Siemens is launching an academy for continuing education that will focus on technical up- and reskilling. At 19 regional training centers across Germany, the SiTecSkills Academy will make a comprehensive, certified portfolio of qualification measures available in new areas of digitalization and sustainability. This initiative aims to enhance employee skillsets to meet the requirements of the digital transformation within the work environment. The Academy primarily aims to provide training to employees in manufacturing, service, sales, finance, controlling and business support functions. In doing so, the SiTecSkills Academy supplements the portfolio offered by the Siemens Professional Education training unit by providing targeted occupational and technical learning opportunities. Thus, the Academy seamlessly fits into Siemens’ existing continuing education offerings. The new aspect is that this offering is available to both internal and external partners within the learning ecosystem.
“Through targeted up- and reskilling, we can ensure that the competencies of our people are always up to date. In this way, we’re not only ensuring their long-term employability, but also our company’s long-term competitiveness,” said Judith Wiese, Chief People and Sustainability Officer and member of the Managing Board at Siemens AG. “Since the ‘shelf life’ of knowledge is rapidly shortening in today’s world, in particular in the areas of IT and digitalization, we need to continuously integrate lifelong learning as a fundamental element within our work processes. The personal motivation and great eagerness to learn that our people display show us that we’re on the right track in this regard.”
Structural transformation and digitalization are bringing tremendous change to the working world: studies show that almost half of all jobs today will change significantly by 2030. As a result, Germany’s labor market is expected to have five million fewer specialists than needed. The requirements for digital skills are rising in nearly all occupational profiles and job descriptions.
As a result, the goals must be to ensure that employees have the skills needed to stay relevant to the labor market over the long term, and to convey core competencies that the economy needs to secure and enhance companies’ competitiveness. The programs that SiTecSkills Academy offers are among the contributions that Siemens is making to master the larger societal challenge caused by structural change, digitalization and a shortage of skilled workers.
“As a certified partner, we not only offer learning solutions that focus on technical qualification programs for specific target groups, but also professional consulting for our own businesses and for external business partners,” said Thomas Leubner, Head of Siemens Professional Education. Depending on the different levels, the portfolio is offered in digital, in-person and hybrid formats as needed. “By taking this approach, we are preparing all target groups for the digital age or are empowering them on the job,” explained Leubner.
Already since several years, Siemens has been using the #NextWork® methodology, which the company developed internally, to systematically look ahead three to five years to analyze the changes that are expected to arise in jobs, tasks and skills. The company uses this methodology to analyze which businesses will be facing the largest transformations – and will thus also have the largest need for qualification measures – and which qualifications make sense for the employees from an operating perspective.
The SiTecSkills Academy works in cooperation with the experts from #NextWork®. This collaboration makes it possible to design individualized developmental paths for the learners and implement concrete training measures. Since #NextWork® first began, its projects at Siemens have examined around 70,000 critical job profiles and the related activities.
Back in 2017, Siemens successfully began working together with Siemens Professional Education at the company’s location in Regensburg, Germany, to systematically give manufacturing workers who had received no vocational training or had been trained on the job the opportunity to obtain credentials – as mechatronics specialists, for example. Ever since then, the portfolio of offerings has been continuously supplemented in a way that was designed to meet concrete needs, and it has now been made available across Germany.
Today, this offering, which is also open for participants from outside Siemens, includes 15 different qualifications programs. They range from certificate courses (for certification in data analytics or as a specialist for service or for digitalization and automation) to measures for learning new occupations (for instance, to become a technician for mechatronics, electronics, or automation technology, or a commercial specialist for digitalization management), and they extend all the way to academic opportunities for earning higher-education degrees (for example, a bachelor of data science or master of science in artificial intelligence).
In fiscal 2022, it was already the case that as many as 2,000 employees successfully took part in about 170 training programs for continuing education or for retraining in a new occupation. The participants achieved a success rate of 97.8 percent. They acquired vocational credentials, for example, as technicians for mechatronics, electronics or automation technology.
With 6,400 apprentices and students in cooperative education programs, Siemens is one of the world’s leading providers of occupational training in the private sector. For more than 100 years, the company has been giving young people entering the workforce the opportunity to obtain credentials for the latest technical and commercial occupations or to earn a degree in cooperative education programs.