The jobs of the future — and the skills required to do those jobs — are changing every day. Recent Slack research shows that only 15% of workers strongly agree that they have the education and training necessary to use AI effectively.
Salesforce is committed to being the best place for employees to grow their careers. That means ensuring employees can collect different experiences, skills, networks, and expertise that allow them to thrive in the AI-driven future.
Salesforce is committed to being the best place for employees to grow their careers. That means ensuring employees can collect different experiences, skills, networks, and expertise that allow them to thrive in the AI-driven future.
Today, we are introducing Career Connect, a new internal platform to help employees gain new experiences and skills, encourage internal mobility, and retain top talent.
Salesforce’s AI-powered internal talent marketplace
Career Connect is Salesforce’s AI-powered internal talent marketplace that helps employees create tailor-made career paths customized to their skills and aspirations. It also allows us to see how skills are trending across the organization so that we can invest in more targeted training opportunities.
With Career Connect, internal candidates create a profile that automatically infers skills based on their job history. Then, the platform surfaces new roles, gigs or stretch assignments, and upskilling opportunities from across the company — and it’s all embedded into the flow of work through Slack. Employees can view roles they are qualified for today, as well as roles where their skills can be transferred. It also helps employees identify learning opportunities and trainings — everything from becoming a powerful storyteller to AI implementation — that can help them build the skills they need on their career journeys.
If an employee is interested in exploring a new role that is surfaced to them through Career Connect, they simply click “apply” and are directed to Salesforce’s internal system for job applications. For gigs or stretch assignments, employees are prompted to express interest in the gig through the Career Connect platform, then they have an informal conversation with the manager about the assignment. Once selected, the employee is connected to the manager through Slack to proceed with the next step.
How Career Connect works in practice
New career opportunities exist within large companies like Salesforce, but they can be hard to find, or employees may not know where to begin or what career path they should take. Career Connect uses AI to help employees think about various ways they can leverage their current skills and grow them to build meaningful careers. For example:
- A mid-level marketing manager may want to understand more about selling so they can be a better stakeholder to their sales counterparts. Through Career Connect, they can take on a three-month gig in sales, selling to high-tech companies, and return to their team with a newfound understanding of the pressures that salespeople face.
- A finance leader can use Career Connect to look across their team to identify where skills may be trending downward. Then, they can host targeted workshops and trainings or launch rotational assignments to ensure their employees are gaining relevant skills and experiences based on anticipated business needs.
- An individual contributor in Customer Success may have ambitions to become a front-end coder, but may not know how to embark on that career transformation. Career Connect can break down the skills necessary to make the shift to coding, and opportunities to close those gaps through learning, stretch assignments, or mentorship, so that the leap isn’t as overwhelming.
Early success among our employees
We launched Career Connect earlier this year with a pilot of 1,200 employees across our customer success, employee success, and business technology teams. Over the course of the three-month pilot, 28% of participants decided to apply for jobs through Career Connect. We also found:
- 91% of the roles that were filled by pilot participants were surfaced to those individuals through Career Connect.
- 90% of employees set up their profiles, logged their skills, and matched with new roles.
- 74% of employees actively engaged with the platform, logging in multiple times throughout the pilot to look for jobs, gigs, and upskilling opportunities.
- 39% of pilot participants enrolled in courses and trainings that were surfaced to them.
We will continue to roll out Career Connect to our employees around the world to provide growth opportunities, increase mobility, and surface skills training.
With this technology, we are investing in our employees and building an agile workforce with the experience and skills necessary to meet this pivotal moment.
More information:
- Discover your AI persona in Salesforce’s latest research
- Learn more about how Salesforce uses AI to drive employee productivity
