Skill management

AI meets learning: Personalized learning experience through AI

Faced challenges

One goal of HR is to identify the right talents with the right skills, thus ensuring effective workforce planning that is oriented towards future requirements and challenges. Important “digital” jobs of the future must be strategically planned and filled by Human Resources already today. Just as future employees must be recruited, training and skills of existing employees must be developed in time.

The HR team of Austria’s leading telecommunications company A1 started at an early stage to deal with these challenges and launched a project together with HRForecast for tailor-made workforce development for future Data Scientists and Data Engineers.

„A traditional top-down approach regarding (strategic) workforce planning and therefore skill development is not working anymore. We live in times when even our private life is affected by digitalization and individualization. The customer has been put into the driver’s seat. This effects also HR and the Learning & Development approach. And that’s why we came to a decision to enable our team members to take care of their own development by using efficient and state-of-the-art technologies. And on the other side, with this AI-supported approach, we helped certain business units and therefore the entire company to target the right employees and offered relevant development and career steps for 70 engaged colleagues.“

Christian Göttinger, Head of Learning & Talent Acquisition, Business HR

Questions to be clarified:

How can AI support in identifying the right potentials with the right mindset to close the personal skill-gap?

How can we identify and make transparent the individual and strategic skillset that needs to develop?

How can we shape a learner-centric experience at scale, which closes the gap from theory to practical application?

How can we enable constant learning on an individual basis for every engaged employee in the entire target group?

Project approach

1. Creation of future job profiles

We created future-oriented job profiles for ‘Data Scientist’ and ‘Big Data Engineer’ based on the analysis of worldwide macroeconomic data. More than 150 A1 employees (independently from their professional background) applied for participation in the AI-based individual learning journey to develop themselves towards these job profiles.

2. Skill matching of the employee profiles with the target job profiles

Unstructured employee data of the participants (CVs, certificates, training) were analyzed using AI technology and the skills were systematically registered and stored in the skill platform app – smartPeople. The participants could access their individual skill profiles via app or web tool and take advantage of various services, such as matching target profiles, analyzing skill gaps, and finding appropriate learning content and paths.

3. Enabling of individual learning journey towards future profiles

70 employees started their self-motivated journey. An interactive dashboard was created for each employee, which provides information about individual learning paths with concrete training so that employees can develop strategically and reduce the skill gap to the target profiles.

Key insights & value-adds for the client

Using AI algorithms and intelligent application of HR tool A1 could:

rethink existing job profiles with regard to their future orientation
create transparency about hidden employee potential through automated competency evaluations
identify suitable candidates for future skill profiles
foster independent, tailor-made learning to fill skill gaps and be prepared for future requirements.