[atrt2] Staff response and clarification - Inventory Item #26: Ensure senior staffing arrangements are appropriately multilingual

[Larisa B. Gurnick]

Lise and Fiona,

Staff has been reviewing the proposed observations and recommendations considered by the ATRT 2 and would like to offer several clarifications.  As you are the ATRT 2 members assigned to complete the analysis and the documentation on various items, staff would appreciate your consideration of the information summarized here.

Regarding ATRT 1 Recommendation 22
The level of multi-lingual staff is very good at the moment but is there a written policy about the need for language skills for senior staff? And if hiring people without language skills the employee will be taken language courses?

Staff response:
While ICANN does not have a written policy for hiring senior staff with multilingual skills, there are a number of well-established practices and standard operating procedures to address this topic.  As ATRT 2 noted, ICANN has been successful in ensuring that senior staff possess multilingual skills by following these practices, and we anticipate that the level of multilingual knowledge will deepen as ICANN continues to implement its global strategy.  ICANN will consider other appropriate documentation of the importance of multilingual skills for senior staff on a go forward basis.

Practices and standard operating procedures:

 1.  All position descriptions (and job postings) for positions where multilingual skills are appropriate have been written to include multilingual skills  as desired, preferred, or required, as applicable.
 2.  Where appropriate, internal interview survey form asks each interviewer to comment on the multilingual skills of each interviewed candidate - this is a standard operating procedure.
 3.  The geographic expansion in the locations of ICANN offices is resulting in expansion of multilingual skills, by design.

ICANN provides several resources to employees for expanding their language skills.  These resources include access to world-class language training tools, such as Rosetta Stone and busuu.com online language training.  Additionally, ICANN provides tuition for  local instruction classes as needed; such instruction has been provided for Spanish, Dutch, French among other languages, for staff in hub office cities.

Staff appreciates the significant work effort that you and the Review Team have committed to making ongoing improvements in ICANN's accountability and transparency.
Larisa B. Gurnick
Consultant/Senior Director, Organizational Reviews
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
larisa.gurnick at icann.org<mailto:larisa.gurnick at icann.org>
310 383-8995

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