Aligning academic knowledge with the current demands of the corporate world is among the priorities of digital journey curation
The search for technical and personal improvement meets the demands of a world that changes very quickly, stimulating a constant cycle of learning for those who want to stand out and stay up to date in an increasingly competitive job market.
The Future of Jobs Report 2023 states that over the next five years, there will be a 2% reduction in current employment (a net reduction of 14 million jobs), but also pathways to ensure resilience, with governments and companies investing in supporting the shift to the work of the future through education, reskilling and social support structures.
This movement, a continuous process of improvement and recycling, is one of the objectives of Delfia Corporate University (UCD), the corporate university of the digital journey curation company that, this year, launched the hard skills academy after a year of consolidation of the soft skills academy, inaugurated in 2023, whose main objective is the development of the human and intellectual capital of its team with a focus on updating and evolving its professionals in all its aspects.
“We had a boom in demand for the hard skills academy when it was launched eight months ago, as 80% of the company's professionals are from the technical area”, says Juliana Motta, Head of HR at Delfia, who is in charge of the Delfia Corporate University, cited in the Great Place to Work survey, ranking of the best companies to work for, as the benefit most valued by employees.
Developing employees
There are twelve courses divided into four academies and everything is online, through a virtual environment called AVA (Virtual Learning Environment): culture academy, leadership academy, business academy and technology academy. The video classes were recorded in a studio with professors who work at top-tier universities, but who are also executives in these practices.
Delfia's HR department estimates that 961 TP3T from the company are registered on the UCD platform, totaling 489 students. "This is a very high average. We monitor monthly who the employees are, what areas they are from, how many accesses, how long it takes to complete, how many were approved, how many were rejected, where they access the course, among other things," says Juliana Motta.
A request flow for employee qualifications, in which people are pre-selected, was created by the company's HR department. The leadership of each area makes a preliminary selection of talents that are in line for growth and, together with the UCD's pedagogical coordinator, a study path is outlined. "Employees can also ask their leader to participate in one of the academies. This movement is well-regarded and well-accepted, because we understand that employees want to develop themselves and seek knowledge", comments Rodrigo Bocchi, CEO of Delfia.
Thus, the path is formed and the time required for completion over a period of time is determined. “We have an average of two courses per month for employees on a path lasting six to eight months, so that they can complete 12 courses, for example – the course is made up of several instructional materials, such as video classes, podcasts, videos, articles, as well as handouts, books and activities. Our goal is for employees to complete this path with ease and quality,” adds the Head of HR.
Most popular courses
The most sought-after soft skills course in the UCD ranking is “Emotional Control”. The second most sought-after is “Communication” and, therefore, “Corporate Etiquette” – the latter gained an in-person version for the commercial area due to the impact among students and even directors who are not part of the University's audience, who attended it, due to its functionality as content.
As for the most sought-after hard skills, Juliana Motta reports that there is a lot of interest in observability and cybersecurity, market trends. “These are topics that are very prominent in the IT universe, in addition to being content that we work on and offer in the form of services. It is natural that our employees want to specialize, especially if they already work in the technical area”, says the executive.
For Delfia’s Head of HR, investing in a corporate university demonstrates the commitment of working with professionals who enter the job market with academic knowledge to merge theory, practice and the market. “The big gap is behavioral, because hiring is based on technical skills, but firing is based on behavior. The important thing is to link hard skills to soft skills,” she emphasizes.
“We believe that knowledge in hard and soft skills need to work together so that the individual can achieve completeness in their performance,” adds the CEO.
Internal Impact of the Corporate University
When a company invests in a data engineer who has completed a technical training in soft skills, for example, the goal is for him to adopt a communicator and entrepreneurial stance, so that he can move into human relations management more easily. “The company is effectively investing in greater performance, as this professional needs to have the opportunity to acquire knowledge that goes beyond the academic world, but which is part of the corporate world,” says the Head of HR.
The appropriation of knowledge also impacts the delivery of services by the digital curation company. Rodrigo Bocchi explains that the employee's performance and the application of content in the company will be verified through movements in the areas, such as how many promotions were given. “By the middle of next year, we will have visibility on the knowledge that was absorbed, from a KPI perspective, unfolded in the form of management practices, actions, attitudes and technical knowledge”, confirms the CEO.
Juliana Motta states that some employees even become educators or monitors at UCD. “The hard skills academy has collaborating teachers who have excelled and grown. We have one employee who started as an intern and is now the head of our Research area.” For her, the trajectory of talents in such a volatile and dynamic segment as technology shows that much more is needed than technical skills. “That is why we first invest in soft skills and, after their consolidation, in the hard skills academy.”
Juliana also highlights another work that has been done, which supports and adds to the University's knowledge: mentoring employees connected to UCD courses in the project called “Curator Leader”. “Today, our Business Partners, professionals who deploy all HR subsystems at the business end because they are close to employees, act as consultants with the areas, mapping the team's profile and assessing employees to select potential for improvement opportunities, where key points of career growth are worked on in conjunction with the company's objectives. And we in HR mentor some professionals recommended by leaders, who will be future leaders”.
HR and the challenge of human capital development
Juliana talks about how HR is constantly undergoing transformation processes, with scenarios that are very different from the past and caused by the multigenerational movement. “Purpose speaks louder than financial proposals and careers. This generation has the greater goal of thinking about quality of life, of being driven by causes, whether social, environmental or cultural, and of not accepting the movement of the past. Today, we have a professional profile with other priorities.”
The professional says that HR has taken on a gigantic proportion within organizations, along with issues of diversity and inclusion, corporate education and development connected to the business strategy. “See how much HR, which was a completely operational area, has become strategic and necessary for any company.”
She believes in a more humanized HR department to meet the demands of different generations, listening to people to make them aware of their rights and their voices. “The biggest organizational conflict of the century is intergenerational conflicts, with baby boomer directors and managers with younger profiles, who are transitioning between other, more current generations, as well as millennials forming teams. We are talking about a matrix structure of an organizational chart that comprises four or five relationships interacting on the same topic, with completely different views of success, performance, results and life priorities.”
Future of education
The Head of HR reveals that a new front will be worked on at UCD to embrace an intergenerational model, so that employees can move well within their expertise and differences, validating the exchange of experiences. “This will be one of the axes that we will work on in the next batch of soft skills courses and include interaction between all generations”.
Furthermore, she plans to present to Delfia's board the growth of the courses every two years, without ruling out the development of content and the inclusion of new themes, in addition to also creating a face-to-face program, as was done with the “Corporate Etiquette” course, always with an eye on mobility, flexibility, technology and curation, escaping from a “rigid” format of traditional institutions.
For Juliana, companies that realize they need knowledge to deal with generations will be ahead of any other, in addition to realizing that human capital, as the name suggests, is human. “Completing professional training in hard and soft skills, taking into account the basis of values, contemporaneity and human relations, will be the big idea of the moment”, concludes the Head of HR.
