Business leaders are increasingly making skills a top priority for their organizations as they strive for agility in a complex world. However, many are running up against a looming skills gap that threatens to undermine business continuity. In fact, the World Economic Forum predicts that 44% of workers’ skills globally will be disrupted in the next five years. Organizations cannot afford to simply wait and see how their industries will be affected; the risk of being left behind in the marketplace is too great. SAP SuccessFactors’ 2024 HR Trends research reveals the costly choices that organizations must now navigate to acquire new skills – whether to build, borrow, buy, or bot. 

Norsk Hydro, a global aluminum and renewable energy company based in Norway with 33,000 employees in 40 countries, is one example of an enterprise that is on a journey towards becoming a skills-based organization. Jeanine Fremstad, Norsk Hydro’s global lead for Skills and Learning, explains why the company is taking a proactive approach to skills development and learning: “We need to keep up with the evolving landscape of workforce skills to remain competitive and at the forefront of our industry.” 

Upholding a long-standing tradition of sustainable industrial development, Norsk Hydro has ambitions to pioneer the transition to “green aluminum” powered by renewable energy by the end of the decade. To get there, the organization decided to take a structured approach to skills and learning by undertaking a pilot project using SAP SuccessFactors solutions.

Fremstad says the initiative is essential to Norsk Hydro’s business strategy and to attract and retain people. “We need to know what skills we already have in the company in order to know what skills we need to attract. We also need to know what skills we need to develop,” she says. “Being able to offer attractive learning and development opportunities is key to retaining people.”

She offers a straightforward assessment of where the organization stands and why change is necessary: “Our internal research shows that one in three employees are unsatisfied with the opportunities for professional development, future careers, and equal opportunities. And we just think that’s not good enough; therefore, we started on a skills transition journey.”

Selecting a Trusted Partner for AI-Driven Skills and Learning

In April 2024, Norsk Hydro began a pilot to offer its workforce access to AI-driven skills and learning recommendations for their professional development. With 100 employee participants in various countries, the company’s HR team has purposefully set the bar for success high. “We believe that for Hydro as an organization, success will mean we will see improved employee experience and engagement, reduced attrition, and that we will have better insights from data for workforce planning,” Fremstad says.

Norsk Hydro selected SAP as its trusted technology partner and joined the SAP Early Adopter Care program because of a shared vision for people-centric skills and AI-enabled learning. It is working closely on the project with SAP partner TalenTeam, taking advantage of its Skills Transformation Suite to speed innovation.

Transitioning to a Skills-Based Organization

The first step in Norsk Hydro’s skills journey was to build the company’s skills library based on a curated skills library from an external provider. The AI-assisted curation process analyzed Norsk Hydro’s job architecture and 33,000 job titles and identified likely relevant skills from the external skills library. As a result, approximately 4,000 skills relevant to Norsk Hydro were mapped against job families. The central project team is working to validate and refine these results.

Next, Norsk Hydro used SAP SuccessFactors talent intelligence hub to help gain the power and simplicity of a single skills model from recruiting, onboarding, learning, and development through to performance and succession. The talent intelligence hub can connect skills, attributes, strengths, and preferences to both people and experiences throughout SAP SuccessFactors solutions. Each employee has a growth portfolio of skills, which helps empower them to own their learning and career development. Employees can also manually add role-specific skills and skills of interest for their development. Norsk Hydro is applying a trust-based approach that allows employees to maintain their skills profiles and build their development plans based on their prioritized skills. While certain skills may need to be validated and assessed for legal compliance requirements, the employee generally may decide their proficiency levels for most skills.

As a third deliverable in the project, Norsk Hydro updated its internal development process to ensure that skills are an integral part of the leader-employee dialogue. It aims to tighten the connection between skills, goals, performance, and learning.

Also, Norsk Hydro recently implemented the new integrated learning experience from SAP SuccessFactors Learning. Embedded AI can enhance the employee’s experience with relevant skills-focused learning recommendations that are unique to each employee based on their needs and interests. Norsk Hydro’s offering of learning opportunities comprises a broad set of both internal and third-party channels. On the organization’s new learning homepage, all courses are now automatically tagged utilizing TalenTeam’s Skills Transformation Suite, so that relevant learning to close skills gaps is easy for employees to find and access.

The project team has taken away some good learnings on the journey to becoming a skills-based organization. For example, Fremstad recommends taking the time to validate the skills library to ensure the correct level of granularity for skills and establishing only one skills library to make certain each employee has a single skills profile. Different vendors use different skills taxonomies, which can cause problems when integrating them. She underscores that it’s important to constantly work towards delivering the best user experience possible.

A key element to the success of the pilot is continuously testing and collecting feedback from users, she says. Pending a successful pilot, Norsk Hydro’s long-term ambition is to implement the SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace solution – offering AI-driven recommendations to help match employees with assignments, career opportunities, and mentors – and a broader rollout of the talent intelligence hub to all employees. Employees will benefit from having a “single pane of glass” overview for all learning and development opportunities across the organization.

Elevating Skills as the Red Thread in HR

Norsk Hydro is building a skills-based organization rooted in a learning culture that will ultimately deliver benefits to employees and leaders alike. Employees will gain the autonomy, leadership support, and growth mindset to set them on a path of lifelong learning and development, so that they have the skills they need to build their careers and ensure future employability. Leaders will benefit from having data-driven insights that support workforce planning and match the right people with the right task to achieve business goals. They will also be able to attract and develop talent by offering a more compelling career proposition that includes skills growth and re-skilling.

“We believe by doing this,” Fremstad says, “we are creating the foundation for a skills-based organization by starting with learning and development. Long term, we would like to see skills as the red thread throughout our HR processes.”

Find out about talent management with SAP SuccessFactors solutions and the integrated learning experience from SAP SuccessFactors Learning.