Afpa – a dynamic mapping of skills
Success story

Customer context

Afpa is today the leading organization for professional training leading to qualifications. With the aim of training adults and young people for employment, it plays a key role in training in France with more than 145,000 trainees trained each year!

Nevertheless, in the face of rapid changes in the vocational training sector, Afpa began a major transformation phase in the summer of 2019 that will impact its professions.

The identified issues

Afpa wanted to acquire a talent management platform and skills, interconnected with its information system (HRAccess & Talentsoft). Afpa was looking for a tool that would allow it to:

• Facilitate the construction and updating of a job repository and skills.
• Develop the Strategic Workforce Planning to project its teams in the target organization.
• Facilitating mobility
• Build and deploy its up/reskilling plan to facilitate the rise in skills.
• Rethinking the employee experience during annual and professional interviews.
• Orchestrate its local, regional and national talent reviews. In January 2019, the joint adventure begins.

Our approach‍

In order to feed the platform, we integrated and then accompanied the optimization of the repository with more than 200 different jobs (5 weeks). For this, Afpa mobilized 2 people from its HR team, in order to involve the managers in the deployment of this approach “skills”. Before cutting the ribbon and opening the accesses, Afpa created a community of ambassadors and managers (about one per center), whose role was to influence the configuration of the solution and to bring up any questions from the field. Accompanied by an ambassador kit, these managers were the first to be involved in the launch.

This is the day! We are launching the communication. The 1st action: help employees to complete their profile on skills, then present the jobs that correspond to them within EPIC. Employees can then take orientation, personality and motivation questionnaires to help them make their career choices. Each employee thus gains visibility and takes ownership of his or her skills.

Second step: internal mobility. Following its transformation plan, AFPA is advertising more than a thousand positions open to internal mobility. We help to match supply and demand, while making the employee’s experience more fluid.

Third step: anchor this approach skill in the life cycle of the employee and make it a steering tool for the manager, and thus, perpetuate the approach. To do this, we deploy annual and professional interviews, during which managers make the link between objectives, skills and the individual development plan. Synchronized with the Talentsoft training module, the manager can select training courses directly from the catalog during his interview.

Last step: organizing staff reviews to validate decisions and detect nuggets. More than 300 reviews carried out in less than 2 months. Hats off to the HR team! Afpa initiates an innovative methodology, based on several years of research, encapsulated in Neobrain.

In order to deploy the solution quickly and efficiently, we collected a lot of data from SNCF G&C: current skills repository, training catalog, internal organization of the company, structure and list of benchmark jobs… completed by our own data thanks to the Neobrain Barometer (55-question questionnaire) and our analysis of the organization chart.

The Results

Thanks to the talent of Afpa’s HR teams and the support of Neobrain:‍

85% of users have completed their profile in less than 4 months. The rate of engagement with the platform is high and the analysis of available jobs and skills is facilitated.

‍+1100 internal mobilities performed via Neobrain.

‍81% of employees log in monthly to update their skills.