Skill management

Siemens: Benchmarked Against Labor Market Competitors & Future Trends

Achieved goals:

Identified emerging roles and skills among the top competitors in the market

Gained transparency on future skills and a structure to guide future-focused employee development

Enabled proactive data-driven workforce decisions

The challenges

Global Business Services is responsible for innovating, designing, transforming, and efficiently executing business services for Siemens units and external customers. The unit has 20 years of experience in Shared Services, focusing on an agile digital environment for its workforce.

By analyzing macroeconomic data with a focus on workforce trends, the task was to:

Evaluate the future orientation of skills demanded by Siemens GBS
Benchmark the jobs and skills demand against selected direct competitors
Evaluate future workforce trends and the evolution of job roles & skill profiles

„HRForecast creates transparency and benchmarking information based on its big data concept easily. We were impressed by the high level of expertise and excellent project management experience. The results from the competitor benchmark analysis helped us to meet data-driven based workforce decisions.“

Sabine Köhler, Vice President Human Resources for Global Shared Services (GBS), Siemens GBS

The reason behind the conducted project

Sabine Köhler, who was in the lead of the project from the Siemens side, explained the project’s aim and motives:

“We always saw potential in applying Big Data and workforce analytics to obtain new insights about our workforce and optimize HR processes. For us, it was a great opportunity to enable targeted action through storytelling with data and strengthen HR function through the utilization of analytics.”

The main aim was to gain an overview of the current labor market situation, including competitor benchmarking, trending skills, and emerging job roles. To put it in a nutshell: Siemens wanted to analyze the labor market competitors, know what future-oriented skills and trends they are looking for and establishing and how Siemens is positioned among them.

Why Siemens chose HRForecast

“Innovative, data-driven, and fast in execution – HRForecast showed its innovative approach towards the set target and explained how we could profit from the available data and complete the analysis in a data-driven way efficient and fast. The team convinced us from the kick-off meeting until the results hand-over with its professional attitude,” explains Sabine. At first, the project teams needed some time to calibrate and link the set goals with the available macroeconomic data. “As it was clarified, we were steadily kept up to date by the professional team. The project was led by Yugendra Subedee, and we experienced very high-quality project management, including perfect team constellation and seamless communication,” adds Sabine.

Questions answered in the project

Competitor benchmarking:

How does Siemens Global Business Service perform in terms of talent recruitment compared to selected competitors in the market?
What are the labor trends of industry-specific competitors?
Which skills is the market intensively recruiting?

Future workforce insights:

Which roles and skills are becoming more relevant in the specific industry, which ones are becoming less relevant?
What are the main future capability clusters that emerging roles and skills fall under?
For selected roles: How does the distribution of traditional hard skills, digital skills, and soft skills differ between selected competitors in the market and Siemens GBS?

Results

“Just within six weeks, we gained the knowledge about our competitors’skill landscape and received a much better picture of the global labor market situation,” says Sabine Köhler. According to Sabine, the provided insights into business trends, skill development, and emerging roles have helped her team redefine the workforce strategy and meet data-driven decisions. Knowing the kind of skills that are trending on the labor market and how these trends are converted into concrete skills and job profiles has helped to review and optimize the employee development paths and hiring practices and be ready for the future.