Episode 290: How Segula Makes Skills Data Work for its Workforce and Customers (With Sonia Fosse)

How do you prepare your workforce for what your customers will need next?

For Segula Technologies, an engineering company of around 15,000 people across 30 countries, the answer starts with understanding employees’ capabilities in greater detail than their job titles can provide.

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green is joined by Sonia Fosse, Secretary General at Segula. A mechanical engineer by background, Sonia oversees HR and talent alongside communications, corporate social responsibility, quality, legal and real estate. She explains how these responsibilities come together around a shared priority: helping people develop the expertise that creates value for customers.

Sonia shares how Segula combines employee input, manager validation and customer conversations to keep its view of workforce skills current and turn that knowledge into decisions about development, recruitment and redeployment.

Together, they discuss:

• Why Segula built its skills architecture from employee input, supported by corporate oversight, rather than imposing a detailed job catalogue
• How communication, manager involvement and access to development opportunities encouraged employees to participate
• How skills profiles stay current through project updates, self-assessment and regular conversations with managers
• How employee insights and customer discussions reveal changing demand, including skills becoming less relevant in particular markets
• Practical examples of reskilling around 100 people for battery production and anticipating critical aerospace workforce needs
• Lessons for HR leaders, including the value of strong pilots and the next steps in career development and communities of expertise

This episode is sponsored by 365Talents, a Docebo company.

Every organisation approaches skills in its own way, so 365Talents designs its talent intelligence solutions to adapt to how each business works. HR teams use them to put skills-based strategies into action more quickly and to see the impact across the whole organisation.

Find out more about 365Talents

Building or refining your skills strategy? The 2026 Skills Toolkit brings together 14 free HR templates covering every stage of the journey. It includes a business case built for your CFO, a structured framework for comparing vendors, a strategy you can take to the board, and practical tools for day-to-day HR operations and rollout.

Get free access to the 2026 Skills Toolkit

Resources:
Segula Technologies

This episode of the Digital HR Leaders Podcast is brought to you by 365Talents, a Docebo company.  

[00:11] David Green: When the expertise of your people is what your customers are buying, understanding their skills becomes central to business strategy.  Which capabilities will customers need next?  Where is demand declining?  And how do you help people move into new opportunities before their current expertise becomes less relevant?  These are questions today's guest, Sonia Fosse, has been working through at SEGULA Technologies, an engineering company of around 15,000 people across 30 countries.  Sonia is SEGULA's Secretary General.  For listeners less familiar with that title, her responsibilities span HR and talent, communications, corporate social responsibility, quality, legal, and real estate.  A mechanical engineer by background, Sonia brings a broad business perspective to developing the people whose expertise underpins SEGULA's work.  

In our conversation, we explore how SEGULA has built a continually updated view of workforce skills, then combining that information with manager validation and conversations with customers.  We discuss why Sonia and her team chose this approach over building a detailed job catalogue from the top down, and how they encourage participation by making the benefits for employees clear.  Throughout the discussion, we return to how skills intelligence supports better workforce planning, more informed customer conversations and clearer career opportunities for employees.  So, whether you're starting your skills journey or looking to put existing data to better use, there's plenty here to take back into your organisation.  With that, let's get the conversation started.  

Sonia, welcome to the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  Before we get into the conversation, please could you give listeners a quick sense of you and your background and your role at SEGULA Technologies, and maybe the business context that you're operating in as well, for those that don't know SEGULA?  

[02:12] Sonia Fosse: Sure.  Thank you, David, for having me today.  I'm very happy to share some of the insights as an HR leader, I would say, today with you.  My name is Sonia Fosse.  I am a mechanical engineer first.  I have studied in the energy industry for 10, 15 years before I joined SEGULA in 2019 as a Chief of Staff to the CEO.  And now, I am the secretary General for the Group, meaning that I have in charge quality, legal, real estate, communication, CSR, and talent, meaning HR, as you can assume.  SEGULA is in, I would say, a particular context today, because we are reorganising the company since September 2025 with a new President, Cyril Roger, who used to be the President of SEGULA 25 years back, which is pretty funny right now, and we are reorganising the whole thing.  But we really have a focus on talent, which is really important for us.  And we used to be very strong on HR, and we want to continue to be strong, as SEGULA is an engineering company of 15,000 people across 30 countries.  We do engineering for industry.  And what we used to say is that we are a people company before being an engineering company.  We really focus on people and talents.  

[03:48] David Green: That's a great background, being a mechanical engineer in an engineering company; I presume that helps you.  Maybe you can talk to the functions like talent and the other functions that you're running, and how the combination of those supports you in your role?

[04:02] Sonia Fosse: Yeah.  As I said, talent is really at the centre of the company's focus.  It's not an administrative role, it's not seen that way in Segala.  It's really a strategic role.  What we believe in SEGULA is that talent means everything, and then we need to help them when they enter the company as a consultant.  When we hire engineers or technicians, they really have to be at the centre of all we do, all the strategy we put in place.  And it links well with the other functions of Secretary General, because when you talk about communication and CSR, for example, then you want to make sure that you communicate on the right way to your employees, that they have the good level of information that they need, that they can also look for a career path, so they have the information to move from a job to another job.  This is also part of communication, of course.  When you talk about CSR, this is the same kind of thing.  We are in a world right now where younger people are looking for impact, they are looking for the sense of the job, "What it means for me, what it means for the society", and having that impact on them, it's really important.  So, when we think about talent, we think about how could we inform them better, what impact can they have on the society, and we can bring that to them.  In terms of quality, of course, we are doing industrial jobs, so it's required safety and quality at a high level, high standards.  

So, all those functions are not, as I said, administrative, they're really strategical and again, talent, HR.  From the very beginning, when people are not even in the company, like they are only candidates, I would say, until the day they leave the company after 5, 10, or 15 years in the company, this is really a strategical journey that we put in place for them.

[06:12] David Green: Perfect.  And Sonia, one of the reasons I've been really looking forward to this conversation is we're going to be talking in depth about the skills journey at SEGULA.  I understand you've been on a pretty significant journey in this area over the last 18 months.  Maybe take us back to before you began.  What could you see clearly then about your workforce and where were the biggest blind spots?  

[06:36] Sonia Fosse: I have to say that if I take a look back in 2020, because I joined SEGULA in 2019 as a Chief of Staff, more in an operational role, but then I joined the HR team in 2020, just before COVID, at that time, we were really strong at recruitment as an engineering company.  But the blind spots, as you say, was really the development, the skills development, the talent management, the talent development.  On that part, we wanted to be better at this.  We didn't really have a strong strategy on people development, which means that in that kind of companies, you have people entering the companies, working for customers, and after two to five years, they are leaving the company.  This is not the plan that we wanted to have anymore.  We wanted to have people joining the company and having a real career path in the company so that they can stay for 20 or 25 years, not only five years.  So, we really wanted to go on this path and build something.  So, we stalled it to build a team.  And to think about what would be the plan to make sure that we come from a staffing company to a, I would say, a real people organisation company, and this is where the journey began.  

[08:06] David Green: That makes a lot of sense.  So, maybe let's get into the architecture, because I know from speaking to many of your peers in other organisations that have tried this, this is where many skill programs either succeed or they fail.  How did you build the skills taxonomy, and how did you decide what the right level of granularity would be within that taxonomy?  

[08:31] Sonia Fosse: That's very interesting because we are a company working for so many industries in SEGULA.  We do automotive, aerospace, railway, energy, we do naval, we do all those kind of things.  So, at the very beginning, we thought that we can maybe have a very short, I would say, job catalogue and a very concentrated taxonomy.  But then, we started to look into the details and we said that that couldn't work for SEGULA.  So, the approach was to say we have 15,000 people across the globe and we have that turnover, the one you were mentioning and I was explaining.  So, two types of decisions that we had to make as a leader at this time were, either we do the standard way of thinking and we launch a big initiative, a top down initiative from the management saying, "What are our jobs?" and we build the catalogue, and then we implement the catalogue.  I mean, it took two years, something like that.  And the day after you implemented it, it's just obsolete, because you always have, I would say, updates on the job catalogue.  

Or the other way, the one we chose at SEGULA, was to say we have those people, 15,000 people.  We won't do a top-down approach, but we do the opposite, we do a bottom-up approach.  And we will provide all of our people, 100% of our people, the possibility to have a view on their skills and to pilot their skills and to give us the information about who they are, what they know in terms of skills, what are their jobs, what they want to develop also as skills for the future, and those people are giving us the information.  And based on the information we have from that, we gather everything and we start to think more strategically at the management level, but based on information provided by the ground.  And we thought it was a better idea to do it this way because doing it this way, first of all, you talk to your employees and say, "You have now the opportunity to share your skills with the company and to grow in the company.  We will provide you the tools and we will train you to make sure that you know how to use this new tool.  Also, you can provide information so that we can help the whole company to structure, as you said, the architecture, and we will do it listening to you.  We won't do this against you, we will do it with you".  So, that was the main job that we did.  The choice was really strategical.  It was pivotal, I think, in the company when we made this choice.  

[11:36] David Green: This episode is sponsored by 365Talents, a Docebo company.  365Talents takes a flexible, tailored approach to skills and talent management because no two businesses are the same.  Their adaptive talent intelligence solutions empower HR teams to move faster, build skills-based strategies, and deliver real impact at scale.  Want to learn more?  Visit 365Talents.com.  And don't forget to explore the complete 2026 Skills Toolkit, 14 HR templates spanning the full skills journey, from the CFO-ready business case, through structured vendor evaluation, board-ready strategy, daily HR ops, and rollout.  Head over to the show notes and get your free access today.

And I guess this brings two of your responsibilities together, talent and communication.  So, if you're going to go for that bottom-up approach, as you've kind of described a little bit there, Sonia, the communication is absolutely key to get people to participate and take the time to document their skills.  I mean, I don't know if you, for your peers that are listening, what were some of the things that you did with the communication that you feel drove the participation from your talent, from your people?  

[13:14] Sonia Fosse: Yes.  So, this was a top-down and a bottom-up approach on this way, the communication way, but it was key on the strategy again.  So, what we decided is first, to talk to our management people, so the managing directors, the HRDs, of course, and the team management saying, "Hey, guys, now we need to shift from this, as I was saying, the staffing company to a global engineering company.  To do this shifting, we need our people to help and we need to communicate to them and to provide them the opportunity to provide information, as I was saying".  So, we started this top-down approach with the management, explaining why we do that and then how.  This is the why, how, and what.  It was almost the same.  So, why we do that?  Because we have to shift, because now skills is really key on all jobs, on all types of companies.  And comparing to the peers, it was almost the same, I guess.  All industrial companies need to manage their know-how, because this is what they provide as a result.  So, the why was that.  

Then, the how was through the management.  So, we said to the managers, "You will communicate and talk to your people and say that we need them for these initiatives.  But we won't have thousands of Excel spreadsheets everywhere.  That doesn't work".  So, the what was this tool that we implemented that we called MySkills from 365Talent, and this tool was an innovation.  It was the first innovative tool that we had in the Group regarding talents, especially.  And having also that innovative tool helped the managers and the people to be engaged.  So, I think it was part of the strategic thinking about, okay, we need to change; but also, part of the technology innovation, telling them that, "Hey, we have something that will help you doing this in a gamification way.  It will be fun, easy to do.  And this will also be your window to the company, not only to your manager, but to the whole company.  And again, it's 30 countries, thousands of technical opportunities".  So, it was, I would say, both of them.  

[15:42] David Green: One of the things that we hear from organisations, Sonia, is skills data, it's only as useful if people trust it.  And it's the people actually entering the skills data, the employees, they need to be able to trust it that you're going to use it in the right way, but also your managers and the people making decisions about different roles within the company.  I'd be interested to hear, how do you validate skills at SEGULA, and what does that assessment process look like in practice?  

[16:10] Sonia Fosse: Yeah, that's a very good question, actually, because we had a lot of discussions regarding this part of not the tool, but the whole process about, "Okay, we ask people now to provide their skills".  So, we ask the engineers, the design engineer, to say, "I know how to say this, I am a very good engineer in CATIA, I can use that type of software, etc", but maybe the manager wants to prove what's his word on that.  So, we had a lot of discussions about how to make sure that the data is accurate, because then we want to use them at the Group level, but also at the management level.  The way we choose to strategically address that was to question, I would say, to ask to all the management teams, "What do you want to approve exactly?  Do you need to approve 100% of the skills?  Do you want to approve that kind of specific skills?  Do you want to approve each time someone is providing a new skill in your team?  Or maybe you want to do that two to three times a year, something like that?"  And we converged into the fact that the management wanted to have some kind of validation, not 100% of validation, but they want to make sure that for technical-critical skills, they can validate the level, and they can validate if they have the skills or not.  

So, that was basically it.  And instead of doing that every day, I would say, they prefer to do this having a conversation with the employees, meaning that what they prefer was to have maybe two times a year when they can sit down with the employee and say, "Look, I have your MySkills profile, you self-assessed yourself on that kind.  Here's my thoughts", and then they can have a conversation.  Because what was really important also on this whole process was to have this conversation ongoing with the employees.  It's not a tool talking to a tool, I mean, it's not an employee filling their skills on MySkills, sending back to the manager who says, "No, I disagree with you".  It doesn't work that way.  It's really providing information and having like a data lake, where you have all your data, and then you can sit down and say, "Okay, I want to understand why your self-evaluation was that way".

So, we started this way and then we just implemented this in the tool, making sure that when the employee is adding new skills, so he does the self-assessment and he says, "From zero to five, here's my level".  And then, the manager receives that and he has a dash screen that he can approve or disapprove, and he says, "Okay, I agree or I disagree".  So, he can do it on his own way, but again, what we want is really to have this conversation with the employee.  

[19:21] David Green: And are you looking at the system?  Does the system infer skills as well?  And if so, what balance do you have between the system inferring skills and what still requires that conversation between the manager and the employee, because I guess it's helpful to understand how those skills profiles are built over time?  

[19:45] Sonia Fosse: So, I would say, if I continue on the process so you can see the balance, there is the employee who is sharing his information with the management.  What's interesting then is the management can approve, okay, and then there is, I would say, a team at the corporate level who is also gathering all this information saying, "Is this a skill or is this something which is not a skill?"  So, we try to also organise in a way that the Group, as a company, because also we need to work as a company and not only as lots of people, information inputs, as a company, how we can manage all those data.  So, we are gathering everything and say, "Those are skills, those are not skills, but are something else that are very interesting for the employee to provide as information".  And a manager is interested also to have this information.  So, we can have our architecture.  

Then, we talk to our management teams and say, "Hey, now you have all those types of skills that are approved by the company.  So, now you have a choice.  You can continue to have this conversation with your employees and your teams and say, 'On this catalogue, do you want to self-assess to tell me if you have those skills or not?'"  So, on the other way, the management can send to the employees, as you said, he has maybe so many people to manage on his team that he doesn't know, he can choose a set of skills, like 10, 20 skills that are critical for him and for the Group, and say, "Hey guys, I want you to make a self-assessment on these particular skills.  So, the conversation goes the other way, from the management to the employees.  

Also, another interesting thing is some employees want to provide information of what they would like to develop as a skill.  So, they say, "I don't really know how to do data engineering.  I don't really know how to use full stack, for example, or agile project management, but I would like to.  Why?  Because I see that on my project right now, this is something that could be useful.  Or I see that regarding the world, I would say, environment, that kind of skills would be required in two to three years", for example.  So, he's also able to provide to us the information that, "Oh, you need, as a company, to look at that kind of skills, because this will become a huge thing in two to three years".  And it helps also the company to prepare.  It helps the manager to, again, maybe not have the conversation with the people, but maybe with his customers, and go and see the customer and say, "Hey, I see that my people are looking after that kind of skills.  What do you think?"  And maybe the customer will say, "Yes, you're right".  If you work on the automotive industry, for example, maybe you want to have some skills on battery, electrical batteries, because now this is something becoming huge in this industry.  

So, again, as I would say, a company, this is a really strategic tool to work either with employees, but also customers and whole organisation.  

[23:20] David Green: I want to take a short break from this episode to introduce the Insight222 People Analytics Program, designed for senior leaders to connect, grow, and lead in the evolving world of people analytics.  The programme brings together top HR professionals with extensive experience from global companies, offering a unique platform to expand your influence, gain invaluable industry insight and tackle real-world business challenges.  As a member, you'll gain access to over 40 in-person and virtual events a year, advisory sessions with seasoned practitioners, as well as insights, ideas and learning to stay up-to-date with best practices and new thinking.  Every connection made brings new possibilities to elevate your impact and drive meaningful change.  To learn more, head over to insight222.com/program and join our group of global leaders.  

And it sounds like, Sonia, again, listening to you in the conversation so far, obviously, you've got the technology that enables you to do this, but more importantly, you've built it into the process and the interactions between managers and their employees.  So, you know, one of the things you said at the start, why you didn't go just for the top-down approach, was that the data would quickly become stale.  But it sounds like you've built something here that's continually developing, and presumably employees are seeing the benefit of this, so then they keep participating in this from an employee perspective.  Is that the case?  

[25:06] Sonia Fosse: It's the case, actually, because ither from the process and from the animation, we made sure that people are really onboarding on the tool.  So, when they join the company, one of the first things they do is they go on their MySkills profile, so they can start to initiate their profile.  So, they enter the company, they do on MySkills the self-assess, they send their resume or they upload their LinkedIn profile, and then they can start the process.  Starting the process gave the first information.  After that, each time they go for a project for one of our customers, after the project, they go back to MySkills to update their skills package.  So, they can say, "I improved from level two to level three", or they can also say, "I learned something new that I want to share".  So, there is also a free text.  There is a situation where they can go and update their profile.  After that, there is the two-times-a-year conversation with the management, which is, of course, really important.  So, people want to be prepared for this conversation.  So, they want to go there and make sure that the profile is okay, it's updated, etc.  And each time, the employee goes on MySkills, he can see his skills radar, so he can see where he stands comparing to people that are the same kind of skills or the same jobs; he can see what are the gaps; and he also has direct access to online training.  

Of course, we can't do that for all the training.  Sometimes, for reskilling, you have to go for six months' training, so it's not online.  But what they have online is, I would say, 60% of the trainings that they can do.  So, they also are used to go on MySkills, by the process, because each time that they have something new to share, we tell them, "Please go on that".  But also, because each time they go on MySkills, it means something for them.  It brings them something, either training, either a career path, they also have access to career path, so they can see from the job they have today where they can go on the next few months.  So, it provides an idea.  And as you were saying at the beginning, for mobility also, it brings an idea.  If they want to go from a job to another job, a country to another country, everything's available on MySkills.  So, we made sure that it was easy, as you were saying at the beginning, it's an easy platform, and it's easy for them to also be open to the whole company, which is pretty rare in that kind of company where you have activities across the globe.  

[27:59] David Green: And maybe you can talk a bit more to that, Sonia.  So, obviously, prior to doing this, you were looking through, I guess, the lens of the job title for various people.  Now, you're able to look at the lens through the skills that people have got on the MySkills platform.  What are some of the things that you've discovered that you wouldn't have otherwise seen through the traditional organisation chart, for example?  

[28:24] Sonia Fosse: The first thing is what you say.  I mean, usually we think about job catalogue, job description.  I mean, I think and we believe in SEGULA, that this is something which is becoming obsolete.  We are not talking about job catalogue anymore, less than before, we are talking about skills catalogue and knowledge catalogue.  So, we want and we need, as an engineering company, to go deeper into the details, not having a look at the job, because a job can mean a lot of things, but really knowing the skills.  Knowing the skills of our people brings a lot more value to everybody, to them, to the company, to the customers.  So, that was the main, I would say, feedback, because we're starting thinking that we will end up with a job catalogue.  Of course, we have a job catalogue.  But this is not what we use to help our people to develop their skills.  We use the skills mapping.  So, that was first.  

Second is when you ask 15,000 people to provide information about what they can do, you have thousands, hundreds of thousands of information.  You can believe that it's not true, accurate, so that's why the management says, "I want to have an approval process on that".  But at the end of the day, 80% of the information are correct.  And you start to understand how big is engineering skill, I mean, how many details, information, all people are learning every day.  So, this is really very, very interesting, because you can put in place a lot of connections between the skills A and the skills B you want to develop.  It's broader, like the universe, so it's really, really interesting.  

I would say, other than that, also what was surprising was that the engagement of the employees.  When we started, as I was explaining, we started from the management and said, "You will explain to your people how we will manage, so why, how, and what".  So, they did that, and the corporate team helped.  I mean, we had hundreds of webinars to explain why we did that.  It was a complete shift.  And people were really engaged from the beginning.  So, that was really surprising.  And why they were so engaged, I think this is because they want to be part of their own career path.  I mean, no one wants to be sitting on a chair waiting for someone else to say, "You will go this way, you will do this in two years", no.  All kinds of generations right now, and it's not a matter of age, I think this is because industry is moving so fast.  All kinds of people, they want to decide, they want to be on the driver's seat, they want to have the knowledge and have a kind of decision.  So, that was amazing.  We didn't have to fight with people and say, "Hey, please, can you update your MySkills profile?" they did it anyway.  So, that was great.  

[31:32] David Green: So, I'm guessing what the MySkills platform really does is it gives you a much clearer understanding of supply, ie, the skills that the people within the organisation have got.  And then, the other challenge is demand.  You talked about how you're engaging directly with your customers to understand the skills that they increasingly require as well.  But I'd be interested to understand how you translate maybe client roadmaps and future work into a credible view of the capabilities you'll need, and how far ahead can you plan with confidence on this?

[32:07] Sonia Fosse: That's a very interesting point also.  I really love workforce planning.  I've been working on workforce planning for 20 years right now.  The way we used to do it in the industry, ten years back or 15 years back, was really manual work.  You had to go to a customer, "Talk to me about what you need", and then you come back to the company and try to see what you can see.  So, that was really manual, but it was the basics of workforce planning.  So, what we do right now, it's not for 100% of the case, but using MySkills is that we now have that huge information on the system.  So, we can have this clear view of what people are telling us, people from our company.  And easily with MySkills, you see the decrease or increase of some kind of jobs.  So, this is just by gathering information.  

This information, we go with it to see our customers.  So, we do the opposite.  I mean, we don't go to see our customer and say, "Tell us about what you need".  We go to them and say, "Here's what we see.  Do you agree with that?"  Again, you start a conversation not with the employees, but with your customers.  The customers look at that and say, "Oh, that's interesting, because I can clearly see some kind of increase of that kind of jobs, but I didn't see the decrease".  And you start to bring information to your customers.  So, this is really what I like with the new kind of doing workforce planning, is that industry is a small word.  I mean, at the end of the day, the evolution, the transformation of an industry, they are going very fast, and the technical job is shared between the industrial customer and the engineering company.  So, you can't say that industrial customers know everything.  Sometimes engineering companies know better because they have the expertise, because they see good practices from one kind of industry, and they can apply to another kind of industry.  

So, having this data and going to see a customer and say, "Do you believe what we see?  Do you have any comments on that?" you start to have, I would say, a very interesting feedback conversation with customers.  Sometimes they will say, "Yes, you're right on the increasing part that you see.  And then, we can start to think together about how we can make sure that we bring you the good capability at the right moment".  But sometimes, and this is where it's interesting, they don't see the decrease because, of course, it's more complicated to see that some part of skills are decreasing.  And it's not only technical, sometimes it's geographical that you decrease, as I was explaining, you decrease the mechanical engineering skills in Europe.  But maybe you move that kind of skills to Africa or to Asia.  So, it's not as easy as there is a skill and there will be another one on the workforce planning.  So, having again this information to share with customers, it helps them also to understand.  And the fact is that taking that information back, we update the process and we can again have, even in live, the information that that the customer is providing to us.  So, we have a certain level of information from our people.  We go to see the customers, then we update, and we don't have to wait six months.  We have the update within a week, also.  

[35:52] David Green: Have you come across anything yet, maybe an example, where maybe it highlighted a specific capability that you either didn't have at all, or you had to build from a very low base?  Has this helped you to do that at all?  

[36:06] Sonia Fosse: Yes, definitely.  So, I'll take this example from the automotive industry.  So, as I was saying, we go from a thermal vehicle to an electrical vehicle, which means that we need to build batteries right now.  As an engineering company, SEGULA, we bring some capabilities, some people to go to the battery plants and build those batteries.  And I remember this story in the north of France.  So, we used to build some gigafactories of batteries to help the OEMs to build their own batteries.  And when we went with our customers there in the north of France, they were surprised, because they were thinking that they will have a lot of engineers or technicians able to do this, but there were none.  And there were none because the technology was new in Europe.  So, it was really, I would say, people were really experienced in Asia, in China, for example, but not in Europe, and especially in France.  So, the skills didn't exist.  So, you didn't have any engineering schools or universities teaching these skills because it didn't exist.  So, no students.  You didn't have, of course, experienced people, so the know-how didn't exist in France.  And we needed to have workforce, because we needed to manufacture, to build those batteries.  

So, what we started to do is to look into MySkills and see what are, not the job description, but what are the skills required to build a battery.  And this is why a job description is not, at the end of the day, what we use, but really the skills.  And we started to think and to understand that the skills required to build electrical batteries are a chemicals background, pharmaceutical background, and also people who are really capable of their hands, I would say, who used to work on a manual way.  Because batteries are really like pastries, so you have to put some layers to build that.  So, we defined a set of skills required for that very high technical-critical asset.  And we looked into our base, into our employees' bases, which are, I would say, adjacent or close to the skills to build the batteries.  We identified 100 people, more or less, and we decided to reskill them.  So, they were all across France.  I mean, of course, they were not in the north of France, but some of them were next to Paris, some of them were next to Marseille on the south of France, some of them were in Brittany.  So, we just gathered all of them and said, "We have a plan for you for reskilling your skills from whatever you are right now to a skill where you can build the future industry of electrical vehicles".  And we started that.  

It was a huge success.  We were able to do that because we had that very, I would say, granularity information of what people are able to do and what is close to what they will be doing in the future.  

[39:26] David Green: Really good.  A great example of understanding skills adjacency and then actually putting it into practice.  Really powerful, Sonia.  So, that's one clear business and workforce outcome.  But I'd love to hear, what are some of the other business and workforce outcomes you are seeing so far from your skills-based approach at SEGULA, and how it supports strategic workforce planning?  What have been some of the biggest wins that you've had?  

[39:54] Sonia Fosse: Another one, which is interesting, is on the aerospace business, because the aerospace business has been almost shut down during COVID, but then it went really up.  I mean, it was exploding again.  And now we have a lot of new programs for airplanes that are ongoing.  So, industrial companies, they need workforce, not for the engineering of the planes, but for the manufacturing.  So, now, I'm not talking about engineers, I'm talking about blue collars.  And it's very interesting how workforce planning can also help on the blue-collar side, because we always think that workforce planning is for white-collar people, engineers, data people, etc.  No, it's also very useful on the plans to make sure you have the right workforce.  On this, we have what we call ajusteur in French.  This is a kind of job, a technical kind of job, where you go beside the plane or under the plane and you do all the mechanical things to make sure that the plane is ready.  Those skills are very critical for this kind of industry.  If you want to train someone, it takes seven years.  So, it's a huge period of time.  

So, what we did was during COVID, when we put in place MySkills, we started to see, in the end of 2021, that this industry, I would say, was going to need a huge amount of people for their agendas, for their schedule, for the workforce.  We started to work with them, with industrial customers.  And what we did was two things.  The first one was to recruit from the external, of course, but we started to recruit people from external countries.  It was also for France, but for Canada.  We started to hire people from other countries to bring the workforce already trained, because again, seven years, you can't afford to wait that period of time.  So, we recruited, but in advance, to make sure that they come and they can be trained on this kind of plane.  So, that was the first thing.  

The second thing was a training academy, and a SEGULA training academy inside.  So, we started to work with national, I would say, employment agencies.  In French, it's called France Travail, but you have the same kind of agency across the globe.  And we started to work with them because they have very good people with no job, and they want, again, to reskill themselves to have a new career.  We work with them to make sure that they bring us the right skills and then we hire them, we train them, but they don't need seven years' training.  Maybe they need six months' training because they already have the capabilities.  And after this few months of training, you can put them on the plan.  And again, for that industry, aerospace defence, aerospace, and naval, this is a huge strategical thing.  It's a bottleneck for them to have the right workforce.  And if you are able to bring it to them because you anticipated the needs, you help them, you help everybody.  

[43:25] David Green: What's the next step in SEGULA's skills journey?  Where do you see the next biggest, the next opportunities to create value from the data you've collected and the capabilities you've built?

[43:37] Sonia Fosse: Yeah, it's very exciting, because now what we want is to strengthen the career path.  So, we want really to help people to have a projection in the Group, not only have a rough projection, but have a very, I would say, defined view of what they can become in the company and how, and how long it will take.  So, we want to be more transparent on that.  So, that's part of the next step.  The other next step, which is really interesting, is the creation of some communities of peers.  So, we also want people to start to have a space in the company where they can have conversations between them.  This is not a management thing, it's only between peers.  And now, they can maybe start to know each other or to find solutions to some of their problems.  But we want to create these communities of expertise and we want everybody to transmit like a mentor to people that are less knowledgeable than them.  So, this community is not only for fun, of course, it's nice to see that all the people are doing the same thing as myself in India or in the US, but it's also to say that if I am someone who is joining the community and have a low level of expertise, I can find a real good expert in this community that helps me to go to the next step.  

[45:06] David Green: Sonia, for the people listening, and most of the people listening to this will be like you, HR leaders, HR professionals in their organisations, they're working in a company that's either much earlier in their skills journey or that hasn't started yet.  What would be your key piece of advice, maybe one thing you'd do differently if you were to start again?  

[45:25] Sonia Fosse: I think it's very key to put that in place.  I mean, we did that six years ago now and it took a while to be this success that we see now.  So, it's never late to do it, but we have to start.  And I will 100% advise that everybody starts as soon as they can.  The advice would be that, as maybe we did at SEGULA, is to have this bottom-up approach, because I really believe that unless you are a small company of 100 or 500 people, you can do a top-down because you need to drive a strategy, otherwise, it's very difficult to drive it this way.  And again, you will have a lot more engagement if you ask people from the ground to help the company and to provide information themselves, whereas telling them what they have to do or tell them, "This is the catalogue and you have to enter into this catalogue".  So, that's the thing.  

Something that I would do differently is, so we are a 30-countries company, so it's a lot to handle at the same time.  We decided to do some pilots, but I believe that we should maybe have done more pilots.  So, that would be also another advice.  If you need to start from scratch and you are at the corporate level, make sure that you start with a strong pilot, maybe one country, one business unit, whatever, but someone who will bring you success that will be with you on the process, and you will have, I would say, quick wins that you can also demonstrate that it works.  Because one of the major things is this is all about change.  So, you put in place some change in a company, and you will always have people that are saying, "It's not working, it's not worth it, and we don't need that.  We used to do this way, why should we do the other way?"  So, you always have that.  And the conversation I have with HR leaders, when I share my experience with my skills in SEGULA, is really this, is make sure that you find the right pilot to help you, to make sure that maybe you will spend six months with it, but after six months, you will have success and you will have quick wins.  You can really demonstrate that it works.  

[47:52] David Green: I think that's excellent advice.  And listening to you, Sonia, I think the other piece of advice I'd give, listening to your story, is number one, you had a clear business objective in doing this.  You understood what the problem was, you understood how this could potentially help you solve that problem.  So, I think that's definitely one.  And you obviously had senior leader buy-in to that as well, so that's important.  And then, you communicated effectively why you were doing it, what benefits it would provide to employees as well.  And I think that's a good lesson for anyone listening to this.  So, that helps us navigate to the question of the series, Sonia.  And yeah, I'm quite interested in your response to this.  So, we ask this to every guest in this particular series.  How should HR prepare people, employees, for jobs that have not yet been defined, because you've been doing a little bit of this already, haven't you?  

[48:48] Sonia Fosse: Yes.  So, first of all, I would say we have to prepare as a global.  I mean, as an HR leader, we need to make sure that our people, employees, know that skills are shifting very quickly.  So, not focusing on one particular one, but saying to our people that what they need to integrate into their day-to-day job is that it's moving very fast.  So then, having said that, you can start to provide them with information.  I think that they need information training, I would say, training, e-learning training, to make sure that they can follow the next tendencies.  Like, for example, in SEGULA, we decided two months ago to train everybody on AI, at least the basics.  So, 15,000 people trained on the basics of AI.  So, some of the revolution we are facing has to be handled by the company, by the leaders.  Some of them, they have to be handled by the people themselves, but they can handle themselves if they know that things are shifting.  

[49:58] David Green: Sonia, I've really enjoyed the conversation, I've learned a lot.  A very impressive journey that you've led through at SEGULA.  Before we finish, where can listeners follow you, follow your work?  And is there anything coming up from you or SEGULA that we should look out for?  

[50:15] Sonia Fosse: A lot of things.  So, we are communicating a lot on social media because we are re-shifting the strategy of the Group.  And what I said on talent is the same kind of transformation we are making, for example, on the sales.  So, at the end of the day, as you were saying, what's important for us is to bring satisfaction to our customers, so all the industries across the globe.  And we do this making sure that we understand very deeply what they need and we help them.  So, we start, we build this strategy with the vision of the transformation we are all facing, the geographical transformation, the technological transformation, the human transformation, and also what we believe our conviction.  And it will be very interesting, maybe, for people to follow that, what are SEGULA's convictions on engineering?  This is what we will be sharing in the coming months on social media.  

[51:16] David Green: Something to look out for.  And are you on LinkedIn, if listeners want to follow you?  

[51:20] Sonia Fosse: Definitely, yes, I am.  

[51:22] David Green: Perfect.  Well, Sonia, thank you very much.  Really, really fascinating journey, and look forward to hopefully connecting with you in person at some point.  

[51:30] Sonia Fosse: Thank you David for having me, and thanks for everyone for listening.  Thank you.  

[51:37] David Green: Sonia, thank you so much.  It's been a real pleasure to hear how SEGULA is connecting the development of its people with the changing needs of its customers.  One point that particularly stayed with me was the importance of recognising where demand for skills is declining as well as where it's growing.  Seeing that early gives organisations more time to prepare and employees more opportunities to develop their capabilities and continue their careers.  The examples from battery production and aerospace bring that to life.  Understanding what people can already do opens up possibilities that a job title alone might conceal.  So, turning to our listeners, how are you using skills intelligence to prepare your people for what your customers will need next?  Come and find my post on this episode on LinkedIn, and let me know in the comments.  You can also follow Sonia and SEGULA Technologies on LinkedIn to learn more about their work.  We'll include the links in the show notes.  And if you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a colleague who would find it useful, and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.  

One last thing before we go.  If you'd like to keep up with what we're working on at Insight222, follow us on LinkedIn or head to insight222.com.  You can also sign up there for our bi-weekly newsletter for the latest thinking on HR, people analytics, and workforce transformation.  Right, that's us for today.  Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week with another episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  Until then, take care and stay well.

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