The Company
CAA-DK Accepts Only Top-Flight Quality
The Danish Civil Aviation Authority (CAA-DK) is a semi-public organization that reports directly to the Danish Ministry of Transportation. The organization is charged with a considerable list of vital responsibilities that range from the regulatory and governance to service and administration aspects of air travel. CAA-DK has the authority to establish aviation guidelines, grant aviation permissions, and conduct inspections of Danish aircraft, airlines, airports, engine maintenance shops, parts and product suppliers, service units, and other relevant technical facilities. Established as an agency in 1938, CAA-DK became a public company in 1986. Today it employs more than 180 people, and its highly specialized experts are fully qualified to address the breadth of CAA-DK's function.
CAA-DK's mission is to maintain a safe and sustainable basis for civil air traffic through effective, symbiotic collaboration with all contributors. By applying its core values, Responsibility, General view, Flexibility, Respect and Efficiency, CAA-DK delivers the quality and reliability that helps keep Danish airspace secure and functioning smoothly.
Ambitious HR, and for good reason
CAA-DK is one of the few organizations in the world that is ISO 9000 certified in human resources. This is no small achievement. “We’ve worked aggressively with competency management for a number of years now,” says Per Jensen, Director of Human Resources and Service at CAA-DK. “We’d applied it throughout our business even before we purchased MindKey™ HCM, and have compiled a comprehensive catalogue of the competencies available in our various offices,” continues Per Jensen.
CAA-DK demonstrates what can be described as an above-average ambition in HR and competency management, and for good reason. The knowledge, abilities, and experience of its inspectors are, in essence, the company’s primary product. It’s commonly said that flying is among the safest means of travel, and this can be directly attributed to agencies like CAA-DK. Its agents must be expert in their diverse fields and stay abreast of developments in avionics and the airline industry in general.
There are checks and balances, and CAA-DK itself is subject to rigorous quality inspections. The agency must conform to regulations stipulated by several international regulatory commissions, including the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). "We must be able to document that we both have and continue to develop specific competencies, which is one of the main ways in which we use MindKey HCM. This helped us thorough the ISO certification, and it certainly helped us through the last audit by ICAO. They could see that the system can support the international competency requirements for supervising authorities and, more specifically, the course management and training functionality helps our inspectors actively maintain their expertise," tells Per Jensen.
Elizabeth Højrizi, an HR Consultant at CAA-DK, chimes in, “Training is a big part of a knowledge heavy organization like ours. On the job training, self study, mentoring, certification courses, this is important information that MindKey HCM helps us manage and document more efficiently.”
Putting MindKey HCM to good use, right out of the box
A business system that is left unused is a useless system. One of the first hurdles when introducing a new system is simply getting busy people to actually use it. This is one area in which CAA-DK has noticed a change for the better."Most managers in our larger offices actively use the system, especially in connection with employee discussions. We've seen that MindKey HCM not only helps them conduct reviews and appraisals according to our high standards, but perhaps more importantly we’ve seen that the system improves preparation on both sides of the table. Employees respond positively to using the system to prepare for development discussions, and outcomes are much more productive because the time has been spent on focused conversation rather than exploratory negotiations,” states Per Jensen. “Additionally,” Per continues, “employees are excited about the enhanced visibility of their competency profiles. They can clearly see the benefits, both for their own careers and for the company, in keeping information about their profiles up-to-date.”
CAA-DK has taken advantage of the opportunity to fully standardize competency management and employee discussion processes throughout its organization. “Rather than trying to bend an IT solution to meet a particular person’s preferences, we chose to implement the processes exactly as they are in MindKey HCM. Standardizing our processes has definitively helped our constantly evolving organization improve consistency, made it easier to engage new managers and employees, and lightened our administrative load” explains Per Jensen.
Elizabeth Højrizi continues this thread, “This engagement has also shortened the hire-to-deployment cycle. It used to take up to several years before an inspector was qualified to conduct live inspections. Our improved ability to systematically document and manage training has helped us reduce this ramp up time, and shorten the training period.”
Positive feedback from users
“The feedback we receive is positive,” concludes Elizabeth Højrizi. “What I hear is that MindKey HCM is easy to use, the interface looks good and its closeness to Microsoft Office products helps take the pain out of learning a new application. The system’s advantages are readily apparent to employees, but what I think makes the biggest difference is that they believe the processes are effective, and they know that our focus on this work is committed, genuine, and highly professional.”
Benefits Summary
CAA-DK has used MindKey HCM to achieve the following:
- Smoother processes for completing audits from international regulatory agencies
- Improved HR process knowledge transfer to new managers and employees
- Shortened hire-to-deployment cycle for inspectors
- Increased employee and manager engagement in HR processes due to an easy-to-use, attractive interface
- Employees and managers are more engaged with the processes that are important to CAA-DK due to an easy-to-use, attractive interface
- Reduced administration through the elimination of spreadsheets
