The Academy Cube is a European initiative - operationally driven by a bunch of SAP colleagues under the patronage of SAP’s Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe and the University Alliances division. The idea is to bridge the gap between the existing skills shortage on the one side and the high unemployment rate on the other by fostering a pan-European skills exchange regardless of national boundaries.
The Academy Cube platform launched at CeBIT does not only provide jobs on a platform as many job platforms do, but also offers eLearnings to its talents** in order to skill them up and provide them with a better start position when it comes to the application for a job. In addition, its unique matching taxonomy helps to identify the right eLearnings for the right talents and accordingly to the right job.
In particular, it aims at training unemployed university graduates and job seeking professionals with a STEM* degree, in order to significantly improve their employment opportunities on the European labor market. Talents with a university degree receive valuable eLearning courses to create a highly demanded talent base across Europe. The Academy Cube offers trainings, provided by industry and universities, on a cloud platform. The course content reflects the increasing digitization of production processes, featuring the topics of big data, data management, business analysis, and enterprise software, as well as logistics and production optimization.
Talents gain valuable knowledge, benefit from course content specifically based on the requirements of leading companies and profile themself as an ambitious specialist. After completing the training, talents can also apply for jobs directly on the Academy Cube platform. Companies will have access to the mass of talents highly qualified by improving their overall efficiency in recruiting and onboarding while playing an important role in the national fight against unemployment.
The initiative, which was officially announced by SAP at the German IT Summit 2012 and launched at CeBIT 2013 by EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes, is first focusing on university graduates in southern European countries, where the job situation is far from unproblematic. It is currently supported by more than 30 partner companies and organizations regularly adding new content and job postings: from manufacturing companies, through IT enterprises, to universities and public employment agencies.
The operations Status Quo - Positive!
Since moving from the pilot into a productive mode in August about 300 talents from Spain and Portugal are on the Academy Cube platform. The opening for further EU countries is process. The talents can choose between and assign for four curricula or nine courses provided by our content partners FESTO, SAP, Software AG, University Duisburg-Essen and pilot partner Hasso-Plattner-Institute. So far about 200 courses were booked. Currently there are more than 170 vacancies related to 28 job offers posted in the job market provided by our industry partners Bosch, itelligence, Randstad and SAP. Together with Microsoft we could gain first experience in providing pre-selected talents by running a dedicated campaign.With BITKOM and SAP TalentNet special campaigns are started to provide their members an attractive offer to use Academy Cube as additional recruiting channel for qualified talents.
*STEM science, technology, engineering, mathematics
**Talents are users with a profile on the Academy Cube platform
