Workforce transformation
From a transformation decision to a bookable learning path for every role it changes.
Enter your transformation plan. We analyse the roles and the skill gaps, and develop a programme for every function.
Eleven in a hundred fall through the gap.
The changeover is agreed, the equipment is ordered, the date is fixed. The question of who on the shop floor will need to know what afterwards gets asked here for the first time, and it gets answered in spreadsheets.
Out of 100 employees, by 2030
- 29will be upskilled within the role they hold today
- 19will be reskilled and moved into a different role in the company
- 11would need training but are unlikely to get access to it
- 41need no additional training according to the same survey
Those eleven are the reason QualiShift exists. Their need is not unknown. It has simply never been tied to a role, a programme and a date.
Evidence
39%
of core skills change between 2025 and 2030
EUR 1,347
per employee was spent on training by German companies in 2022
93%
of companies already offer training
So budget is not the constraint. Training happens almost everywhere. It is simply not tied to what is actually changing on the shop floor.
Why the mapping never gets done
Everything needed is already there, it is just not connected. Roles in one file, providers in a second, the ramp-up plan in a third.
The role list lives in a spreadsheet.
Pulled from the HR system, named after job titles rather than activities, and therefore close to useless for a question about skills.
The course catalogue is a different document.
Provider lists, PDF brochures, quotes sitting in an inbox, each with its own vocabulary and no shared grid.
In between, someone maps it by hand.
Usually learning and development, usually alongside the day job, and usually in a way that nobody can justify six months later when asked why that group went on that course.
And the works council asks for documents.
Documents that do not exist yet, because they would only emerge from exactly that mapping.
The chain everything hangs from
Eight steps from today to tomorrow. Each one produces something you can put in front of a colleague, and none of them stays an interim state inside someone's head.
Transformation
The initiative as it was decided: driver, period, the sites it touches.
Plant South 2028, 36 months, starting Q1
Unit
Which parts of the organisation it reaches and in what order it arrives there.
Manufacturing, Quality assurance, Maintenance, Production planning
Today's role
Comparable work is grouped into role clusters. The grouping follows what people actually do, not the job title in the contract.
End-of-line testing and quality control, 64 employees
Target role
The internal role profile needed after the changeover, at the skill level the new equipment genuinely demands.
Digital quality technician
Skill gap
The distance between today's work profile and the target role, skill by skill rather than as one overall grade.
5 of 6 skills have to grow
Learning path
Several building blocks in an order that survives shift work, including a practical phase on the employee's own line.
4 building blocks, 24 weeks
Programme
A concrete offer with dates, location, format and provider, not a topic suggestion.
Digital quality inspection and machine vision, September
Cohort
People with the same need become one group that starts together. Only then does a date become negotiable.
24 confirmed in the cohort
Other tools either deliver the analysis and stop short of delivery, or they deliver learning content with no reason behind it. QualiShift closes the seam between the two and ends at a programme that an entire group can book.
Two surfaces, one shared picture
HR plans at the level of role clusters. Employees see their own role and their own routes. Both sides work along the same chain, but not with the same rights.
Company Workspace
For HR, learning and development, line functions and transformation leads.
Capture the initiative. Driver, period, the sites and units it affects.
Build role clusters. Group the work instead of counting job titles.
Define target roles. At the skill level the future equipment actually requires.
Compare programmes. By coverage, dates, format and location, with the gaps left visible.
Plan cohorts. Bundle comparable needs until a group size comes together.
Produce the documents. Role overview, qualification matrix and timeline, ready to export for committees.
Employee App
Employees see their current role, the routes open to them and what is still missing. The choice belongs to the person, and they only ever see their own view.
My role today
Machining and CNC production
Possible routes
Digital quality technician
Fit 48
Digital production technician
Fit 44
Automation technician
Fit 39
What you already bring
What is still missing
Practical example: automotive
691,500
people employed in German vehicle manufacturing
219,500
of them at suppliers
In the strictest scenario, up to 726,000 of roughly 1.6 million jobs in European powertrain production are also at stake by 2040. Source: Fraunhofer IAO, ELAB2040 study, July 2026. That is Europe, not Germany, and it is the powertrain, not the industry as a whole.
In that situation, the question of who does which work after the changeover stops being a learning and development question and becomes a question about the site itself. That is why the example below looks the way it does.
One route, worked through in full
From end-of-line testing to digital quality inspection
Instead of three short examples, one complete one: a role cluster, a target role, the skill gap and the programme that closes most of it.
Role cluster today
End-of-line testing and quality control
- Quality assurance
- 64
- Camera-based inspection systems
Target role
Digital quality technician
Runs camera-based inspection stations, assesses results and maintains test programmes.
Skill gap
Metrology
Machine vision
Statistical process control
Reading production data
Test programmes and equipment
Test and process documentation
Matching programme
Digital quality inspection and machine vision
On site with practical part
4 months
September
Ingolstadt
Coverage of the gap
87
Covers
Left open
What a programme does not cover does not disappear. It stays on the learning path as an open item and gets closed through a second building block or a supervised practical phase on the employee's own line.
Digital quality technician is an internal role profile that a company defines for itself, not a recognised German apprenticeship occupation. In practice that is the normal case, and we do not present it as anything else.
Skill names follow ESCO, the open classification standard of the European Commission, so that the same skill carries the same name across two providers.
Codetermination
The works council is not a module here. It is the reason the data is cut the way it is.
Anyone planning qualification in Germany because of a transformation plans it together with the works council. The Works Constitution Act describes exactly this case, and it does so in more detail than most tools reflect.
- Section 92 BetrVG
- The employer informs the works council about personnel planning including vocational training measures, in good time, comprehensively and on the basis of documents.
- Section 96 (1) BetrVG
- At the request of the works council, the employer determines the vocational training need and discusses questions of vocational training with it.
- Section 97 (2) BetrVG
- Where measures taken by the employer change the work of the employees affected so that their existing knowledge no longer suffices for their tasks, the works council has a right of codetermination on introducing vocational training measures. That is, word for word, the situation QualiShift handles.
- Section 98 BetrVG
- Codetermination on carrying out company training measures, plus the works council's right to propose participants.
- Section 94 BetrVG
- Assessment guidelines require the works council's consent. A skill profile held per employee very probably falls under this. We say so openly rather than working around it.
What follows from that for the product
The unit of analysis in the Company Workspace is the role cluster, not the individual person. What someone can do and where they want to go sits in their own view in the Employee App and never becomes an assessment basis in the workspace.
Because software intended to monitor behaviour or performance falls under Section 87 (1) no. 6 BetrVG, it is simpler and more honest not to build it for that in the first place.
The documents that early involvement requires come out of the planning as a by-product: role overview, qualification matrix, cohort overview and timeline. Not as extra work afterwards.
Next step
Once the initiative is decided, we start at the roles.
The Transformation Scan returns a first role and skill picture you can take into the next meeting. After that you decide whether it goes any further.