Siemens’ ‘SkillUp! Learning Challenge’ aims to fuel the future with ‘NextSkills’ – how LinkedIn supports Siemens in ASEAN with this initiative
SUCCESS STORY
Driving future success by increasing learner engagement
Siemens is a global technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport and healthcare. It empowers its customers to transform the industries in which they work, but in an ever-changing marketplace, that task gets harder and harder.
This is just one reason why Siemens ensures its employees are equipped with resilience, relevance, and the desire to thrive in a world that is constantly evolving so that they have the skills to help their customers. LinkedIn Learning has been playing an important role to support Siemens ‘SkillUp! Challenge and Competition’ initiative to empower its people to upskill, increase their opportunities to learn, and adopt a growth mindset.
THE CHALLENGE
Creating a learning culture to meet tomorrow’s challenges
Siemens wishes to create a better tomorrow and is committed to transforming the world in which we live and work. However, it acknowledges the challenges faced by its customers and recognises the need to stay relevant in a permanently changing world. It believes its people are the key to making positive change in an unknown future and has a clear vision: To become an adaptive learning organisation that stays at the forefront of change, so it can thrive. But to do that it must invest in its employees, creating equal opportunities for skills development and developing a meaningful learning ecosystem that empowers individuals to learn together, as one cohesive team.
“The need to upskill and reskill our own people has never been more urgent,” explained Chinh Duong, Head of Global Learning and Growth at Siemens ASEAN. “We have been on a journey of transforming our workforce to drive productivity, innovation, and growth.
“Bridging the digital skills gap, anticipating the right skills for the future, motivating, and engaging our local business communities and individuals to accelerate their upskilling journey to create the workforce of tomorrow are complex issues. It requires everyone to work together to foster a culture of learning and make our workplace a more resilient, more capable, and more inclusive place.”
Siemens has created an environment to empower its people to make learning a new habit. Our learning eco-system, My Learning World offers a wealth of digital learning content that is available any time, on any device to help people accelerate skills development and inspire others with their learning experiences and grow in Siemens ASEAN. The LinkedIn Learning platform has been playing a role as one of Siemens strategic learning ecosystem partners.
THE SOLUTION
Making learning accessible and enjoyable
Siemens ASEAN People and Organisation (P&O) Learning and Growth team created the SkillUP! Challenge, an initiative designed to empower employees to build a habit of learning every day and to accelerate upskilling and reskilling. It partners with LinkedIn Learning, working together to curate Learning Paths, providing its employees with access to recommended courses and popular learning content.
In 2021, Siemens launched the SkillUp! 30-Day Challenge. It was such a huge success that Siemens built on the initiative for 2022, and launched SkillUp! 60-Day Challenge, increasing both individual and team learning goals. It used gamification to motivate employees. More importantly, SkillUP! encouraged daily learning, initiated and challenged self-commitment and consistency to develop new learning habits, engaged employees in social learning, and made learning fun and sustainable.
An inspirational skills challenge that empowered employees to invest in themselves
Siemens ASEAN collaborated with LinkedIn and leveraged the platform to curate and prioritise key learning topics and essential work skills.
Chinh continued: “We found that employees wanted to learn so much but sometimes our employees did not know where to start; which skills were important and relevant for them to learn? What impact would certain learning content have on the individual and the business? We had to define our objectives and show employees the most useful skills to have and where they should invest their time. However, time is an issue for everyone.
“One of the challenges our employees faced was finding the time for learning and development and what to learn.”
Siemens ASEAN P&O Learning and Growth team was inspired by LinkedIn newsletters and the platform’s ability to inspire through ideas. Recommended content helped employees to focus their learning. As a result, Siemens highlighted 12 skills that employees should focus on. Employees taking part in the SkillUp! Challenge had to learn a minimum of four Work Skills. Topics included diversity and inclusion, leading with EQ, project management, communication, leadership, and time management. Also, employees had to embrace peer learning and share their learnings at Skills Club – specific community-based learning sessions. This made learning more fun and new skills and learnings were shared using Yammer and social media too.
Motivated to learn more by organisational recognition
In 2021, employees had to partake in eight hours of mandatory learning. In 2022, that increased to 16 hours, but to become a “Learning Guru” on the SkillUp! 60-Day Challenge, employees had to commit to 24 hours of learning. Moving forward that figure will increase.
Chinh explained further: “The challenge supports our HR strategy and has the full support of our executive management team and endorsement to roll it out across ASEAN (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines) to more than 2500 employees. A total of 344 employees signed up to join in the challenge as individual and team.”
She added: “Our employees are so motivated that they are already asking about the next SkillUp! Challenge. They were motivated by the recognition they received from the senior management team and felt that they were contributing to the future of the business. Plus, they enjoyed receiving rewards for their hard work, ambition, and positive attitude towards learning and received larger rewards for their team achievements.”
An award-winning initiative
The SkillUp! Challenge has been a huge success. In fact, the challenge can now be described as “award-winning”. Siemens’ ASEAN P&O Learning and Growth team recently won seven Human Resources magazine awards for the initiative, including Excellence in HR Change Management and Excellence in Workplace Culture.
“We are thrilled that the challenge has made a truly positive impact on our colleagues,” commented Chinh. “Our employees have enjoyed the benefits of lifelong learning and learned to set clear personal goals. They have inspired the company by sharing their learnings on communication, leadership, time management, mental wellbeing, digital skills, strengths discovery, and growth mindset.
“Our initiative has been the highlight of the year. We have created a positive workplace experience where our people feel valued and appreciate our commitment to their development. It’s not about us; it’s all about our people and how they feel making them more engaged.”
“We know that our employees value the challenge greatly. I am pleased to report that they continue to follow their learning journey even after the SkillUp! 60-Day Challenge has officially ended. This has positively impacted the organisation so much that we now plan to use the SkillUp! Challenge model to speed up technical and products learning in APAC and Germany.”
Main product used
THE RESULTS
Award-winning SkillUp! Challenge
Winner of seven Human Resources magazine awards
Increased learner engagement
Employees are eager to continue their learning
Challenge expansion
The SkillUp! Challenge is to be rolled out across other areas of the business and in other regions
In their own words
“The SkillUp! initiative has empowered our people to challenge themselves in adopting a growth mindset and has helped build a lifelong learning culture for learning and growth in Siemens. LinkedIn Learning has played an important role as our ecosystem partner to provide great learning resources to make this initiative a success. We are proud to work with LinkedIn in supporting the journey of enabling our people to stay resilient and relevant in an ever-evolving world. The initiative has won many HR excellence awards in ASEAN. We’re delighted to have been recognised for leading large-scale organisational change to reinforce an adaptive workforce that focuses on capability building and organisational development. We continue to collaborate with LinkedIn to strive for future learning initiatives that focus on nurturing our talents and skills.”
"The SkillUp! 60-Day Learning Challenge was a good opportunity for our Siemens colleagues to embrace the Growth Mindset. It got them to set aside time to pick up new work skills for the present and future. LinkedIn Learning is crucial in supporting our learning challenge with a wholistic catalogue that covers many wide-ranging topics that our people are keen to dive into. With the vast learning tools and in-depth learning resources provided, we can enable our people to foster a healthy learning culture where colleagues can share with each other their learnings from the same resources. We look forward to more collaboration initiatives with LinkedIn Learning to better support our people on their Learning and Growth Journey.”
“I had an enjoyable time cultivating a learning habit through the SkillUp! 30-Day competition – not just learning specialist knowledge but also exploring new topics and skills from the many available learning resources that we have at Siemens.”
"LinkedIn Learning is a great platform for employees to upgrade their knowledge and leadership skills. Through the SkillUp! 60-Day Learning Challenge, I started using the platform as there were many options to choose your learnings based on your personal requirements. The instructors on LinkedIn Learning were quite realistic in imparting the skill and the right content is recommended to the user based on the goals. This helps to save time from the hassle of finding the right instructors or content as we can focus more time on learning. All in all, LinkedIn Learning is a powerful tool that boost the knowledge and skills for the ones who desire to keep themselves upgraded.”
“In a rapid ever-changing industry where IQ and knowledge seem to be a key to success, it struck me that one should not undermine the importance of Emotional Intelligent as well. I was personally intrigued in this specially curated topic for my SkillUp! 60-Day journey and took part in the training ‘Leading with EQ’ from LinkedIn Learning during the Learning Challenge. This learning is relevant and had greatly transformed me to be an empathetic leader, both at work and at home.”
ABOUT SIEMENS
Siemens is a technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare. From more resource-efficient factories, resilient supply chains, and smarter buildings and grids, to cleaner and more comfortable transportation as well as advanced healthcare, the company creates technology with purpose, adding real value for customers. By combining the real and the digital worlds, Siemens empowers its customers to transform their industries and markets, helping them to transform the every day for billions of people.
Industry:
Automation Machinery Manufacturing
Number of employees:
10,001+ employees
Headquarters:
Munich, Germany