Head of Talent & Culture

Talent Development & Learning is the Global Value Team that owns how Nokia identifies, develops, and leads its people, including culture and leadership. As the Talent Lead, you will hold the frame for talent, succession, performance, culture, and learning end-to-end, designing once on behalf of many rather than servicing each business group separately. Your role will involve governing a focused and deliberately lean global program catalogue, so that Nokia offers standard principles rather than a standard service everywhere and concentrates investment on a few interventions that create the greatest enterprise value.

You will simplify a landscape of programs, frameworks, and practices accumulated over time, removing duplication and complexity rather than carrying it forward. Increasingly, you will design talent and development approaches that can be enabled by data, AI, technology, leaders, and employees themselves, allowing the Global Value Team to remain focused on enterprise strategy, architecture, governance, and the capabilities that differentiate Nokia.
 

Core Purpose

To own the strategy, framework, and governance for how Nokia develops its talent and its leaders, defining the processes the company runs rather than executing them for each unit. You will be accountable for what enters the global catalogue and what Nokia stops offering, continually simplifying the portfolio and challenging whether centrally provided programs remain the best answer.

You will create simple, scalable and increasingly AI-enabled frameworks that allow leaders, employees, and businesses to take greater ownership of talent and development, while maintaining the enterprise standards Nokia needs. Success means no more programs, but fewer, higher-impact interventions that are easier to navigate, easier to execute, and capable of reaching Nokia at scale.

• Global talent strategy: Own the global talent strategy, defining the process Nokia uses to identify and move talent rather than running it separately for each business group and region. Simplify the mechanisms through which talent is identified and matched to opportunity, using data and technology to improve visibility and reduce dependence on manually intensive processes.

• Global culture strategy: Own the global culture strategy, including employee listening and engagement and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, and set what a healthy Nokia organization is measured against (organizational health)

• Global leadership framework: Own the global leadership framework, set what Nokia expects of its leaders and how leadership capability is assessed across the company at every level, Keep the framework simple, distinctive, and embedded in the moments that matter rather than creating stand-alone leadership processes

• Learning: Own learning strategy, framework, and governance, and the delivery of leadership and behavioral programs; functional and technical learning passes back to the business that needs it. Shape a learning ecosystem that increasingly uses AI, digital platforms, and learning in the flow of work to personalize development and reduce reliance on centrally administered programs

• Performance management: Own the performance management framework and approve every change to the rating, calibration, and goal-setting model; People Services runs the annual cycle

• Succession: Own the succession framework for Nokia's critical positions and decide what counts as a credible pipeline; the People Partner builds the pipeline inside their own business group. Use enterprise talent data and insight to strengthen visibility of internal talent and ensure succession remains a leadership-owned process rather than a centrally administered HR exercise

• Program catalogue governance: Decide what enters the global catalogue and reject bespoke regional or unit programming; the People Partner brings the need, and you set the answer

• AI-enabled talent and development: Set the direction for how AI can simplify and strengthen talent, learning, performance, succession, and leadership practices, including where AI can provide personalized guidance, surface insights, connect talent to opportunities, or enable employees and managers to act without HR intermediation and partner with People Tech & AI on the talent technology roadmap, including skills platforms, talent marketplaces, learning ecosystems, and talent intelligence tools

• Operating model and execution: Design each framework with clear choices about what the GVT owns, what technology enables, what leaders and employees execute, and what should no longer be done. Resist building central capability where ownership can sit effectively in the business or be enabled digitally

• External Labour Market Intelligence: Continuously assess external labor market trends, emerging skill demands, competitor talent strategies, and workforce innovations to ensure Nokia’s talent approach remains future-focused and externally competitive.

• Future Capability Forecasting: Identify the capabilities, skills, and leadership profiles Nokia will require over the next 3–5 years, partnering with business leaders and Workforce Transformation Enablement to anticipate future talent demand before gaps emerge.

• Skills Marketplace Strategy: Define and govern Nokia’s enterprise skills strategy, creating transparent visibility of skills across the workforce and enabling dynamic matching of people to opportunities, projects, learning, and career pathways.

• Internal Talent Mobility: Establish internal talent mobility as a strategic capability, accelerating movement of talent across business groups, functions, geographies, and career paths to maximize internal opportunity, capability development, and workforce agility.

• Strategic Workforce Readiness: Ensure Nokia maintains sufficient depth in critical future skills by proactively shaping talent pipelines, development pathways, and mobility mechanisms for emerging business priorities.
   

• Hands-On Content Experience: Has worked hands-on in talent and culture; hands-on leadership and learning experience are favorable. Combines depth in the disciplines with the ability to challenge established HR practices rather than preserving them

• Talent Experience: Required, given talent's priority on Nokia's agenda. Talent experience is taken to cover succession planning and performance management, with an understanding of how data and technology can make talent decisions more dynamic, transparent, and scalable

• End-to-End Framework Creation: Has created frameworks, policy, and strategy end-to-end in a centralized environment, which is new to Nokia

• Actionable Framework Design: Builds frameworks with a business mindset and hands over work the business can act on, not an ivory-tower product

• Business Exposure: Has business or HR VP experience; a candidate who has never worked in or been exposed to the business does not qualify. Understands where HR activity creates enterprise value and where HR complexity gets in the way of it

• Talent and Succession Architecture: Builds a succession and talent framework that senior leaders actually use

• Portfolio Judgment: Stops a program the organization is fond of and defends the decision to its sponsors

• Executive Credibility: Persuades a Group Leadership Team member to adopt a framework they did not commission

• Consultation Literacy: Recognizes which talent or culture changes require works council consultation first

• Digital and AI Fluency: Understands how AI, data, and digital platforms are changing talent and learning and can distinguish genuinely transformative use cases from technology layered onto an unnecessarily complex process

• Future Workforce & Skills Strategy: Demonstrated experience building skills-based organizations, developing future capability strategies, and translating technology trends and business strategies into actionable talent priorities and workforce investments.

• Learning Delivery Experience: Has run leadership or behavioral program delivery at global scale

• Design for AI Execution: Specifies a process precisely enough for an agent to run it under human supervision

• Transformation Experience: Has been part of a transformation initiative. This role needs less transformation depth than People Services

• Talent Technology and Analytics: Has used talent intelligence, skills data, learning technology, or AI-enabled platforms to improve talent visibility, development, or workforce decisions

• Commits to one global catalogue and pushes back against granting exceptions that would restart bespoke programming anywhere

• Adopts a “Nokia First” mindset, prioritizing what is best for Nokia over the programs their own organization built

• Empowers line managers to run talent identification and team culture rather than reclaiming that work centrally

• Communicates with transparency when a program is stopped, including to the people who built and ran it

• Mobilizes across the business to push execution outward while the frame stays with the Global Value Teams

• Challenges activity before improving it, asking whether Nokia should continue doing something before redesigning or digitizing how it is done

• Uses technology to remove friction and democratize access to talent and development rather than simply digitizing existing HR programs

• Measures success through business impact, talent outcomes, adoption, simplicity, and reduced organizational effort—not through the number of programs delivered or participants served