SAP leaps forward on its journey to becoming a skill-based organization.

Three years ago, SAP set out on a mission to transform how we delivered learning to our customers, our partners, and our employees -- driven by a strong belief that our success would depend on a skill-based approach. Today, we're happy to share that not only have we taken huge steps to deliver on our foundation of skill-based learning -- we've also been recognized as a top 10 gold winner of the Chief Learning Officer LearningElite award for 2023. This peer-reviewed ranking and benchmarking program recognizes organizations who employ exemplary workforce development strategies that deliver significant business results.

Our ranking as a top-10 organization for learning validates our strong commitment to upskilling and reskilling our workforce, ecosystem of customers and partners, and underrepresented communities across the globe – all with a goal to create opportunity through learning and development for all.

Why we take a skill-based approach to learning

Now more than ever, it’s crucial that upskilling and reskilling opportunities are readily available to help people and organizations continue to innovate and grow. The World Economic Forum predicts that more than 40% of skills and 1 billion jobs will change based on the introduction of new technologies by the end of the decade.

This pace of change and the talent shortage calls for a new approach to understanding and managing skills and roles and a streamlined process aligned across SAP. While up-skilling and re-skilling our workforce is crucial, a skill-based approach can help improve all processes from hire to retire. Instead of the traditional method of focusing on degrees, job histories, or job titles, in relation to a role, we focus on a person’s competencies. This not only results in more accurate recruitment and simplified career development, but also democratizes access to economic opportunities and could mean an estimated 100 million more people in the global talent pool (WEF, 2023). It all starts with skill-focused job descriptions that outline the skills and capabilities an employee should bring or aim to develop. This shifts the emphasis from required tasks for a job to required talents – and how those talents could be applied in a role (Harvard Business Review, 2023). SAP’s commitment to defining more meaningful, skill-based role descriptions will help employees to identify potential future roles across the company, as well as bringing further diversity to our employee base through skill-based hiring.

Aside from revolutionizing our job descriptions, we must also provide people with continuous skill-based learning – relevant training opportunities based on a person’s current skills vs. required future skills for their current or desired role. Of course, to know where we need to go, we first need to know where we are – and that requires skill transparency. Simply put, we need to have a clear picture of our current skill portfolio across SAP, as well as the necessary frameworks in place to continuously access that data as our transformation continues.   

We’ve implemented dashboards to provide these vital insights on our skills internally and we closely monitor trends and changes externally in the market, so we can easily assess our skills against required skills and provide meaningful upskilling to fill any gaps.

Delivering a more personalized experience for every learner

We’ve also laid a strong foundation for company-wide skills transparency by defining a globally aligned skills language at SAP, simplified significantly from over 6,500 skills to less than 1500. This includes 32 professional and leadership skills relevant across all roles, and baseline development skills that commonly apply for roles in our development organizations – like Security, DevOps and AI. By leveraging globally compiled skills from Lightcast, we combined our internal and external skills into a single taxonomy, aligned with market trends. This in turn enables us to update our internal roles and bring them closer to our customer and partner ecosystem. With one language for skills, employees understand the most sought-after skills in the industry, and we can ensure we’re speaking the same language as our customers and partners. Our taxonomy was a huge milestone in our skills transformation journey and, in fact, was commended as a great contribution to the wider learning and development field by the LearningElite program.

We’ve also started unifying existing skill management tools and migrating everyone to one platform to manage skill-based development for our whole workforce, powered by SAP SuccessFactors. How does all this support the average employee in their daily work? It’s pretty simple really – by regularly assessing their skills and competency levels - using one language - and maintaining that data on one platform, they’ll receive tailored upskilling recommendations based on exactly where they are in their learning journey. This simplified access to career development means less time wasted looking for learning, and more time spent actually learning. A skill-based approach to learning has already delivered impact in SAP: within our development organization, 60% of employees have already received a personalized learning communication based on their skill level and role. This resulted in increased registration for key learning events that focused on strategically important topics, and greater impact on day-to-day work for participants. Skill transparency also led to prioritizing AI learning early, which enabled us to quickly deliver a cohesive AI learning collection for over 100k employees as the strategic importance of this topic grew rapidly and continues to accelerate.

Solving an industry-wide challenge

Of course, SAP isn’t alone on the journey to becoming a skills-based organization.  It’s clear that the current macroeconomic environment is characterized by talent scarcity and unprecedented change velocity – like Generative AI disrupting the job market. In 2022, SAP participated in a Mercer study where it became clear that most organizations shared similar challenges and opportunities. We continue to meet regularly with companies like Microsoft, Nokia, Electrolux, MasterCard, Schneider Electric, Unilever, and others to exchange lessons learned and discuss how to solve the skills challenge, together. We recently presented SAP’s skills transformation journey at the Lightcast conference and were delighted to engage with and inspire so many other organizations starting similar journeys. With 2023 being declared the “Year of skills” by the European Commission and the World Economic Forum recently launching the Skills First Lighthouse Program, we’re excited to see the momentum building and organizations across the world working together to revolutionize how we understand and manage skills. By reaching more learners with engaging skill-based content and experience, we can accelerate digital transformation and enable people in every phase of their career to gain the cloud skills they need to be successful.