PeopleBench Appoints Chief Technology Officer

Education workforce analytics and research company PeopleBench has appointed technology leader Peter Blyth to the position of Chief Technology Officer as it nears 100 subscriptions to its data-driven school benchmarking platform.

PeopleBench offers Principals the chance to track their school’s workforce data and its connection to student outcomes discreetly, then benchmark their workforce anonymously in context with other similar schools.

Blyth’s career in Information and Communication Technology has seen him tackle a broad range of challenges in community facing organisations, leading teams to deliver successful results at companies including Suncorp, EB Games, TechnologyOne and Super Retail Group.

PeopleBench is his first role within the K-12 education sector, where he sees big opportunities for technology to create positive lasting change across the nation.

“Education, just like most traditional sectors, has a huge opportunity to better utilise their existing data and systems to become more efficient and data-driven, ultimately having more impact within the community that they serve,” said Blyth.

“I’d like to see PeopleBench make an impact not only in the specific space of workforce strategy but also in general by helping school leaders harness data to help inform their management decisions.”

He believes that although digital data management systems are a step in the right direction for schools, data needs to be coupled with insights and benchmarking to deliver optimal results.

“A historical record of a teacher's annual leave and professional development has limited value to a school sitting in isolation in a spreadsheet or data management system, but when it is mixed with other data sets from the school, like student outcomes, insights can be gained,” Blyth explained.

“When that workforce and outcomes data is loaded into the PeopleBench platform where it can be benchmarked against other schools, the value of that data is increased yet again – it can then be used to make informed management decisions about annual leave and professional development to improve student outcomes.”

PeopleBench is aiming to grow its community through new subscriptions to its platform, looking to expand across the country and, in the near future, across the globe.

“The more schools that do provide their data, the more useful and accurate the benchmarking becomes,” said Blyth.

“At this stage we benchmark Australian schools against each other but imagine what we could learn if this was a global platform where Principals were gaining insights from all corners of the world!”

The PeopleBench platform is a Software as a Service (SaaS) tool developed in Amazon Web Services (AWS) that any user can access via their web browser on any device.

PeopleBench is currently available to Australian schools on a subscription model. The company also creates an annual report based on finding from data supplied by all schools to help education systems across all sectors with governance and decision-making around their workforce.