38 minute read
MYIDEALWORKPLACE
1 NURTURING ENVIRONMENT “Leadership that sees your potential and enables you to realise it; respect from a team that listens to your opinion regardless of differences in role or experience; and innovation that stimulates learning.”
Elisa Camorani, impact finance junior consultant at Innpact SA
2 MODERNITY
Maxime Toussaint, BTS media writing student at Lycée Classique Diekirch and freelancer at the Lëtzebuerger Journal
3 TIP-TOP CULTURE “An impactful organisation with a great work culture that values well-being and compassion for others. Also a workplace where the cultural diversity leads to interesting discussions over coffee.”
Linnet Reid, doctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg
4 PROFESSIONAL CLOSENESS “A company with a lot of multicultural diversity and opportunities to get new perspectives, and where everyone feels like a close-knit family, can support themselves and can reach their potential.”
Rui Zong, intern at Impactify
5 OPPORTUNITY
Anna Atanassova, manager at EY Luxembourg
14 Labour minister Georges Engel wants to focus on lifelong learning ahead of the elections next year
Labour minister Georges Engel (LSAP) talks about making jobs more flexible, reducing working hours, the future of teleworking and how to keep Luxembourg an attractive place for employees.
Interview CORDULA SCHNUER Photo MATIC ZORMAN
The pandemic changed working life for many people. What stood out for you? The sentences ‘can you hear me’ or ‘turn your mic on’, which were never uttered before. Teleworking took on a dimension during the pandemic that it absolutely didn’t have before. For some people it was very pleasant to be working from home. For others it was probably less pleasant, in a small apartment, with children, a partner who’s also at home. But I think it will be difficult to imagine life without it in the coming years.
Feedback from HR departments is that flexibility is more important, for example, than salaries. What is the risk for companies if they simply fall back into pre-pandemic patterns? I think that would be difficult. Teleworking is established. It needs to be regulated, and that’s important. It needs a framework. Too much teleworking isn’t good for a company. A maximum of two days per five-day week, to me, seems to be a good rule, with fixed days where people need to be in so that the team in a company can see each other and exchange.
For some it’s an opportunity to work remotely, but for others it will simply never be an option. Nurses or educators will never be able to work from home, which is why it will be difficult to introduce a right to remote working.
To what extent are cross-border workers part of the equation, as there are limits to what they can benefit from? Until now, there was an agreement between employers and labour unions to regulate SHORT CV
January 2022 Georges Engel succeeds Dan Kersch (LSAP) after the labour and sports minister steps down from office for personal reasons.
2012 to 2022 Engel is nominated to the Chamber of Deputies in February 2012 after Lydie Err ends her mandate early. He is re-elected in 2013 and 2018.
2010 to 2019 After being a member of the LSAP for 17 years, Engel becomes vice-president of the party in 2010.
2005 to 2020 After 15 years in office, Engel steps down as mayor of Sanem in 2020 after becoming the head of the LSAP’s group in parliament earlier that year. teleworking. That’s a good thing. But there is now a need for a series of legal frameworks to accommodate all aspects --legal, social security and other social aspects. And that includes the question of cross-border workers, where at EU level not more than 25% of working time should be outside the country.
We have agreements with neighbouring countries significantly below this and if it’s more than a certain number of days--depending on the country--then workers fall into the tax system of that country. In that case, teleworking might not be so interesting or there could still be a benefit--you might lose some money but, in return, you don’t have to drive to work, can organise yourself better. A new world has opened up.
If we’re speaking about legal frameworks, what are projects you’re working on concretely? In parliament, there’s a working group for teleworking that stems from the labour committee. This examines all these aspects --social security, work accidents, what’s the situation when you get injured at home, how does that work when you weren’t working, what is or isn’t working time.
There’s a number of things to regulate, and that working group addresses this and should make proposals on how we should adapt our laws to this new situation.
Talking about flexibility, there are countries across Europe that are testing a four-day workweek. What future do you see for such models in Luxembourg?
The discussion came up because Belgium said it would introduce a 38-hour week spread over four days instead of five. I’m not convinced. Here in Luxembourg, that would be a 40-hour week, no longer divided into five times eight hours but four times ten. Under Luxembourg law, if you agree with your employer, that’s already possible. But I’m not sure if that’s social progress. Add a one-hour commute each way and you’re gone for 12 hours. Reducing the 40-hour week and working fewer hours, on the other hand, would be social progress.
Work-life balance is very important to me, and that must be discussed with social partners. But it brings other problems. We have a shortage of qualified staff. If we reduce their hours, that won’t make it any easier for employers to get the job done. We must start this discussion now, which is why I would like to commission a study to gather data on which we can base the debate. But in the coalition agreement there’s nothing that allows me to push through a working time reduction.
If it’s not a topic in the coalition agreement, will it be a topic for the next elections? Absolutely. It will be a topic for the next elections, and I know what I will propose to my party.
A study by the Chamber of Employees says that a quarter of employees are thinking of quitting their job. A jobs.lu survey says that two-thirds of people are unhappy with their salary. Are we seeing a shift in mentality, that people want to get out of the corporate hamster wheel? In times of crisis people ask fundamental questions--whether it’s the right decision to stay in the hamster wheel, work more and more for a bit more money in the bank, have less and less time at home and for the things you enjoy.
There are people who have the option to earn a little less money and live better. But there are also people who don’t because they rely on every cent. Politics needs to do something. Parliament will hold a debate on tax justice, which is very important. Paying less taxes could allow people to work less for more life.
One of the priorities in the coalition agreement is skills--upskilling, reskilling, identifying what the market needs. Where are the biggest gaps between offer and demand? We have a very particular job market. We have around 17,000 job seekers registered with Adem and 10,000 vacancies. That should be simple. You match them and have no vacancies, and only 7,000 unemployed. But it’s not that simple. The demand from the market isn’t met by the offer. People don’t have the skills they need to find a place. We need to bring them closer together.
A part of that isn’t waiting until people are unemployed to upskill or reskill them but to do this while they are working, so they can learn things they maybe don’t need for the job they’re doing right now but that will open doors to something else. And to help them before they risk losing their job, to get them fit to move with the times. We have a series of programmes, also with Adem. We carried out a skills assessment in seven sectors. Based on this study, we’ll adapt our programmes. There will be a second study in the health and
social sectors. It’s up to Adem, but also schools and education, to get people on the market who have what’s needed.
In how far is it also the responsibility of employers to offer training opportunities? The onus is also on employers to make sure their staff don’t stand still. It’s in everybody’s interest, also the employers’, that things keep moving. Lifelong learning is one of the things I want to expand during my mandate, to introduce a sort of training account. This would include a number of days you have for training, staggered through the year. We’re working on different models. There’s always the question of who pays, and we’re looking at how to best manage this.
To what extent is the private sector in competition with the state for staff? It’s definitely a topic. And I can understand that employers in the private sector aren’t happy. They have someone, train them and when they’re done, that person goes to the state. That’s not great. And that’s why I know employers who hire people that aren’t eligible to work for the state, so they don’t abscond.
Luxembourg depends on talent from abroad, but immigration procedures are still lengthy and complicated. Is there room to facilitate access to the labour market? Yes. We should make it as easy as possible. But that also has risks. If we make it too easy, we risk attracting a lot of people whom we need to accommodate. It’s a double-edged sword. But we should make it easier for people who are already here, refugees who want to work. In the areas where we lack staff, we should make sure they can work as quickly as possible.
The Ukrainian refugees have a different status--temporary protection is different from being an asylum seeker. This means they can enter the job market more quickly. That can help us in some areas, but we must ensure not to create a twotier society among refugees.
In the December tripartite it was decided to make it easier for accompanying spouses of thirdcountry nationals to access the job market. Where is that project at?
I wasn’t yet in the December tripartite. But we’re working on making it easier and faster to access the job market for people who arrive as a partner. Discussions are ongoing.
The pandemic shone a spotlight on difficulties for self-employed workers. For example, they couldn’t access partial unemployment. What progress is there to reviewing their status? I’m still in the prospection phase with the different federations and unions to see where the biggest problems are. The status of self-employed workers was an issue in several talks. There’s a paper developed by the Chamber of Commerce and the Chamber of Skilled Trades and Crafts with a series of recommendations. We’re examining this paper, and there are some measures that we can implement quickly. One of them is to introduce father’s leave for independents, so they are compensated during those 10 days.
Another idea is for independents to request partial unemployment when their activity has ceased and they’re eligible for the labour market, or to create a mutual insurer, to which the state would contribute money and from which independents could then finance partial unemployment. We’re analysing this. The status of independents should be valued if we want to have companies here, so that not everyone goes to the state and communes.
Luxembourg is in a greater region and European labour market. But the job market is also becoming increasingly globalised. What are points where Luxembourg must be careful not to lose in competitiveness? We rely heavily on the financial sector, and you can do that from everywhere. It’s not something that’s tied to a country. They go where conditions are best. We must offer an attractive environment. We must ensure that non-wage labour costs aren’t too high.
Social peace is important. Here in Luxembourg, we have an index that means people earn 2.5% more when prices go up. That also means that we don’t have exaggerated collective bargaining, with discussions of 8, 10 or 12% loan increases. All these elements mean that we have a good climate, and we must preserve this. EUROPEAN PILLAR OF SOCIAL RIGHTS
The European Parliament, council and commission in November 2017 proclaimed the European Pillar of Social Rights at the Gothenburg Summit. It sets out 20 key principles on equal opportunities, labour market access, working conditions, and social protection and inclusion. The European Commission under Ursula von der Leyen in March 2021 presented an action plan to implement the pillar across member states by 2030, turning the principles into concrete actions. These include a directive to enhance minimum wages in the EU and improving working conditions for gig economy workers. Luxembourg has yet to transpose a work-life balance directive that came into force in 2019 as a result of the social rights pillar.
A question that comes up in every portfolio is housing. To what extent does it impact your ministry? If you want people to come here… they don’t all have to live in Luxembourg, but people want to live close to their place of work. It’s a topic that must be addressed. Not enough has happened--I agree with everyone who says this. We missed addressing the problem, tightening the screws, targeting those who are sitting on land and aren’t putting it on the market. We should look at banks, giving out loans of €1m or €1.5m for a field. Is that field worth it?
I was a mayor for 15 years--I can tell you, it’s a catastrophe. We don’t build fast enough and that has several reasons. We need an offensive. We must build faster. We need people, we need materials. It sounds so simple, but unfortunately, it’s not.
Under the European Pillar of Social Rights, the European Commission is looking to have a greater say in social affairs, including labour. What impact will directives--for example on minimum wages or gig economy workers--have on Luxembourg? I’m happy that we were able to agree in Europe to have a social minimum wage everywhere. Of course, this cannot be the same in every country. It has to be proportional. We’re working actively on this. We always wanted--and we have defended this--a secure minimum wage to enable people to live decently in their country.
We’re also working on platform workers. We have two statutes--employees and self-employed workers. But there are trends between these. We’ve spoken out against this. You’re either self-employed or an employee. We don’t have big platforms here in Luxembourg, but still we’re looking to draft our own law.
The social pillar also includes lifelong learning, the fight against poverty. We’ve sent a paper to the commission where we set our targets to get people into work, to lift them out of poverty. There is room to catch up, and there will be actions to reach those targets.
It won’t be long before Luxembourg gears up for the 2023 elections. What’s on your list of priorities until then? There’s a directive on work-life balance. There’s a number of things in there that should, for example, allow employees to take care of a sick child. The directive is also about paternity leave. Those draft laws are almost done and will be submitted soon. I’ve mentioned paternity leave for self-employed workers. And lifelong learning is something I want to tackle.
There’s a lot that could still be done, but you also have to be realistic, know how long it takes for a law to be voted. There are laws in the pipeline, such as the anti-bullying law. October 2023 isn’t far away.
What’s the challenge to pick up this mandate in the middle of the legislative period? I was less involved in the coalition agreement, but I was the president of the labour committee in parliament for the last eight, nine years. This has given me an insight into the work underway. But you’re right --to pick it up along the way isn’t so easy. A bunch of stuff has already happened, which you need to catch up on. Perhaps you have a slightly different view than your predecessor, and you want to adjust things without turning everything upside down. It’s not so easy, but I wanted to tackle this challenge.
Thinking holistically about the skills gap
As the skills gap continues to widen, trends are emerging, and the need for holistic thinking only becomes more important. Governments, employers and employees all have a part to play in the transformation of the labour market.
Words JEFF PALMS Illustration SALOMÉ JOTTREAU
“We need to act in a more coordinated and strategic way as a country--across all ministries but also together with employers--with our talent attraction strategy.”
This comment is from Inès Baer, Future Skills Initiative manager at Adem, the government’s employment agency. She describes the need for bigger-picture thinking when it comes to the problem of the skills gap.
The gap is, unfortunately, real. “We don’t have enough people in the local labour market to meet the demand,” she comments, specifying that even in the Greater Region it’s hard to source talent. It isn’t just niche technological expertise that’s missing, either: “This can be IT profiles, but it can also be butchers, for example… we don’t have, by far, enough butchers in the Greater Region.”
This gap exists across Europe, she adds. “So this whole competition for talent becomes more challenging.”
Big-picture thinking The better-coordinated approach that Baer calls for is already in the works, albeit nascently. Since last year, Adem has been working with the OECD on the “National Skills Strategy in Luxembourg”, a national-scale strategy that brings together Luxembourg’s ministries, employer federations, professional chambers and unions. Thus, government, employer and employee voices will all be used to forge a common strategy and to identify where more instruments, financial support and incentives are needed--or where they already exist but aren’t used enough. The strategy should be ready by the end of 2022.
This project is a concrete step, but the process still has a long way to go. “We have a lot of pieces, be it on the public or the private side, to address the [skills] challenge,” Baer says. “And we are quite at the beginning of having the awareness that we need to put those pieces together, to create synergies, to act with a common vision and strategy.”
What employers want While this harmonised vision slowly matures, several macrotrends on employer hiring practices have already become clear. In a nutshell, what companies want from employees is changing, and not just in terms of proficiency with the latest programmes or technologies.
At the end of 2021, the Future Skills Initiative published a series of in-depth
sectoral studies into changes in recruitment practices in Luxembourg. Among other things, the studies used text mining to examine 142,000 job adverts posted between 2015 and 2021 in Luxembourg, in which 1.28m mentions of skills were collectively made.
Perhaps the most basic takeaway from the studies is that across every sector-trade, commerce, construction, hospitality, industry, finance and transport/ logistics--employers want more. In other words, the raw number of skills mentioned per advert increased. “That’s already a trend,” says Baer, “showing that the requirements of employers in the labour market are tightening and increasing.” This data backs up anecdotal observations that the job market is becoming more complex and selective.
Another pan-sector trend is that transversal skills--including personal, language, management and digital skills, i.e., those that are transferrable from job to job-are growing in importance faster than any other skill. Technical knowledge, in contrast, has remained relatively stable. “Still important, but growing less strongly,” says Baer of the latter.
Expanding on this trend, Baer correlates the rising preference for more “human” skills directly with the rise of automation. “As technology becomes more capable of taking over routine, well-defined, structured tasks, it automatically places a bigger value on all of the skills that are difficult to automate, which are empathy, creativity, originality.”
A discrete but related finding is that, across all sectors, the most-requested skill is “adapting to change”. This reflects the fast-changing environment, Baer comments, and also implies a core shift in how people see their careers: rather than a stable existence as a specialist in x, y or z, constant flux and “lifelong learning” have become the norm.
Furthermore, employers are recognising that the skill of adapting to change is largely a mindset, and as such is hard to teach. “They can learn the specific skills on the job,” Baer says, commenting on what companies think of job applicants--“but the most important thing is the attitude.”
Still, the future is slow to arrive. “To be honest, many employers still want an electrician who has worked as an electriINÈS BAER SHORT CV
Current role Future Skills Initiative manager, Adem
Former role Manager in consulting, KPMG Luxembourg
Education PhD (in progress) on the impact of AI on work, VU Amsterdam
cian and knows how to do the job,” she adds. “That hasn’t disappeared completely.”
New job territories With the caveat that Adem isn’t placed exactly right to descry the emergence of new professions, Baer nevertheless shares some insights on novel areas. Sustainability-related profiles are one emerging area, such as roles in green construction (related to the disassembly of buildings or the recovery of materials) or green finance. Another change is in cybersecurity, where the profiles sought are becoming more granular. “Before, we just had cybersecurity experts in demand… now it ranges from penetration tester to code inspector.” Specialisation is the general trend in IT, she adds.
New regulations such as those in finance, health, security, the environment, etc. also spur new roles, as personnel are needed to handle them.
The onus on employees The world of skills is thus changing at the whims of some large and momentous forces: employer needs, which are based on the never-ending, ever-quickening march of technological change and automation; social imperatives, like the move towards a circular economy and sustainable practices in general; and top-down evolutions in regulation. Where does that leave the employees themselves?
“It can be very overwhelming,” says Baer about the reality that people need to become comfortable with change. “For most job seekers… the stress factor of having to always (again) adapt, reinvent themselves, learn new skills--the whole mindset of lifelong learning, which for many wasn’t taught in school--doesn’t come naturally.”
On the heels of accepting the instability of a profession comes, of course, the need to find both the motivation and the time to learn new skills. “That is quite a challenge,” says Baer. Help does exist, however. Job-seekers who register with Adem gain access to free training, while relevant outside training sessions can also be reimbursed by the organisation.
The employed also have options. Namely, employees in Luxembourg get 80 days (per person, per lifetime) of paid individual leave from their jobs to do training. “That’s not enough time to completely reinvent your profession, but it’s enough to keep up with trends and make sure that your skills stay up to date,” says Baer. She adds that this option is underused, however: only about 40% of employees in Luxembourg receive training in a given year, leaving 60% who don’t.
Upskilling, reskilling If the Greater Region and Europe more generally are missing many sought-after profiles, then employers can’t simply keep looking further and further afield to make their hires. Indeed, reskilling and upskilling are at least half the answer to the skills gap. Adem is active in this area, given its traditional focus on job-seekers, with various training programs on offer.
Interestingly, however, the agency’s scope has recently--from the end of last year--been widened to enable it to help employers train employees as well. This represents, in Baer’s phrasing, “a big strategic change”.
“It’s important [to train employees]” she says, “because waiting until people are in unemployment… that’s a shame. It’s better to act preventatively.”
Even if the job climate is complicated, the opportunities in Luxembourg are not lacking, with the Future Skills Initiative having found growth in jobs in most sectors. “The Luxembourg economy is still very dynamic,” Baer comments, “even during the pandemic and now in the recovery phase. We see growth from IT to waiters in restaurants to construction workers. We see prospects in all kinds of areas.”
Daily truths for a Luxembourg recruitment specialist
How easy are tech profiles to come by in 2022? Talkwalker’s Zach Traer spoke to Delano about recruiting challenges, changing employee demands and Luxembourg’s competitiveness.
Words JEFF PALMS
200-250 signes
For Talkwalker, a technology company specialising in consumer intelligence, the hardest profiles to find are no longer developers. “Surprisingly,” says Zach Traer, talent acquisition specialist.
“What’s more difficult is targeting industry-specific skills,” he explains, naming pre-sales consultants, solutions consultants and product marketing experts specifically in the SaaS (software as a service) sector as examples. “That has become the challenge, more than our typical recruiting of a JavaScript developer, because whatever company you worked in, if you know Java, you know Java--but if you’re a solutions consultant in one industry, it’s not necessarily the same as our industry, consumer intelligence.”
As technology firms mature, this kind of increasing granularity in profiles is normal, as Inès Baer of Adem points out (see page 18). On the other side of the same trend is that certain tech skills--proficiency in JavaScript, as Traer says--are increasingly basic and easy to come by.
Soft skills For both technical and nontechnical roles, Traer agrees that soft skills are rising in importance from a hiring perspective, naming communication, attitude and motivation as particular assets.
“I think this is universal, not just for Talkwalker--but to have good communicators in your organisation is paramount these days because of remote work.” With so many video interviews, online meetings and crisscrossing emails, he adds, written and verbal communication are key.
Talkwalker has about 650 employees worldwide, with over 50 nationalities represented, making it particularly important that employees can express themselves in the working language, English. Good communication is about avoiding misinterpretations and assumptions, says Traer, which ultimately increases efficiency.
Motivation and attitude are also skills that Talkwalker evaluates strictly. “We’re looking for other like-minded people who are excited about the space that we’re working in.” Attitude can separate one junior candidate from another, he adds.
ICT SPECIALISTS IN THE WORKFORCE
As digital technology matures, the makeup of the workforce is being transformed. Data from 2020.
50.5%
Percentage by which the number of ICT specialists grew in Europe between 2011 and 2020 (over nine times higher than for total employment)
6.3%
Percentage of Luxembourg’s workforce made up of ICT specialists (EU average: 4.3%)
80.2%
Percentage of Luxembourg’s ICT workers who are male (versus 87.3% in 2011) Luxembourg’s unique situation Being a tech company in Luxembourg comes with certain pros and cons from a recruitment perspective. Traer notes the country’s “very small pool” of talent, contrasting his job with those of his colleagues in Talkwalker’s offices in the US, where the pool is hundreds-of-millions strong. “However, their challenge [in the US] is that they are competing against the biggest companies in the world.” In Luxembourg, Talkwalker competes (indirectly) with the likes of Amazon, but after 12 years of operation and growth has also become known locally in its own right.
Another challenge relates to the newfound imperative for flexibility. In answer to the question of how employee demands are changing, Traer says: “Definitely more home office.” However, due to tax and social security issues, companies in Luxembourg are limited in their teleworking policies for cross-border workers. “I guess it’s up to the politicians,” comments Traer. On the various motions calling for flexibility for non-residents, he says: “I think [passing one of them] would only be positive for any company here in Luxembourg.”
Blending technologies, blending professions
Trades in the building sector are evolving quickly, challenging what it means to be “highly skilled” in the first place.
Words JEFF PALMS
In order to understand the difficulty of finding talent in the building sector, it’s essential to first consider the several revolutions currently underway in that sector. The speed of technological change, the push towards sustainability, the merging of companies, the new methodology of construction, the creation of utterly new professions--all of these factors influence the question of skills on a level that can seem frightfully basic. “What is a skill?” asks Marc Ant, managing director of the Competence Centres of the Luxembourg Crafts Sector (Centres de Compétences de l’Artisanat, or CDC).
Founded in 2015, the CDC brings together trades related to building technologies (electricity, sanitary, heating, ventilation, etc.) and house finishing (floors, roofs, wood, metal, glass, etc.) Since 2016, it has trained over 30,000 people across 7,700 sessions. Taken together with its other activities, which include running a similar facility in Cabo Verde as well as a new academy for educating real estate professionals, the CDC is among the largest training centres in Luxembourg.
The mere process of creating the CDC’s curriculum is complex. “The development of skills is technology-driven,” Ant explains, specifying that they don’t design courses around skills as much as around the technological developments occurring in the sector. “So we have to observe what’s going on in the market.”
To do that, they exchange with the industry itself, which constantly produces new or updated devices; incorporate topdown directives, such as the energy ministry’s focus on decarbonisation; and consider what companies need and want, such as help with digitalisation and regulatory challenges.
Theme of integration “A building is not built in a linear order anymore,” says Ant. Traditionally, up to 15 separate tradespeople would come to the site in sequence, each one adding a layer to the whole. But this approach doesn’t work anymore. “This is a complex building,” he explains, talking about the CDC’s new facility. “The ventilation has to do with the temperature, the temperature has to do with the solar panels
MARC ANT SHORT CV
Current role Managing director, CDC
Former role Professor and dean, Bonn University of Applied Sciences
Publishing Author of 15 books and about 100 articles on training and management on the roof, and with many other things… we have two big heat pumps--and all this has to be coordinated.”
The result? Integration. Not just of systems, but of professions. Electricians have to know something about ventilation, ventilation experts have to tap into the electricity network, etc. It isn’t enough to remain in your silo anymore, despite the tendency of many professionals to do so anyway. “Young folks have no problem with it,” says Ant, referring to these fundamental changes. “Others do.”
A related trend is that companies have begun merging with each other. “The construction sector has more and more companies that have all 15 trades instead of only one.”
New professions In many cases, the new technology is so unlike the old that the profession itself is novel. Gas heating has been entirely replaced with heat pump technology, for instance, the installation of which is an entirely different task. The CDC runs a training series on how to do it, which lasts for 32 days. “That’s a lot,” comments Ant. “Still, not enough.”
Skills-wise, he says, the model for individuals is to have a combination of core skills (social, technical, managerial, etc.) and peak skills, such as expertise in digitalisation or in security issues.
“You can have somebody who has three peaks. These are the guys that earn a lot of money.”
TOP 1OO
The ranking of the most influential economic decision makers in Luxembourg
13.12.22
Professional training: resources for upskilling
Upskilling will be key to accelerating economic growth and prosperity and could lead to the net creation of 5.3m new jobs globally, according to a 2021 World Economic Forum and PwC “Upskilling for Shared Prosperity” report. Here are just a handful of resources available in the grand duchy for boosting competencies and knowledge.
Words NATALIE A. GERHARDSTEIN
1
University of Luxembourg Competence Centre Situated on the Belval campus is the University of Luxembourg Competence Centre organising professional and academic continuous education and lifelong learning. The centre, with its expertise across competency clusters, aligns its pedagogy to keep up with developments across Luxembourg’s economic and government strategy. As managing director Anne Oberlé told Delano, the centre can craft bespoke training--for example, on topics like satellites and artificial intelligence. One of their recent customised programmes, in fact, drew in some 1,000 participants from over 160 countries. Such tailoring and flexibility in pedagogical engineering also mean that organisations can work with the centre to determine what type of learning (in-person, online, blended, etc.) best suits training objectives, particularly given an increased demand in flexibility. Oberlé adds that the centre is still dominant in the health sector, with its tailored training for Luxembourg specificities. Courses have also been adapted for jobseekers, as the centre works with Adem for specialised certification programmes in areas like IT, project management and more.
2
INFPC Operating under the education ministry, the National Institute for the Development of Continuing Vocational Training (INFPC) manages the lifelong-learning.lu platform, centralising around 10,000 courses in a wide variety of training at the public, private and voluntary levels. The institute also assists companies applying for state subsidies co-funding and, through its Observatory of Training, monitors training trends for the future. According to INFPC, the institute’s digital ecosystem was strengthened in 2020, a year marked by digital learning development.
www.infpc.lu www.lifelong-learning.lu
3
House of Training Created by the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce and the Luxembourg Bankers’ Association (ABBL) in 2015, the House of Training provides continuous vocational training in the country’s three official languages, plus English. Fields of training vary widely, from accounting and banking to IT, insurance, law, marketing and sales, real estate, taxation, culture, entrepreneurship and more. The easy-to-use website also allows users to select interests based on whether they want to get certification, simply reorient themselves in their current workplace or prefer to grow in a particular area of expertise, even to create or manage a company.
www.houseoftraining.lu
4IMS Luxembourg In honour of its 15th anniversary this year, Inspiring More Sustainability (IMS) Luxembourg announced in February the creation of its new sustainability academy. Training through it is offered in a variety of formats, including physical and distance learning, with expert-led programmes designed with original content. The academy collaborates with a number of subject-matter experts, including through the Luxembourg Stock Exchange, ILA (Luxembourg’s independent directors association) and construction group CDEC. Sandrine Grumberg, IMS partner since its start and founder of two training organisations in Luxembourg and France, and IMS deputy director Sophie Öberg have been charged with the academy’s development. Courses centre around the three IMS strategic pillars: people, planet and prosperity.
10�6 HR
UP YOUR SKILLS!
10 HR professionals, leaders, experts and users will share their experience and advice on developing skills, retaining talent and gaining in competitiveness.
Programme • Welcome cocktail (18:30) • Conference with the participation of M. Georges Engel, Minister of Labour and Employment (19:00) • Networking walking cocktail (20:15)
28.06
Tuesday Kinépolis Luxembourg-Kirchberg
Registration and information: www.paperjam.lu/club
Arnaud Spirlet has been the managing director of Cisco Belux since 2016
Inclusion is a multifaceted term that carries new meaning in the context of hybrid work. Cisco’s Arnaud Spirlet explains how Webex by Cisco enables the transition to a new world of work and what it takes to lead a hybrid team.
Return-to-office conversations at the onset of the pandemic have evolved towards understanding what the future of work would look like. But at the same time, employers have been preoccupied with how best to shape present day corporate culture, pivot the workplace experience, create smart workspaces, while also managing the modern-day workforce.
After two years of large-scale shifts in how and where work is done, it has become evident to many employers that whether hybrid work persists or not, the concept of work prior to the pandemic or collaboration techniques will never be the same.
Today, the new way of working has led many companies to implement work arrangements for employees with varying degrees of remote work flexibilities spanning from a few days a week to full remote work. Certainly, the tech infrastructure in place for effective collaboration contributes to the remote work policy adopted.
Arnaud Spirlet, Belgium-Luxembourg managing director of Cisco Systems--a leading provider of networking technologies present in over 80 countries, headquartered in California and deriving its name from the city of San Francisco--explains that hybrid work should not just be understood as working from home and from the office, as it is a large topic that involves several key aspects to be considered by businesses. PRE-PANDEMIC VS. POST-PANDEMIC PREFERENCES
Cisco employee work patterns prior to mandatory work from home showed employees spent three or more days in the office. Preferences for working three or more days in the office had shifted as shown in the August 2021 survey.
Source Cisco Return to Office surveys, February and August 2021
80%
70%
60%
50% 63
57 77
62
40%
30%
20%
10% 19
15 28
20
0%
Global Americas Asia-Pacific, Japan & China Europe, Middle East, Africa & Russia
Pre-pandemic work patterns (Feb. 2021) Post-pandemic work preferences (Aug. 2021)
Productivity metrics In a world where filling time sheets has been the norm, measuring employee productivity especially in the context of hybrid work will require new and improved metrics.
“You don’t have to be in the office for eight hours, you have to do your job.
“We want to make hybrid meetings better than the classical meeting. We’re trying to make the old way better”
You don’t have to be the policeman to make sure staff is in the office at 8am.… actually, you don’t measure the time spent, you measure the output and the quality of the output,” says Spirlet. On one hand, most employers have been convinced about employee performance regardless of their location, as demonstrated by a higher productivity level but also burnout observed during the lockdowns, mentions Spirlet, adding that “probably one of the only benefits we have from covid is just that it opened the eyes of management that actually you can trust your people.”
On the other hand, employee perception and expectations of the office has also evolved. For an employee to go to the office today, “the office must be an asset and bring you value,” and the added value of being in the office must go beyond the mere convenience of talking one-onone, because if this was the sole reason, employees may probably be more comfortable at home, explains Spirlet.
Remote work flexibility also raises the question of security because “the more you work remotely, the more you are not really under the secured cyber environment that your company can provide, and maybe you’ll take some risks there,” says the director, underscoring the need for corporate awareness of cybersecurity threats and risks.
Beyond this, he specifies that hybrid work in the context of covid encompasses enabling a safe collaborative experience- creating touchless environments, voiceactivated videos or tracking adherence to social gathering restrictions within the office environment.
Inclusion in hybrid work Conventional understanding of terms like inclusion--which in the past has mostly centred on marginalised groups--has expanded to take on additional meaning in the context of hybrid work.
Although representation will remain relevant for the foreseeable future, hybrid work models have added new layers to what inclusiveness means in practice.
“Inclusion in hybrid work means that if you’re in a meeting, whoever you are and wherever you are, you have the equal time of speech, you have equal attention and the meeting is inclusive of all its participants. When a provider speaks about a hybrid meeting that is inclusive, it means that everybody has exactly the same weight during the meeting,” explains Spirlet.
Some of the ways Cisco drives inclusiveness in hybrid work is through several enhanced features on Webex, a cloud-based collaboration solution to create a seamless and immersive experience. Examples include noise cancellation, real-time translation in multiple languages. It is the only platform directly translating into Luxembourgish--document co-editing via screen sharing, or the raised hand and poll features.
In March, the company announced a first-ever partnership that will allow Ford electric vehicles to connect to Webex meetings, expanding the limits of what is considered a workplace.
“There’s been a lot of development that has been done on Webex so that we are able to basically get more out of it. You could link Webex with social media while
respecting privacy and GDPR guidelines and only if the person agrees to it. But this is possible,” explains Spirlet, adding that Webex is totally encrypted.
Training Another critical area highlighted by the director is training and coaching managers, which he describes as one of the major challenges in the last two years.
Typically, “managers are not trained to trust their team, they’re trained to control. And here you have no choice but to trust and then to measure productivity totally differently,” he explains. Also the span of trainings ought to cover engagement techniques and ways to effectively conduct hybrid meetings, which differ from normal meetings. “You have to pay attention to what is happening on the screen. You have to react, and you have to make sure that everybody feels comfortable and that it’s inclusive in the way it happens,” says Spirlet, while mentioning that these skills will also apply in remote recruitment setups.
A Webex by Cisco analysis conducted in October 2021 showed that out of 650m monthly meeting participants, 47% of them aren’t speaking during meetings for reasons linked to the number of meeting participants, for example, individual personalities and cultural trust, or the meeting duration and format.
Diversity Simply put, the more diverse the team, the more effective it is, says Spirlet from his experience at the company over the last six years. “Diversity has always been top-notch for me as a manager trying to achieve my goals… I’m not doing it to be
FLEXIBLE WORK AND IN-OFFICE TECH EXPECTATIONS
Key findings of the global survey of 39,880 CIOs, IT decision makers and corporate workforce respondents in 34 global markets, commissioned by Cisco and deployed by Censuswide in August 2021. The survey uncovered evolving perceptions around the future of work, connectivity and the modern enterprise.
Source Future of Technology survey, Cisco 2021
69%
Employees who agree that the ability to dictate their own working hours directly affects whether they stay at or leave a job
64%
Employees who agree that the ability to work from anywhere impacts whether they stay at or leave a job
47%
By the next 6 to 12 months (from the survey date), around half of employees think their company will provide flexibility on working from anywhere
84%
Agreed that the work-from-home experience has influenced the technology expectations for an in-office experience politically correct or because it’s the hype of the moment but because I’m convinced that it’s in the best interest of the company... diverse teams are on average happier, and it’s way more fun to work in those teams,” he says.
In terms of promoting gender diversity, he explains the importance of attracting more girls and women to tech fields. Part of the ways the company does this is by organising tours of the Cisco office for schoolgirls with one of the most recent tours organised about two months ago in the Brussels office. “We show them that it’s not just somebody behind the screen coding. There are many cool jobs you can do if you go into this direction, but we need to sell this idea very early.”
Along with promoting a gender-diverse workplace, Spirlet discusses how artificial intelligence is used company-wide to track pay parity and end compensation discrimination regardless of gender, age or ethnicity for individuals with “the same job description”.
Diversity also ties in with the way recruitment is done. “Are you sure that the panel of interviewers is a diverse panel? If the panel is not diverse, probably the result will not be diverse either,” says Spirlet, adding that job advertisements should be rid of gender bias that may discourage women from even applying to certain jobs.
Cisco has been working with the public sector in several countries, including the Luxembourg government, as part of its Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) vision to accelerate global digitisation.
New solutions on the horizon Although he couldn’t yet disclose information on this, he explained the Cisco Live event, which will take place online and in Las Vegas, Nevada, on 12-16 June would put the spotlight on leading products and solutions connecting the hybrid world. In addition to networking opportunities with Cisco executives and engineers, the five-day event consists of over 1,000 business and technology sessions with multiple meetings dedicated to hybrid work. A non-disclosure agreement session will unveil Cisco’s strategy and roadmap for Webex.
DELANO LIVE
THE ULTIMATE LUXEMBOURG QUIZ
Programme • Welcome drink (18:30) • Quiz with the audience (19:00) • Meeting with the Irish community + Networking cocktail (19:45)
14.07 Thursday Zulu, Luxembourg-Clausen
Registration and information: www.paperjam.lu/club
