How SAP raised digital competencies by 52%!

SAP, a global leader in the Software & Technology industry, was working on a digital transformation project focused on increasing the capabilities of their marketing organization. They set out to achieve this by bringing the skillsets they require into the organization through their people and teams.

SAP partnered with the Digital Marketing Institute on this project and identified several key goals to focus on. These goals including:

• Demonstrate a commitment to the development of their teams and invest in employees with transferable skills, aligned to business objectives – to create a stronger digital mind-set and savvier workforce.

• Evaluate existing digital skill levels and provide content to fill gaps where necessary.

• Provide external certification and futureproofing of skills for employees.

• Enable SAP’s leadership team through digital certifications.

• Implement a cultural change within the organization.

• Reduce agency reliance and cost by bringing skills in house.

The transformational project involved over 300 SAP employees becoming Digital Marketing Institute members, first completing a self-led assessment of their existing digital skills through the Digital Diagnostic, before enrolling in one of the DMI’s Pro or Specialist certifications.

Upon completion of the initial skills testing through the Diagnostic, analysis was delivered to SAP management with insights separated by team, location, role and department. The results were benchmarked against the industry standard and enabled a renewed confidence in the organization's overarching goals and investment to close skills gaps.

The SAP team, led by Kirsten Boileau, split their project over two phases to include various geo’s and practitioner levels. Participants had up to 24 weeks to complete their certification. Learning was self-paced and was supported by leadership who utilized a selection of tactics including executive sponsorship, webinars, support hours, email shots, newsletters and internal champions to drive ongoing engagement with the project.

The first phase included high-achieving individuals across North America and Latin America. In the first phase the program was billed as a developmental opportunity, and saw some resistance based around time commitment and content relevance to the individual’s day to day tasks. This resistance highlighted a number of key elements that had been missing in setting the stage, namely;

• Choosing the right audience, based on their application of the knowledge and skills

• Emphasizing the time commitment needed to participate

• Underlining that the content is industry best-practice and not company-specific

The second phase of the program solved these identified issues with detailed expectation setting. Along with SAP building a community of learners across the organization, generating engagement through office hours, study groups based on location, and leveraging success stories and blog posts about learner’s experiences with the program.

One of the biggest challenges was to change the mindset of learners from “How can I apply this today?”, to “How will this set me up for the roles of the future?”. This challenge was solved by using storytelling centred on the changing landscape, and future-focused discussions around how SAP could use these skills and tactics in the future. Enabling participants to understand not only what skills they are developing personally, but also how they contribute to the long term organizational strategy.

Bringing learners together on a bi-weekly basis to discuss progress, content questions, next steps and learning best practices was one of the most effective and well-received tactics used.