Jarrod McGrath grew up in the small country town of Bathurst in New South Wales, Australia. Bathurst is famous for three things: farming, motor car racing and education. As a young bloke riding motorbikes around on farms, it became obvious to Jarrod that agriculture was not his calling. He fell in love with cars, especially fast ones, which is still a passion of his – but it’s not the topic of for now!
Jarrod’s father and other relatives and friends are educators, school teachers and volunteers. This taught him at an early age that education is a fundamental foundation stone on which you can build a lifetime of learning. It’s also how you learn to challenge and shape what the future holds. Jarrod loves to learn and to challenge – and hopefully shape – what the future may bring.
Jarrod studied the theory of workforce management (WFM) and artificial intelligence (AI) at university. WFM is founded on an area of mathematics known as Operations Research, on which Jarrod focused in his degree. From the outset, Jarrod was intrigued to understand how a business could run more effectively and deliver greater value by optimal use of its assets. When he started working with WFM software in the early 2000s, this idea became tangible when he discovered that Operations Research could be applied to optimising employee productivity and increasing value.
Jarrod has dedicated a substantial part of his career to building the global profile of WFM, and over the years he has had significant hands-on WFM delivery experience from the perspective of the client, service-provider and product-supplier. He worked with enterprise resource planning (ERP) software in the late 1990s and had strong exposure to large enterprise implementations working for a major systems integrator and its clients. In more recent years, he founded and established a global WFM practice for a world-leading human capital management (HCM) player. This gave him more hands-on exposure to global WFM implementations across human resources (HR) and payroll.
In short, Jarrod has been responsible for, and successfully delivered, literally hundreds of WFM programs over the years to clients across a multitude of industries including retail, health, construction, manufacturing, hospitality, service and government. His expertise is in both local and international sales and delivery for large and small-to medium- sized clients, solving an amazing number of interesting and valuable workforce-related business problems.
In his current role as the founder and CEO of Smart WFM (smartwfm.com), a boutique consultancy focused on empowering the workforce now and into the future, he focuses on what clients need to stay relevant in a time of rapid digital advancement.
Jarrod McGrath is a visionary WFM leader who can articulate the strategic value of WFM within a business, from the senior management level through to the operational coal face.
Jarrod McGrath is a public speaker and media commentator. For further information and to find out about Jarrod’s availability, please contact: speaking@smartwfm.com
