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  |   Indonesia

Building a future-ready workforce: How Telkom led its employees on the path of digital transformation

Telkom is a state-owned information and communications technology enterprise and telecommunications network in Indonesia. The Telkom Group announced its digital transformation in 2020, introducing three new business portfolios, considering fast-evolving technologies and customer lifestyle and preferences. This development prompted the need to digitally upskill its employees.

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Industry

Communications technology

Use Case

Digital readiness and technical assessments

What Telkom Indonesia achieved

10k+ employees were profiled on their digital readiness levels

Telkom assessed candidates on 75+ new skills to cater to new roles


It is more important for us that people pass with integrity. That's where Mercer | Mettl’s powerful proctoring solutions helped us. Once people have undergone Mercer | Mettl’s assessments, we are not worried about their technical prowess. We believe they can be developed further to contribute to Telkom’s survival in the digital world.

Gede Agus Putrawirawan

Manager - Business Planning and Performance, Telkom Indonesia

Business Challenges

First, Telkom had to decide between recruiting or developing talent. The new business portfolios required new-age competencies and roles. Some of them could be developed in-house, while the others required external recruitment.

 

Telkom’s digital journey was going to impact each employee. Digital transformation meant that every existing employee was on board the digital bandwagon, and every new employee was ready to join the journey.

 

The first objective was to conduct a skills gap analysis for over 10,000 employees, considering the company’s digital initiatives against global benchmarks. A skills gap analysis helped Telkom determine its talent strategy – whether to develop or recruit – establishing who needed reskilling and the skills that needed to be acquired by onboarding new talent.

 

While Telkom had already created an organization-wide competency framework, translating it into an actionable strategy proved challenging. Thus, Telkom required a strategic partner to understand and translate its objective into a holistic assessment plan.

 

Aside from attracting and developing prospects with the desired digital skills, including behavioral and cognitive competencies, Telkom also needed assessments for specific domains and competencies. The assessments needed to match global standards to ascertain the current employees’ standing on them and the extent to which they needed to be developed further.

 

Telkom’s challenges were multifold:

Recruitment strategy

The new business portfolios required Telkom to diversify its roles and hire at scale while maintaining quality. Thus, the organization needed a recruitment strategy for the domain competencies that were missing.

Organizational development

Every aspect of its business had to be ready to embrace the digital transformation- for it to champion the cause. This development meant finding the existing employees’ skill gaps and upskilling them to align them with the company’s digital vision.

Remote solutions

Like countries the world over, Indonesia, too, was in the middle of a pandemic and recurring lockdowns. Therefore, it commenced its digital journey while operating remotely and sought the necessary technology platform to scale its recruitment and development initiatives.

Solution

When Telkom reached out to Mercer | Mettl, it had just begun its digital journey and was unsure how to proceed. The digital adoption became more daunting with extended lockdowns, forcing employees to operate from their homes.

 

Telkom wanted Mercer | Mettl to step in to assess its current employees strategically, credibly and at scale. While Telkom already possessed the competency frameworks, Mercer | Mettl hit the ground running by offering a two-point solution.

 

Every employee had to undergo a digital readiness assessment to gauge their digital readiness levels, following a development plan to upskill them in line with its digital journey. The company was to acquire the remaining skills by hiring talent.

 

Mercer | Mettl’s subject matter experts understood Telkom’s position and charted a detailed assessment for every role and competency it sought to achieve its digital objective. Mercer | Mettl offered a robust platform with a remote proctoring solution, ensuring that lockdowns didn’t delay its efforts, enabling it to continue its digital transformation journey.

 

Mercer | Mettl stepped in with the following solutions to cater to the company’s requirements.

 

Digital readiness assessment

 

Mercer | Mettl’s digital readiness assessment was designed to test the knowledge, skills and behaviors that underpinned Telkom’s current employees’ preparedness and readiness levels to adapt to the organization’s digital culture. It evaluated whether the employees possessed the potential and proficiency to adapt to the digital transformation process.

 

Over 10,000 employees took the digital readiness assessment that analyzed their current skills level, empowering it to provide its employees with the right training and development plan for upskilling.

 

The digital readiness assessment comprised two parts:

 

1. The digital potential assessment had the following components:

 

Personality profiler + critical thinking competencies + abstract reasoning competencies

 

The competencies that were part of this tool were:

 

 

2. The digital proficiency assessment covered the necessary skills required to use digital tools and technologies to improve one’s effectiveness. The three criteria of digital proficiency were:

 

Digital proficiency Scope
The ability to locate, retrieve and manage digital data, information and content. Find the rights apps, use keywords effectively and locate the right information on blogs, etc.
Interacting, communicating and collaborating through digital technologies. Use emails/email suites, different online media and digital tools to communicate and collaborate effectively.
The ability to protect devices, content, personal data and privacy in a digital environment. Understand the use of passwords, privacy settings, and the ability to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate digital content to be shared on social media.

Domain/technical assessments

 

Telkom’s venture into new portfolios proffered several new roles. Many of them were not very popular. Hence Telkom needed subject matter experts to design its assessments.

 

Mercer | Mettl helped Telkom to create unique assessments for each of these 75+ new-age roles, including, but not limited to:

  • Data engineer
  • Cloud engineer
  • IoT engineer
  • Web designer
  • Network engineer
  • Tower maintenance
  • Graphic designer

Mercer | Mettl defined every sub-competency required for each of the 75+ roles and designed assessments, considering the levels for which they were being administered.

Impact

Mercer | Mettl helped Telkom choose the right talent strategy – to build or buy talent – for various roles and competencies. Using a customized assessment tool enabled it to gain an in-depth and holistic understanding of every employee’s standing on the competencies, especially on the required digital skills. The new roles and skills required by Telkom for its additional portfolios were mapped to unique assessments to help it make the right hiring and developmental decisions.

  • More than 75 skills and competencies were assessed using Mercer | Mettl assessments.
  • More than 10,000 employees were profiled using Mercer | Mettl assessments.
  • Telkom could identify skill gaps for every employee and chart a development path for them.
  • Mercer | Mettl enabled Telkom to build a future-ready workforce.

Are your employees ready to embrace the future of work?

Mercer Mettl’s digital readiness assessments can help prepare your organization to survive the prevalent technological transformation.

Confused about how to approach digital readiness and the widening skill gaps?

Learn how Mercer Mettl helped Telkom Indonesia conquer digital transformation through a strategic talent strategy and a suite of assessments to gauge futuristic skills and competencies.

A solution that suits the specific needs of your fast-changing industry.

With digital transformation becoming inevitable and skill gaps widening, your organization needs to stay updated on the current HR trends around digital readiness.

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