Municipality level predictive workforce analytics for continuous education

Jessie Cai
SAP Product & Innovations, SAP Asia Pte Ltd
Regional Headquarters
Mapletree Business City, Singapore

Talent and workforce management is becoming more important — as Klaus Schwab, the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum put it early this year: ‘The world is moving from Capitalism to Talentism.’ In the meantime, municipal governments are facing the problem of increasing mismatches between the job market demand and available talent resources, due to rapid changes in technological and economic trends. There is therefore a need to discover the root causes of such mismatches and come up with actionable interventions for better municipality-level workforce planning and development. The current practice of workforce management on the municipality level is to match the explicit needs of individual workers, employers and training or education agencies through various activities and programmes. Such activities and programmes are facing challenges, including limited participation, a lack of transparency and a lack of agility to support the sustainable growth and upgrading of the city workforce. Over the last few years, data relevant to human capita have dramatically increased, as well as advances in text data mining.

We propose to combine data sources — such as individual profiles from professional social networks, news feeds on the economic outlook, technological trends, the business environment and company strategies, and published openings from job portals — to feed into a predictive analytics model. In this way, we aim to arrive at the following: (1) supply, demand, gap and risk analyses for municipal government, education institutions and local employers; (2) root cause suggestions and intervention effectiveness analyses for the above stakeholders; and (3) outlook and competitiveness analysis for individuals.

The proposed solution will help the stakeholders to have more clarity about the local talent pool, to better balance the demand and supply of human capital through effective interventions, and to influence local residents who have already joined or will be joining the workforce. For individual users, this application will provide personalized insights on their skill sets, competency level and continuous education needs. We believe such an application will bring the necessary insights to all stakeholders for an open, flexible and sustainable education framework.