DXC Technology Upskills its Talent Pool With Neo4j

DXC Technology (NYSE: DXC) helps global companies run mission-critical systems and operations while modernizing IT, optimizing data architectures, and ensuring security and scalability across public, private, and hybrid clouds.

DXC’s market leadership rests on its ability to train and retain a highly skilled workforce. DXC must assign the right talent and skills to every customer account to deliver performance and support employee career growth.

DXC wanted to improve career mobility and upskill employees to meet business demand. The business saw an opportunity to connect employees with ‘in-demand’ skills and give teams visibility into open roles across the organization. 

“That’s when Career Navigator was born,” says Michele Howard, Product Owner and Workforce Management Data Analytics Specialist at DXC. “We knew employees needed a career portal to explore their potential advancement pathways and help them reach their professional career goals.”

Howard began exploring ways to unify DXC’s data sources, aiming to:

• Improve visibility into employee skills.
• Enable upskilling.
• Increase internal hiring for open positions.
• Make better decisions about employee development.

Howard ruled out spreadsheets and relational databases, which proved inadequate for managing relationships and uncovering connections across DXC’s data sets. These systems struggled with the interconnected nature of team member skills, project requirements, and career paths.

“When DXC’s Chief Technology Office introduced me to graph databases and how they could power a recommendation engine, we knew we had our solution,” says Howard. 

Career Navigator is now an award-winning platform that has been deployed to 14,000 employees in the Asia Pacific and Middle East regions. Its accolades include a Neo4j Graphie 2023 Award for Excellence in Data-Driven Career Development and a Gold Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Future of Work in the category of Best Program for Upskilling Employees in 2024.

Developing a Robust Resource for Career Navigation

Development of Career Navigator began in 2021 when the initiative caught the interest of DXC Australia’s Innovation Think Tank. Soon, Howard had a full Agile software development team and UX (User Experience) designer working to develop a proof of concept (POC).

Howard began by building a graph of DXC employee skills, learning needs, and assignments. Using a Neo4j graph database to model these relationships made intuitive sense: “Graph databases organize data the same way I think about it—and that was a game changer,” says Howard. “In relational databases, I can see data and basic relationships, but not how they all interconnect and impact each other.” Relationships in the data would confound table-oriented databases, which required joins and schema normalization with each new connection.

The region’s senior leadership recognized Career Navigator’s potential to enable employees to take charge of their personal career growth. Howard’s team trialed a minimum viable product (MVP) of Career Navigator to a group of 5,000 employees in 2022, and after the success of that pilot, launched the tool to the full Asia Pacific and Middle East region in 2023.

Today, Career Navigator connects employee data from multiple internal platforms, including organizational hierarchy, learning records, skill profiles, past, current, and future assignments, and third-party skill data.

Above: DXC Career Navigator consolidates siloed data from around the organization

A Smarter Solution for Employees, Managers, Talent Acquisition, and Workforce Management Teams

DXC Career Navigator is now a career development planner and internal marketplace that supports employees, managers, Talent Management, Talent Acquisition, and Workforce Management teams. 

For Managers:

• Long-term talent development: Career Navigator connects development plans, career profiles, learning and project assignment data, and up-skilling recommendations to support managers in discussions with their direct reports.
• Workforce Management: Managers can plan beyond typical project windows, building talent pools with in-demand skills like cybersecurity and AI. This foresight allows DXC to stay ahead in an evolving IT landscape.
• Data available in real-time: Real-time dashboards have replaced static reports, allowing managers to track employees and quickly match them to assignments, improving staffing and bench management.

For Employees:

• Dynamic development plan: Employees can create their Individual Development goals and receive personalized skill and learning recommendations based on their goals.
• Personalized career guidance: Employees receive crowd-sourced recommendations based on the experience of their peers globally, tailored upskilling and learning recommendations, and detailed gap assessments for desired roles. This empowers them to take charge of their career development.
• Career mobility: Employees can discover and apply for open positions based on their skills and career goals using the career mobility dashboard. This includes opportunities for promotions, assignments, and stretch roles.
• Mentorship opportunities: Career Navigator automatically matches employees with in-region mentors based on their current roles and aspirations. Employees can also volunteer to mentor staff, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing.

For Talent Acquisition:

• Identify internal candidates faster: Talent Acquisition can identify internal candidates quicker and understand their skills, experience, and career aspirations.
• Hot jobs: Teams can now promote ‘hot jobs’ internally, building attention and excitement for internal opportunities among employees.

For Workforce Management:

• Precise skill matching: Resource planners can search for candidates with specific technical and leadership skills. The system returns matches and highlights upskilling needs, making assigning the right team member easier.
• Bench management:  “Bench” employees are employees who are between assignments. Career Navigator is used to identify these employees who should be upskilling and developing themselves.  

DXC now understands its workforce better and mobilizes it faster. Since adopting Career Navigator, DXC has decreased attrition rates from 24% to <15% and increased internal hiring by 12% (Data from Australia and New Zealand August 2022 to August 2023).

“Career Navigator reinforces DXC’s commitment to supporting business growth while giving our employees a tool that supports their career goals and the advanced skills to succeed now and in the future,” says Howard.

Career Navigator is now crucial to DXC’s employee Performance and Engagement strategy. Since its launch, 8,000 employees have created a career profile within the platform, and 5,000 have built a development plan. Employees know more about in-demand skills and see opportunities at DXC for promotions and assignments. Managers connect employee assignment history, learning, and skills data to make career conversations easier.

“When GenAI and other new technologies are ready for mission-critical work, our people will be there,” says Howard. “Career Navigator and the Neo4j graph database help get our employees ahead of any skills gap and future-proof our business.”

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