Machine Learning

Saba Transforms Traditional Career-Development Planning

Redwood Shores, CA (USA) - September 2013 - Saba, a global provider in next-generation cloud solutions for talent management, has announced groundbreaking functionality in its Saba Cloud, including The Intelligent Mentor (TIM) and Rock Stars. The innovations are designed to transform traditional career development into a deeper and more personal experience and to make succession planning into a more comprehensive and effective process.

New to talent management, TIM acts as a career GPS for employees to help them build their professional network and a roadmap for success. It is built on Saba’s patent-pending machine-learning technology that automatically learns about employees based on their activities in the Saba Cloud. By doing so, TIM makes personalized and relevant recommendations about content, classes, and mentors that can help them be more productive on the job and develop in their careers. Users enter data to get great feedback, while human-resource and executive teams benefit because they are always operating with up-to-date and complete profile and career-interests data.

TIM makes career development and succession planning more accessible and flexible for any organization because it is designed to work with or without models such as global competency frameworks or centralized role-based learning assignments, which can sometimes be complex and costly to implement and maintain. TIM does this by learning the interests and characteristics of users in the system and establishing affinity groups to power personalized recommendations based on users with similar goals and interests. With TIM, Saba Cloud is a talent-management system that learns.

Another significant new capability, Rock Stars, uses social dynamics to help surface high-potential and high-performing employees through informal peer feedback. While traditional succession-planning and talent-calibration processes are critical to building a leadership pipeline, sometimes executives and managers may not have a full picture of the true stars in the organization based on their everyday activities and the value they add to the productivity of their peers. Saba has significantly enhanced the succession-planning and career-development process with “Rock Stars” identifications.

Through an intuitive and insightful talent dashboard, Saba Cloud provides managers and HR teams with a broad view into key talent indicators and overall workforce strength. The Saba Cloud dashboard focuses on six main data points:

  • People Quotient (pQ) scores: patent-pending technology that measures an employee’s influence, reputation, and impact within the organization
  • Badges: enable real-time feedback and social recognition from an individual’s network and provide a historical record of that feedback that can be referenced for quarterly and annual performance reviews
  • Role model and Rock Star endorsements: allow employees to recognize their colleagues as role models and “rock stars” within the workplace and showcase their talents and leadership to the wider team
  • Contribution: see overall contribution and performance of employees at a glance based on several factors such as performance and potential scores, role model and rock star endorsements, and formal mentorship nominations.
  • Risk: managers can understand the overall retention risk of their people based on key talent indicators

Bench strength: helps managers and HR teams see details of bench strength for key employees and positions, identify risks, and assess timing of readiness for successors.