Episode 74: How Tata Steel Uses Skills Data For Learning and Workforce Planning (Interview with Joanne Kuipers)

In research we undertook last year at Insight222, to investigate the future of workforce planning, nearly all of companies surveyed (90%) expressed the desire to build a skills-based workforce planning process.

However, only a quarter of companies just 26% were actively doing so. One company that is successfully harnessing skills data to inform workforce planning and learning and to drive business outcomes such as safety compliance and productivity is Tata Steel. My guest on this week's episode of the podcast is Joanne Kuipers, manager at the Tata Steel academy based in the Netherlands.

You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.

In our conversation, Joanne and I discuss:

• How Tata Steel visualises skills data and makes it actionable for managers

• The key considerations in a build versus buy approach to closing skills gaps

• The public private approach to up-skilling and re-skilling in the Netherlands

• How companies should approach the measurement and utilisation of skills data

This episode is a must listen, for anyone interested or involved in operationalising skills data to support learning and consequently benefit the business and the workforce. So that is CHROs and anyone in a learning people, analytics, workforce planning, or HR business partner role.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by AG5. To learn more, visit www.ag5.com.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Welcome to the show Joanne, it is great to have you here. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to yourself and your role at Tata Steel?

Joanne Kuipers: Thank you for having me, David. I am very delighted to be on your show.

My name is Joanne Kuipers and I am the manager of the Tata Steel academy in the Netherlands. I have been with the company for a little bit over three years now. At the Tata Steel academy, we basically do everything that is involved around education and training for the company. For example, at the academy, we educate about 170 apprentices every year as we have our own company school. We are also responsible for the policies of the company and also the management system behind it. And of course, we deliver training, thousands and thousands of trainings actually, on the job, most of them, but also in our training centre. We also organise them centrally, if we can. So that is basically what I am doing.

David Green: Training, obviously has had to change a little bit over the last 12-15 months. So are you now also delivering a lot of training virtually as well. Is that something you have had to build in?

Joanne Kuipers: Absolutely. Yeah, because before it was still a bit more traditional, everybody was coming to the class room and they get their lectures from the trainer and of course also workshops, but we have needed to be creative now. A lot of the training has had to be remote or a combination of them. So sometimes we did still train because it needs to be practical as well.

Especially the company school, it was still open, but only in small groups of apprentices we would still give them practical training. A lot of remote training as well, so we really learned our way around all the different things that you can do, digitally. So that is, I think, a beautiful side effect of, a horrible crisis.

David Green: There are so many things that we could talk about the crisis, but I think one thing it has shown is that actually we can be quite adaptable as humans, given the situation that we have been in. I guess the other thing that is interesting, if we didn't have access to the technology that we have got access to now, let's say this had happened five years ago, it would have been really difficult just to A] work, without, things like the platform we are on today. But also, B] training, would have been even more of a challenge, to be able to be flexible, and shift to do some of it remotely.

Joanne Kuipers: Yeah, I think so too. We would be much more behind than we are today.

David Green: We are going to talk a little about some of the work that you are doing, in the Tata Steel academy and the whole topic around skills, which is such a big topic at the moment it was before the pandemic and it will continue to be, I think, for the foreseeable future.

How important is it to understand the skills that you have available to you in the organisation?

Joanne Kuipers: Well, I think it is one of the basic requirements for our company to keep production going. First of all, your available skills are important because of safety and quality reasons. First and foremost safety, we want our colleagues to be safe. That means of course, knowing the safety rules, but also, all the risks. Also, the more technical safety that there is, for instance, working on high voltage or hydraulics. So it is very important that people have the right skills for safety reasons. Second of all, we want to make the best steel in the world. So we also need a wealth of trained people to know how to make high quality steel and to have good process and production process in place. For example, if one of our installations falls out because we did something wrong at an installation, this costs lots and lots of money for every minute that the installation stands still, because we make huge amounts of steel.

It is very important for us to have a stable production process.  It is very important for us to have the right operators, but also the right maintenance skills, so that if there is a problem they can solve it immediately. That is the first big reason why it is so important for us to have the skills, and to have enough available skills in our company.

Second of all, it is also very important for our licence to operate and our licence to sell, as we say in our company. Our licence to operate is that we need to demonstrate in audits from the point of view of our government, that our workforce are well educated and trained, so that they are really skilled for the task that they need to do. Our licence to sell is from the viewpoint point of our customers, and they have very high quality standards and also audit us to see if we have demonstrable skills in our company. Also, that the people that work in our company are skilled. So it is also very important from that point of view that we can demonstrate that our people are trained.

David Green: And I guess for your workforce, it is  important. Maybe you test this through engagement, surveys, and other means if people feel that they are well trained and developed, they are motivated and engaged to do their work and maybe more likely to stay as well.

So is it those sort of factors that you are looking at as well?

Joanne Kuipers:  Absolutely. One of the things that I really noticed when I started working at this company, was that there is a real learning culture. So from day one, people get very familiar with the fact that you need to train, train, train, educate, and develop yourself.

There are a lot of career opportunities in our company, because it is a big company. So the sky's the limit. You can also really change your career if you want to.  There is a lot of opportunity for people because of training and because of education to get into their career and grow.

We have people that started as an apprentice in our school and are now in management. You see how they evolve and develop themselves in the company. It is absolutely a very important factor as well, to have a happy workforce and an engaged workforce.

David Green: And of course, understanding the skills that people have allows you to think about those career pathways for people as well. I know you have been on a bit of a journey at Tata Steel to better understand the skills of your workforce. Can you tell us a little bit about this? It is a challenge that a lot of organisations are going through at the moment.

Joanne Kuipers: Yes, well, we are a 24/7 production company. So we work in shifts, for a line manager to work with his team on a shift, it is essential that he knows all the skills available in his team. So it is not only about individual skills that people have, but it is also about the capabilities of the whole team.

So what is available in my team? Because in essence, it doesn't really matter to the line manager, if Peter is going to work on the crane, or if Thomas is going to do that. It is much more about having one person who is able to be on that crane. For us in our company, it is very important that people are qualified for the work that they do.

It is a little bit like a driver's license. You can only drive a car on a public street, if you have a driver's licence. That is the same with basically all of the tasks In our company and factories, if it is about crane driving or lift forks or doing tasks at an installation. For the line managers, it is very important to know which qualifications do I have on my team.  Also, how many of them do I have. Because he knows he needs to have, at least, two crane drivers available at every shift that he is working on. Because if one of them is on holiday or sick, then he still knows that he can do his production. So it is also very important for the line manager to have an overview. We have been working with a digital learning management system for years, putting it in the system, but unfortunately, most learning management systems, I think don't provide such an overview. They don't show the capabilities, the skills, the qualifications of the whole team in a very nice overview in a matrix actually. So what our line managers did all these years was putting it in Excel. They were getting the information out of the learning management system and putting it in Excel. We of course have a lot of technical people who like Excel, so they were always putting it in Excel. But a big problem about it is that, of course, they are not updating it every day because they are very busy with other stuff.

So, when we got an audit, but also for ourselves, it is not sensible to have two administrations. You have your learning management system and you have your excels in the factories. So this was not a good thing. The line manager said, I really need this overview to work. I need to have the information on my team. Especially, I need to know if I have enough qualifications on my team because if someone retires, then I need to train someone else because I need the minimum. Then something great happened. We found this amazing tool that is doing exactly this.

 This tool AG5 skills intelligence software that is putting all the information from our learning system into a matrix. That is what it does. It is a dashboard. It is not where we register things. We only show it in the dashboard and you can see in one overview, as a manager, your whole team where all the qualifications are available, you can also see the status of the qualification. So you can see if it is required, if it is successfully met, if it is maybe already overdue because a lot of qualifications need to be repeated once in a while. You can see if it is almost overdue so that, you know, as a manager okay, I need to send Peter to the training again because in two months his licence expires. Besides that, the tool also has some analytic tools in it which is also very important for the line manager to just easily get the information. If he wants to know something about a qualification, he can just find it. He can find immediately who has this qualification in my factory, for instance.

 It is very, very user friendly. So it is very nice and we have now been rolling it out. So we said to all the line managers throw away your Excel sheets, we have something incredible. I think that we rolled it out now for 80% in all of the factories. It is something that they need to adapt to because their digital skills are not that high but fortunately, it is very user friendly. We still we need to learn a little bit about how it works, but it is actually amazing what it does to people because finally they have the overview of their team and they can see what is in the system. They put it in the system themselves in the learning management system, because they didn't have an overview they didn't have any idea of what was in there actually.

So, it feels like we are light years ahead now in our company because it was always Excel and now we have this amazing new, analytics tool.

David Green: And I guess, now at group level or head office you have got that overview as well. So you can see the teams in all the different factories. That probably helps inform some of the training courses that you put on or the volume of training courses that you put on. Also, you can be a bit more proactive about noticing, for example, these hundred people’s licenses are going to be coming up in the next six months.

So we need to run at least five courses over the next six months, because we can only have 20 people in each course, and we need to get these hundred people up to speed.

Joanne Kuipers: Absolutely. So we can now for the first time also make easy comparisons between the shifts. We have five shifts on an installation and you can see that there are differences between the shifts in the level of qualifications, how many forklift drivers they need, so we can also compare this stuff and can also make analysis about, learning gaps, but also we can make analysis now on the impact of training. So do we see that the performance of one shift is much lower than the other one that can be a million different reasons why this is, but maybe it is also about skills and about training so we can make good comparisons now.

 It is very interesting and important for us as a department.

David Green: As you alluded to one of the challenges that you had at the start, number one, it supports around scheduling shifts. So, as you said, if someone is on holiday, someone leaves, or retires, you can see that that person has these 15 skills, let’s look at where those 15 skills sit on the rest of the shift. Okay, we need to close the gap around five of these skills, so you can either bring people in from the outside or move people between shifts, I guess, or you can augment with training, as well.

Joanne Kuipers: Yeah, exactly. So it also helps us to analyse this and to become more flexible actually, because we know now.

David Green: It is that power of having the access to that information and it being visualised in a way that you can use it if you are a shift supervisor, but you can also use it if you are part of the academy like you, or, if you were involved in longer term workforce planning or even recruitment, I guess as well.

Joanne Kuipers: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So it will help us much more in all the processes that we have as HR and also in factories. Of course.

David Green: What has been some of the feedback you have had in the factories, from some of the supervisors?

Joanne Kuipers: Ooh. Well, they are very excited.

Most of them, it is so fun to notice that at some point they hear about it because we rolled it out per factory because some of the factories, there are a thousand people working, so it is quite quite big. We decided to roll it out factory by factory, to make sure that we give enough attention to really introduce the tool to them, because otherwise, if they don't know it or they don't understand it, they won't use it.

But when we were starting at some of the factories, other factories heard about it. So then they were asking, "when is it our turn?” So they are very excited and we see it more and more because more factories are now using it more factories learn about it and hear about it.

And they are really excited then they really want us to roll it out as soon as possible, so that is really nice to hear. Another thing that is very interesting, as well, you see the line managers get really enthusiastic about training before it was a big hassle, it was always being a bit negative about our learning management system that was also complicated that it wasn't working. You see now that it is changing into "This is actually pretty interesting" and now I understand why I need to manage the capabilities in my team. Almost for the first time in years, it seems that they get something positive that really helps them to do their work because this is only just this part of their job, of course, if you are a line manager. So, it is lovely to make that as easy as possible.

David Green: And presumably it is saving them quite a lot of time?

Joanne Kuipers: Absolutely, if they were updating their Excel’s, because some of them weren't. So, yes absolutely.

David Green: You hinted at it at the start, so let's zoom out now a little bit and think about how the steel industry is changing more broadly. There is a big shift in how steel is made, I understand. Can you tell us a little bit about that and the impact that this has on skills?

Joanne Kuipers: Yeah, well, as probably everybody knows the steel industry in general, is an old industry. Our company in the Netherlands, was erected more than a hundred years ago in Britain, it is even longer than that. So in that respect, you could say that we are quite a traditional company. Especially if you compare it to a startup tech company. But at the same time, we are also very innovative because we need to make our steel better, stronger, lighter, more reliable.

So we have a lot of, innovations to create new types of steel. And of course, also these innovations have an impact on skills. But you also see that the areas in which we work for instance, maintenance, is also changing because of technology. So, we go from traditional maintenance to smart maintenance and hopefully in the future to predictive maintenance. This is changing the field completely, because maintenance becomes much more about censoring about analysing data. So, your whole job as a maintenance engineer, for instance, changes. The third thing or the thing that is really, really changing in our industry is, of course, that we have sustainability challenges. We want to make our production process carbon neutral by 2030. This means that the process of making steel will change rigorously. It will be a huge transition and that also has an impact on the skills that people need. It will be much more about digital and analytics.

David Green: That must be a huge challenge and, obviously, as part of the academy, I guess it must be something you are looking at as it  is partly developing some of the talent that you have, but it is also influencing, how the maintenance engineers of the future are educated and learn some of these skills to make sure that they are ready for work so that you don't have to spend then three years adding skills that they don't learn in education or establishments.

Joanne Kuipers: That is true. But the most complicated thing is that we don't know yet what skills it will be in a couple of years. So if we already knew then we could have a programme  ready and train them, but we don't know yet. So that is even more complicated to find out what it is, that they don't know now, that they need to know in the future or what they cannot do right now and what they in skills terms what they need.

So that is a big challenge, but at the same time, we do know what kind of technologies we want to use in the future to get the production process more sustainable. One of the things that we try to do is to at least, investigate what the gaps could be.

So we create, field labs, we call them, we have now one on, smart maintenance. So that is an example for now, but we will go build them also around other technologies that we will have, on our side, in the future, because some factories will disappear and we will create other factories with new technologies in these field labs. The idea is to actually experiment with the technology, but really use that to see what the gap is, because I think that there are also a lot of skills and knowledge that they already have that they don't need to learn. We also need to find out what the gap is exactly and how we can close it. It will be very interesting. At the same time, we have this tradition of educating people in the factories because there are always new installations, new innovations and always new things going on and because we are quite big, it is also possible for us to organise.

David Green: Yeah, a huge challenge. Are there any other ways that you are looking at to find these skills for example, are you thinking about a build versus buy approach?

Joanne Kuipers: I think it will be a mix. One of the things is that we are quite unique in what we use, it is not that there aren’t other steel companies in the Netherlands and there is steel education. A lot of the things that we do, we only do at our company. Not even other steel companies are doing it because they have their own approaches, to making steel.

So a lot of the stuff that we do is build, because we are the only ones that can do it. But one of the things that we are trying to do is to find a lot of partners that are also working with the technology for another approach in steel making, to see if there are also things that we can develop together.

Sometimes the basics of technology are exactly the same. It doesn't matter if it is about steel or about another, field of work. But I think a lot of things will be built by us.

David Green: It looks like you are in an exciting time and you are in a really important role in the academy to help that change. It might be quite interesting to talk a bit more broadly about the approach to up-skilling and re-skilling in the Netherlands and I am sure some of the things that are happening, there are very much applicable in other countries as well. Can you talk to us a little bit about the private public partnerships?

Joanne Kuipers: Yeah. One of the things, although, the Netherlands is very small as a country, we still believe in regional approaches. We would be a very small region in America, if you compared to the size of the countries. But we have had a regional economic approach for about 10-15 years now. An economic approach, especially, focused on the competitiveness of the region, the innovation in the region. And of course, also the labour market and your human capital and how to make sure that you have the right human capital for the regional strength in your region. One of the things that the Netherlands, and also Tata Steel, it was trying to work more closely together in the region in the Netherlands, we call it public-private partnerships, and there has been a real impulse from the government as well.

Of course, Tata Steel has been working with partners in the region for years as we have our company school for instance. We have worked with the vocational training school for years and years already as a structural, partnership. But in the past 10 years, we have been working together more and more, with businesses, but also local and regional governments around innovation projects. So, what we want to create is open innovation and related to skills and we have two main focus points. One is smart maintenance because that is also a very interesting topic for a company, but also for our region. And the other one is sustainability and the technology that comes with it.

What we try to do in this public-private partnership is to really what I was just talking about with the field maps is really to bring together companies and schools to create innovation projects and to really see what this innovation means for the skills of the future.

David Green: I think that is great. You need those three players government, companies and schools, all working together to do that. Obviously, sustainability is such an important consideration for society as well and it is something that all governments are trying to do. There is such a drive from citizens to do that and companies are having to move into that. We are coming towards the end of our conversation, Joanne, but I would love to know a bit more about the academy at Tata Steel Europe. Can you tell us a little bit more about the academy and some of the goals and aims that you have there?

Because I know people listening will be working in organisations that have their own academies as well, and I think it would be great to hear about some of the things that you are doing?

Joanne Kuipers: Like I said before, everything that is involved around training and education we, at the academy are involved. We believe that with the right training interventions, we can create a safer workplace, deliver more quality, have a stable production process.

And have very happy workers. as I said before, at Tata we have a real learning culture. So that was a big surprise for me when I came to the company. That really helps because people are used to learning. They like to learn, they want to learn. So that is actually, great.

Our goal for the next couple of years is to really make a transition in how training is delivered. So I think that we can make some big steps when thinking about digital ways of learning, thinking about VR, but also simulations. We have some pilots already on our side, of course, also AR that we might use, micro learning, which is not that new anymore, but I think that we can still incorporate it much better.

Instruction videos and to even reach a higher impact with training. I think there is still a huge step that we can take. And I think that as an expertise organisation, Tata Steel by training, that is one of the goals that we have to really make steps in that direction. Another big challenge is of course our labour market.

It is harder to find people with technical skill. So we see a big role for us also to re-skill people with a non technological background and make them ready for our company. In the past, we could still find enough people for our company, but that gets more and more difficult. So that is also a challenge that we have to make interesting arrangements for people to learn the technical skills as well. And maybe they also get more attractive because of all the technological changes that we will go through and the sustainability that we want to achieve.

David Green: I would love to hear more about some of the things you are looking into around augmented reality. I guess that has an ability to help transform how you deliver training, particularly in some of the more technical things, because I guess that puts people in a real life, well, it is not real life, but it puts people in a simulated real life experience rather than a classroom. What are some of the things that you are thinking about around. that?

Joanne Kuipers: Well, augmented reality is very interesting to really zoom into an installation for instance. So to really see how it works from the inside one of the things that augmented reality can do is to zoom into a certain area. You can also show inside of an installation when something goes wrong, what really happens in the installation. I think that is especially, for the maintenance. it is very interesting to really grasp how the installation is working and what you should do as a maintenance employee. So that is an example for us. Also, simulation is very interesting. So that is not AR, but the simulation part with simulations you can really train, in crisis situations. You can never train it in normal life because you are not going to stop. The installation from setting on fire or whatever, but if you can simulate it, scenarios that have happened once in 30 years, you can really train.

Now we can't. In theory, you can say that maybe this might happen, then you have to do this and that. So that kind of, technology and learning can really enhance the skills of our people.

David Green: And really interesting because not only can you assess if people have the skills to cope in a crisis, but it is also how they react.

I know it is a simulation, so maybe people still wouldn't react how they'd react if it was a real thing. But I think it is probably much closer than what you can do at the moment, you can see how people collaborate together. For example, if it is not one person solving the problem, there is probably a group of people and to see how they collaborate and problem solve.

That might identify some softer skills that you might need to work on and softer learning afterwards, as well.

Joanne Kuipers: Yeah, absolutely. I think so too. And also the awareness of, safety, that is something that you can really train with VR, because then it almost feels real if something is on fire or something happens, it has a much bigger impact on people for the safety awareness than when you just show a video or talk about it. So there are a lot of opportunities there, I think.

David Green: It sounds like we need to have a conversation in three to five years time see where things have gone. So the final question, and this is one we are asking every guests on this series, what is the value of measuring skills data, and how should companies approach it?

Joanne Kuipers: I think that above all, maybe, this is a strange answer, but above all I think that measuring skills data is the most important thing for creating ownership. So ownership for the employee ownership for the manager. Because the moment that, a manager knows where they are at, where others are at, and what possibilities there are.

Then people tend to take action or want to do something about it. I see it happen now with the rollout of  AG5, the training matrix I was talking about before, it immediately creates ownership for line managers. They get enthusiastic about the topic, but they also want to get rid of all the red icons. That means that the requirements have not been met yet, they want to get rid of them.  They want to make them green. So they really immediately start working on it. I think that it will, of course give us data or, other people in HR. But I think it is, a very powerful thing to really give ownership to the employee or to your line manager.

So I think that is the most important thing. Of course, then for us, it is also interesting with training planning, with the efficiency of the trainings, also measuring impact of training, which is very complicated to really measure but at least it gives us some insight. Also measuring gaps, and managing those gaps.

It gives us a lot of, information about how we can improve.

David Green: As you said ultimately, it is how can you use data and visualise it in a way that drives action? Because ultimately that is what you need to do, and it might then lead to behaviour change as well, but it drives action. That was a great example, there is a drive amongst managers to turn those red icons into green and you can't hope for better really. Very simple, but very effective and very important in the context of the work you are doing at Tata Steel for all the reasons that we have talked about. Joanne, thanks so much for being a guest on the digital HR leaders podcast.

Joanne Kuipers: Thank you very much.