scale deployment and recovery methodology; and our capability to establish an array of grid connected turbines (i.e. a tidal farm).