Mind the Gap: Skill-driven Strategic Workforce Learning and Development

Scheer is a forward-thinking IT consulting company that prioritises the continuous professional and personal development of its employees. With a strong focus on growth, adaptability, and operational efficiency, Scheer remains agile and competitive in a rapidly evolving market landscape. Through strategic planning, Scheer continuously analyses, reviews and documents its needs to increase its market value and keep its employees well-trained to face current and future challenges. By leveraging the DS4Skills data space – its offerings, building blocks, trust framework, regulatory compliance and governance structure – Scheer aims to strengthen collaboration with trusted data and (AI) service providers. This is expected to unlock new business and innovation opportunities and support cost-effective, advanced skill-driven strategic workforce learning and development.

Using Skills Management, Scheer aims at supporting HR (L&D), Managers and Team Leads to:     

• Increase skill transparency (mapping, identification, evaluation, analysis)
• Promote targeted and personalised upskilling, particularly in future-oriented areas (AI, agile, SAP)
• Support career development (vertical, horizontal)
• Influencing decisions (hiring, investing in areas and training)

More specifically, Scheer aims to enable targeted personnel development, focused upskilling, recruiting, and simple matching of individuals to projects within the company. By integrating and visualising all available skills at the individual, team, and organisational levels, and analysing the resulting skill gaps, we can better adapt our training needs, recruit employees with the required skills, and match our workforce to suitable projects based on their skillsets.  

Additionally, Scheer aims to consolidate skills data from disparate systems into one integrated skills dashboard. Over the years, Scheer has collected various data that support the evaluation of the employees’ skills and needs. However, this data is distributed across multiple systems and is available in multiple formats. Hence, the data requires to be properly prepared, collected and aggregated from various sources. Using various services to support the preparation and analysis of data is therefore needed.

Having an overview of all existing skills, the company can easily compare them with the company’s and market’s requirements. Through an analytical tool, HR, Managers and Team Leads can quickly identify gaps and tailor upskilling and recruiting strategies accordingly. This allows managers to align the training programs more closely with the actual needs of the organisation.

As a company, Scheer assumes that skills management and analysis will provide them with effective monitoring of which skills are lacking or need to be strengthened. This enables more targeted personnel development, which in turn leads to cost savings – for instance, by only offering training that is truly needed. In addition, a skills dashboard can be used to inform and support management decisions. For example, investing in training or departmental development. Besides, Scheer can respond more quickly to emerging needs. For example, if a new skill is required, Scheer can first analyse whether it already exists within the organisation. If not, it can be developed in a focused way. Moreover, identifying skill gaps allows Scheer to specifically recruit new employees with the required competencies, which will also result in cost savings.

As a German and EU-based company, Scheer takes the rules and regulations around data privacy and security very seriously. Since skills data are personal and sensitive, it is crucial for Scheer as a company, not only to follow these rules and regulations itself, but also to collaborate with other services and systems that respect and follow them.