Director, Talent Strategy at CDW in Chicago, IL

Job description

Director, Talent Strategy & Planning Reports to: SVP, Head of Talent | Function: Talent | Scope: Global Position Summary The Director, Talent Strategy & Planning is responsible for strengthening CDW's ability to make proactive, business-aligned talent decisions that support growth, transformation, and long-term organizational readiness. This leader ensures CDW has the leadership depth, workforce plans, skills visibility, and performance discipline needed to execute the business strategy today and build the capabilities required for the future. Reporting to the SVP, Head of Talent, this role leads a team focused on building simple, scalable, data-informed talent practices that help leaders understand where the organization is strong, where risk exists, and what actions are needed to close gaps. The Director connects leadership assessment and succession, strategic workforce planning, skills, and performance management into an integrated approach that improves decision-making, strengthens accountability, and prepares CDW for an outcome-obsessed future. The successful candidate will bring an enterprise talent mindset, strong business acumen, and the ability to translate strategy into simple, practical tools and resources that help HR Business Partners and leaders act. They will use AI fluently in their own work and embed it into how talent work gets done across the function. Key Responsibilities Leadership Assessment & Successi on Own the enterprise approach to leadership assessment and succession, ensuring CDW has a clear, differentiated view of leadership strength, readiness, and risk from front-line leader through executive levels. Elevate the quality and depth of talent review discussions by equipping HR Business Partners and leaders with simple, practical guides, templates, and prompts so discussions meaningfully differentiate talent, surface successors and successor gaps, and result in committed actions rather than ratings alone. Drive follow-through on succession outcomes in partnership with HR Business Partners, who own the leader relationships and day-to-day execution, working with the Director, Learning Strategy & Design on targeted development for successors and high-potential leaders and with the Sr Director, Talent Acquisition where succession gaps require external pipeline building. Track and report progress on leadership readiness, bench strength, and completion of agreed talent actions, giving HR Business Partners and leaders easy-to-use views of their own talent picture so accountability for movement is visible over time. Strategic Workforce Plannin g Build strategic workforce planning as a new enterprise capability at CDW, starting simple and maturing the approach over time so it becomes a practical input to business and functional planning rather than an HR exercise. Translate business priorities and growth plans into a forward view of the roles, skills, and capabilities CDW will need, and the gaps between that future state and today's workforce. Help leaders understand workforce implications, risks, and tradeoffs earlier through practical planning tools and clear, digestible outputs that support informed decisions on capacity, capability, build-versus-buy, and readiness. Partner with Talent Acquisition, Learning, Finance, and HR Business Partners so workforce plans connect to hiring plans, development investment, and budget cycles. Shift CDW to a Skills-Based Talent Organization Lead the shift toward a skills-based talent organization, giving CDW a real-time view of workforce capability and a common language for skills across talent processes. Advance the skills framework and taxonomy, organizing priority skills into clear groupings that leaders and coworkers can actually use, including integration with the CDW Way values and commitments. Progress the multi-year skills infrastructure roadmap and the effective use of supporting technology (for example Workday Skills Cloud) to build skills visibility at scale, wh