Deutsche Bahn and StackFuel win the eLearning Award 2021 in the category competence development
The German railroads and StackFuel With their joint project "Competent personnel for a digital railroad", the "eLearning Award 2021" in the category Competence development won. The aim of the project is to prepare DB's employees for a digital, data-driven future for the company and to provide further training for urgently needed specialists such as the Data Analyst and Data Scientist. In doing so, DB encourages and challenges its own employees and managers to build a deep awareness and understanding of data. They were helped by StackFuel's innovative professional development concept, consisting of trainings, mentoring and the Data Lab. "Open and trusting collaboration is the best foundation for excellent solutions. An intensive analysis and (if necessary) the search for a high-performance partner creates the basis for long-term success," said Gerd Schumacher, senior consultant and product manager on the Deutsche Bahn side, in an interview with StackFuel.
Why employee training in data literacy is so important
In 2021, Big Data is no longer an unknown term. Worldwide, around 4.4 million jobs can be associated with Big Data and this number is growing every year with the increasing use of data by companies. Today, hardly any area of life and work remains untouched by data use. Yet there is a shortage of skilled workers who can handle this growing flood of data. The need for highly qualified personnel in the fields of data science, data engineering and artificial intelligence is great. Data technologies are developing faster than universities and other education providers can meet this demand with sufficient graduates. For this reason, we are already experiencing a shortage of subject matter experts who can handle large amounts of data in a secure and goal-oriented manner.
Many positions in the field of data science therefore remain unfilled and, in addition, there is also a lack of fundamental data awareness among employees and managers in many companies. If this data competence is sharpened company-wide and across departments, the potential of data-based analyses can thus be better recognized, but also appropriate expectations can be placed on the results. DB has recognized this opportunity and launched a project, StackFuel, to help its employees acquire data literacy skills and position themselves optimally for the business of the future.
A project and a vision that convince
A goal was quickly found: To develop highly intelligent mobility by 2030 and the necessary company-wide data competencies in 2020. Without question, this is no small project for a company like Deutsche Bahn AG, because with 600 companies that belong to the group, approaches and resources must also be well planned in e-learning. With its social responsibility, DB also sees itself as a driver for tackling challenges such as climate change. It wants to achieve this by encouraging even more people to use rail instead of cars for shorter and longer journeys in the future. In order to realistically implement this "Strong Rail" strategy, Deutsche Bahn is relying on permanent improvements to its business model, which can only be achieved by taking all employees along for the ride. The targeted use of e-learning in vocational training and continuing education via DB Training is thus intended not only to increase employees' self-learning motivation but also, in the same breath, to optimize the sustainability of the planned qualification measures. Deutsche Bahn sees the increased use of data in particular as a necessary step toward this optimization. Although DB has been collecting data records for some time, these must also be processed in order to make comprehensive analyses possible and to be able to read recommendations for action from the data.
Holistic employee qualification as needed
To support the goals of the "Strong Rail", DB Training, Learning & Consulting planned a voluntary learning offer for employees from all organizational units to build up basic data competencies and thus make data-driven work and decision-making possible. To achieve this, StackFuel's "Data Awareness" and "Data Driven Management" trainings were designed to build basic competencies within Deutsche Bahn and to train additional employees specifically as competent Data Analysts within three months and Data Scientists within four months. The training and development courses were online and part-time, so that employees were specifically prepared for the new job roles and job requirements alongside their everyday work. "The biggest learning from the joint project for me is that you can create major milestones as a team with different strengths and focuses. We have proven how successful a collaboration between a corporation and a startup like DB and StackFuel can be," added Irmantė Ežerskytė, project manager at DB Training, Learning & Consulting.
For the data training, DB employees used StackFuel's interactive and cloud-based Data Lab as a learning and programming environment to implement and reinforce the training content. The Data Lab not only provided a training platform and learning content in the form of high-quality video content and technical reading, but also enabled independent learning and practical application of statistical methods and machine learning algorithms. The real-life business cases to which the learning was applied added a business context to the learning content, strengthening problem-solving skills in preparation for the new job roles of Data Analyst and Data Scientist. During the training, DB employees benefited from end-to-end mentoring and content support from StackFuel's mentors, automated notes in the training, and weekly group webinars.
This is how the collaboration became a success
At the beginning of the training offensive, discussions were held with executives in a top-down strategy to ensure that the approach was optimally aligned with Deutsche Bahn's training needs. In addition, DB conducted research within its own employee network DB Planet and defined the relevant stakeholders. StackFuel's subject matter experts were also thoroughly prepared for the collaboration and worked their expertise in methods of statistics, higher mathematics, and knowledge of programming, specifically Python, into the training sessions and were available to answer any questions the learners had. The training began with a face-to-face meeting to clarify expectations so they could be incorporated later and a kick-off webinar where participants could get to know each other in smaller groups and clarify initial questions about how the training would proceed. During the training, participants had access to a forum where they could exchange ideas with each other and with the experts. Each week, new chapters of the training were unlocked and live webinars were held with the mentoring team to ensure everyone was at a similar level of knowledge and keeping up with the content. Participants in the Data Analyst and Data Scientist trainings completed them in a self-paced final project where they could apply what they had learned and show their progress. In this way, graduates were prepared to work independently in the field of data science, so that they could integrate what they had learned into their future day-to-day work and tackle their own projects. In total, DB employees from 15 different departments were trained and a completion rate of 93.1 percent was achieved. "For us, this confirms that e-learning has great potential for the future and simply motivates us to continue," says Irmantė Ežerskytė.
A win-win for both partners and numerous graduates
"The eLearning Award is a great confirmation for me. The award shows me that with StackFuel we have found the powerful partner we were looking for," explained Gerd Schumacher. Once a year, the "eLearning Award" is presented by the expert jury of the eLearning Journal to particularly innovative and progressive projects from the DACH region. The official award ceremony takes place every year in June at the LEARNTEC congress in Karlsruhe. The jury was particularly impressed by the practical concept of the Data Lab and the mix of interactive programming training with real data sets and technical content in the form of video training, glossaries and business cases.
"I see winning the eLearning Award first and foremost as a reward for the successful and trusting collaboration with our partner DB Training. The award shows that we are well on the way to preparing Deutsche Bahn's workforce for a digitized and data-driven working world. We now know that we can help large companies like Deutsche Bahn with our trainings and act as a pioneer for further e-learning projects and drive collaboration between corporations and startups." - Daniil Liakhovitski, Account Executive at StackFuel.
StackFuel thanks the eLearning Journal for the special award and to his partner DB Training, Learning & Consulting for the extraordinarily successful collaboration. We look forward to further successful projects and the promotion of data literacy in Germany and beyond.
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