Proactively Shaping Digitalisation

At the end of March 2019 the external page SBB and its social partners—external page SEV, external page transfair, external page KVöV, and external page VSLF—founded the first digitalisation fund in Switzerland. The SBB is contributing 10 million francs to the fund and has made clear that it wants to approach the changes that will arise for the company and its employees as a result of digitalisation together with its social partners. The fund will be used to launch studies and projects that analyse the opportunities and challenges for the workplace and jobs of the SBB. The SBB and its social partners want to use the results to identify adequate responses and design supporting conditions. The fund will also be used to define competence development programmes for occupations that will change fundamentally due to digitalisation.

“SBB Workplace of the Future” is the first of the planned studies and demonstrates how occupations will change as a result of digitalisation, where new jobs will be created and possibly others be discontinued, and which competencies will be in demand in the future. Next to digitalisation, future mobility and demographic change will have the largest influences on the SBB workplace. Demographic developments will affect the SBB especially strongly: By 2035 over 40 percent of the current workforce will have retired. This represents more than 10,000 employees. At the same time, the study reckons that the number of SBB employees in 2035 will lie either at the same level as today or be reduced by up to 15 percent, depending on assumptions about the speed of technological developments. But even a decreasing need for employees would be exceeded by the wave of retirements.

The study further shows that many occupational domains will change by 2035 as a result of digitalisation. Resource-intensive routine jobs will be automatised. Assistance systems and automatisation will make many jobs easier. The demands made on employees in many occupations will increase, however, as will the associated demands on leadership; new job profiles will also be created. Competencies such as the ability to cooperate and to deal with conflict will increase in importance. For jobs with IT and data science profiles, but also in fields closer to railway operations (locomotive drivers, client services) demands for qualified employees will likely exceed supplies. In certain occupational fields there may be a labour surplus, especially in fields for which automatisation will be possible, such as assembly and procurement.

The SBB and its social partners will build on the results of the study to initiate measures to cushion against the respective shortages or surplus of workers, for example through

• proactive career planning and competence development;
• technological development with an eye to retaining competencies and railway know-how;
• the development of instruments that will cover the mutual future needs of all stakeholders in labour agreements and contracts.