‘This is not just another HR program’: Inside Schneider Electric’s skills-first careers overhaul

Energy technology giant Schneider Electric is on a skills reinvention journey. In March, UNLEASH spoke to Chief Talent & Diversity Officer, Tina Kao Mylon, to discover how the organization planned to build out future skills pathways to realize its people and organizational strategic objectives.

Developing strategy is one thing; delivering it as a fully fleshed-out project across different business lines and regions is another. Six months on from speaking to Mylon, UNLEASH returned to Schneider to find out how the project is progressing.

Dorothy Chan, VP Skills Transformation Global Project Lead, is leading on turning the strategy into reality, implementing the Global Career Architecture – a skills-first framework that creates transparency around jobs, career levels, career paths, and critical skills across the organization.

The first challenge, she tells UNLEASH, was to be clear about what the project was not: “This is not a pure technology deployment project or just another HR program.

“Historically, a lot of our talent processes were built around job titles, organization structures, and employee experiences. While these are all important points, we also want to have more agility as an organization to anticipate how AI and technology are reshaping work, build the capabilities we need and adapt our workforce for the future.”

The goal is to build a common language across Schneider that connects mobility, learning, workforce planning and succession across its more than 150,000 employees globally.

Balancing global standardization with local flexibility

The move to build a consistent global career architecture and skills framework meant balancing the need for global standardization with local flexibility. This was, in Chan’s words, one of the hardest calls to make.

In practice, this meant moving away from the locally built customizable tools that have been shaped over time, but gaining an enterprise-wide skills insight, while enabling employees to explore diverse career paths based on their skills.

“A career path should not be limited to France or China, or a particular business unit, for example. It should be a career path across Schneider.”

The balance in getting this right is essential; The Global Career Architecture is universal, but the implementation strategy remains flexible, enabling countries and regions to tailor change management to their specific needs. The rollout of Schneider’s Career Hub – an AI-enabled platform to help employees navigate their career opportunities and pathways in a manner customized to them – shows how this works in practice.

Since its launch last October, 65% of employees have already registered on the platform.

Chan says when promoting the Career Hub in different regions, that’s “where we see a lot of creativity in different countries in how they engage their employees.”

“Some will be more top down, having more messages from management to show how they are using it. Some will use more stories from employees showing how it benefits them. Local adaptation is powerful for us on this.”

Sharing ownership between HR and the business

Due to the complexity of the skills project, ownership and governance had to be clarified early. Collaboration on the Global Career Architecture was deliberate, Chan explains, because HR “cannot know everything.” Business leaders cannot decide everything either – otherwise “we lack the consistency and also the long-term approach.”

As such, Chan’s project team owned the methods and the governance. She highlights that Schneider has defined 21 “job families” internally, with subject matter experts identified for each one.

For example, the Innovation and Technology job family includes “core R&D, software and technology roles across our organization” and involved 50 subject matter experts and people managers.

This group brought practical insight into how jobs are performed day to day, how they are evolving and the skills needed to succeed in them, while the HR Business Partner provided a perspective on organizational strategy and workforce priorities.

Developing a common framework and working through trade-offs on this also threw up a surprising result, Chan explains. There was an expectation that the subject matter experts would “overemphasize the technical and functional skills,” but instead they placed importance on human skills.

“The human skills are what connect our experience and exposure across the different functional areas,” Chan says. “For them, it’s just very intuitive – they jumped on it.”

Ultimately, this fed directly into Schneider’s focus on T-shaped career development, which combine deep specialist knowledge with the skills that can be applied across disciplines.

Demand isn’t the problem – fatigue is

Implementing a change of this scale regarding careers and skills development can generate resistance from employees, but this wasn’t the case at Schneider.

Chan says the idea wasn’t an issue; after all, employees had been requesting greater transparency and clarity on this for years already. The barrier was change fatigue across a business dealing with new models and strategy simultaneously.

“Be it within HR or in the organization, the business model changes. We have new strategy, so there is a bit of change fatigue everywhere,” she says.

“Although it's doing good things and people want it, we have to make it simple and easy for people to understand.”

Early feedback and results show this approach is having a positive impact, across career stages, while resonating particularly with younger generations who bring heightened expectations for career transparency and greater clarity about how to navigate their future.

“They come with very different experience(s). They feel a lot of uncertainty about the future. So, being able to guide them about what skills might help them to create different types of career paths has been resonating a lot.”

Managers also feel more comfortable “having that career and development conversation with employees” now they are equipped with clarity on career path options, the skills needed and the opportunities to get there.

From framework to everyday skills conversation

Chan adds that one thing she would have changed about the project is to invest more in change management, to combat that change fatigue, particularly for the Global Career Architecture because it “touches different parts of the everyday for manager and employee.”

She highlights giving them more examples of “how they use the Global Career Architecture together with the Career Hub, as part of their everyday conversation, not only once a year.”

That will be a focus for the next 12–18 months to “really get the value out of what we have invested so far,” as will building on the skills foundations that have now been established “to make better workforce and organization decisions.”

“More clarity about the job and the skills we have in the organization. How AI can augment our workforce. Where we need to invest more in the skills development and upskilling of our workforce. These are all data points,” Chan concludes.

“Now we see the potential of how we can reshape the work itself with all these data points with the common career architecture.”