Case Study
Upskilling the Public Sector
Exploring how the Swiss Federal Administration could advance ambitious digital transformation goals through employee upskilling.
Note: Digital transformation is a broad challenge. We used a Design Thinking sprint to approach it from a fresh perspective and explore disruptive solutions.
Problem
Everyone wants digitalization. Nobody knows exactly what it means.
Unclear direction
Digital transformation is a strategic priority, but a clear vision is often missing.
Limited resources
Employees are expected to drive change with limited resources, unclear expectations and little practical guidance.
Huge scope
The scale of the organization makes digital transformation difficult to coordinate and prioritize.
Solution
Reward people who
drive digitalization
Instead of outsourcing digital expertise or creating new positions, a platform makes business needs visible to employees, turns them into gamified skill-development opportunities, and makes newly developed skills available to the organization.
Clear priorities
Employees can see which skills matter most and where to focus their development.
Personalized learning
Learning paths adapt to individual skill gaps instead of offering the same development journey to everyone.
Motivation to grow
A gamified reward system incentivizes employees to develop skills that address real business needs.
Impact
A disruptive concept led to a more practical solution
Pitch
Pitching the concept to management sparked further discussion about how employee skills could be developed and used more strategically across the organization.
Rethink
The main barrier was feasibility: building and maintaining the platform, together with financial rewards for employees, would require significant resources.
Evaluate
A more realistic alternative was then explored: an internal skills marketplace where employees could make hidden skills and interests visible and be matched with projects that needed them.
Process
How we got there
01
Empathize
How do people experience digital transformation?
To better understand the challenges behind digital transformation, each team member conducted interviews with employees across different roles within the Swiss Federal Administration. Together, we collected perspectives from 4 managers, 5 employees and 1 subject matter expert. Key Decision: Conducting interviews online, so they could be automatically transcribed by Microsoft Teams. AI could then help extract key insights before the team reviewed and synthesized the findings together.
Interview Material
Prompting in ChatGPT to extract insights from interview transcripts
02
Define
Finding the right problem to solve
Interview findings were grouped into themes using affinity mapping. Together, we identified recurring pain points, challenged our assumptions with AI, and translated the strongest opportunities into "How Might We" questions:
• How might we map employees' skills?
• How might personalized learning experiences look?
• How might employees be guided through this
transformation journey?
Key Decision:
The challenge was broad and the timeline exceptionally
short, so we narrowed our focus to employee skills. We set
aside larger organizational challenges, such as replacing
widely used digital tools and strengthening management
support and strategic leadership.
Digital meets analog.
03
Ideate
Exploring as many ideas as possible
Ideas were generated collaboratively and enriched with AI using techniques such as the Morphological Box and Random Word. The concepts were then discussed, voted on and evaluated against predefined criteria before we refined the strongest solution. Key Decision: Creating a concept for a gamified skills management platform that would encourage employees to develop skills that the organization actually needs.
Random Word Method, Morphological box and prioritization
04
Prototype
20 minutes to bring the concept to life
With the deadline approaching, we split up to make the concept tangible. While part of the team refined the personalized learning concept, I focused on creating an interactive prototype of the proposed skills management platform. Key Decision: I independently made the design decisions for the prototype, from the initial prompt to refining the output into a functional interactive prototype.
Prompting in Claude
20-minute prototype
05
Test
A reality check
The prototype was presented to another team to gather feedback. Rather than discussing the interface itself, the conversation quickly shifted to organizational adoption and the barriers that could prevent such a platform from succeeding. Transparency and security concerns would require organizational change management and clear communication about how employee data is used. Key Decision: Present the concept to management and use their feedback to refine it into a more realistic solution.
The Prototype
A clickable concept for personalized learning
Try it out!
Open on desktop to try the interactive prototype.