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F E A T U R E S
HR TECH CASE STUDIES
S P E C I A L F E A T U R E
EMBARKING ON
DIGITAL UPSKILLING
FOR A BETTER TOMORROW
ALMOST
three-quarters (7 1 per
cent) of CEOs are worried
about skill gaps in their organizations,
according to data from PwC's 2021
Global CEO survey. Businesses are
facing a "skills mismatch" — and this
challenge is expected to persist over the
decade.
To address this growing issue, PwC
Canada helps organizations prepare
for a new world with new skills through
"digital workforce transformation."
Effectively, this transformation uses
the "new world, new skills" approach
to challenge the norm of upskilling
employees. It keeps employees at the
forefront and empowers them to drive
citizen-led innovations to disrupt their
business and evolve for the better. It's
an initiative that enables upskilling
on technologies that quickly unlock
great value.
Telecom embarks
on upskilling program
Recently, this approach was used on a
Canadian telecommunications client,
who praised the approach:
"The program is shifting our culture
— people feel empowered to address
their issues with new skills and tools.
It's amazing to think that, in four
months, we've completed over 60
automations, with a runway of more
ideas to tackle."
The company saw a few key reasons
behind wanting to embark on an
upskilling program. Staff was being
asked to do more with less, without
Telecommunications company uses 'new world, new skills' approach
to empower workers to solve problems and drive innovations such
as predictive inventory forecasting, automated executive financial
reporting and streamlined learning and development tracking
new tools to do the job more effectively.
People struggled to free up capacity
to work on new strategic initiatives.
Existing analytics and automation
efforts were focused on small analytics
teams but hadn't truly scaled, and IT
was generally too busy working on large
projects. The client wanted to accel-
erate the change in how its people were
empowered to solve problems at the
front lines more efficiently.
To address this issue, PwC Canada
recommended the company launch
an upskilling program. The team first
started the journey by rallying senior
leaders around a program vision and
developed a business plan to quantify
the opportunity for automation. The
organization put together a "mission
control" team that was focused on
launching the program quickly through
pilots, working in a very agile manner.
Within six weeks, the client began
to upskill its workforce, running
"upskilling sprints" on automation,
data wrangling and analytics tools.
An upskilling sprint is a five-week
program where participants go through
a three-day training in PwC Canada's
Virtual Digital Academies (VDA).
Participants are upskilled on analysis
and automation tools such as Alteryx,
Power BI, Tableau, UiPath or a client's
preferred tools. Participants are also
asked to submit opportunities they see
to apply the tools to the "Idea Lab" as a
way to manage a backlog of innovation
opportunities.
Following the academy, participants
