Digital transformations only fulfill their potential if everyone keeps up with the technology. At SAPPHIRE NOW this week, SAP is showing how workers can stay on the cutting edge with Live Journeys, visual representations that demonstrate how people can develop necessary skills and take on new roles within their organization.

Digital enterprises cannot afford to make learning an afterthought, as they have in the past, according to SAP’s Bernd Welz. The digital economy requires educating employees before their organizations begin a project, select a strategy or implement an innovation roadmap, as he explained in a Live Studio interview last year at SAP TechEd.

Back then, the focus was on how important learning is for the digital transformation. Now the focus is on the learning tools that will help optimize that digital transformation, Welz said in a video at SAPPHIRE NOW on Monday.

“To be able to build applications on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform — or beautiful mobile applications — we have built these Learning Journeys as specific upskill programs,” said Welz, SAP’s Global Head of Scale Enablement and Transformation. “These move a person who has a specific skillset today to the new world, where maybe a broader skillset is required.”

Semper Gumby

SAP teaches these skillsets via flexible Learning Journey options, which include:

• openSAP courses
• SAP Learning Hub
• Classrooms

Participants can earn SAP certifications by solutions, but a new certification will help workers within organizations that must constantly make sense of massive data volumes. And let’s face it: That’s just about everybody.

“There’s a huge demand out there for data scientists,” Welz said. “So a new Learning Journey we will launch is the data scientist curriculum and certificate.”

In addition to cultivating data scientists from within an organization, the upskill program will also teach business skills via the SAP Education Network for Digital Transformation, a collection of SAP user groups (including ASUG), partners, SAP University Alliances and Stanford University’s LeadershipGarage.

A View to A Skill

“Digital transformation impacts nearly all areas of a business — from the design of new technology-enabled business models to efficient, highly automated operations,” a recent SAP white paper stated. “Digital skill development is, therefore, a key success factor for driving a company’s digital transformation.”

Skill development will help organizations make the most of what digital transformations have to offer, such as more people empowered to solve problems; instant decisions based on up-to-the-moment data; and boardrooms free of paper reports and PowerPoint presentations. And these skillsets will be necessary for any Live Business to sense, respond, learn, adapt and predict to create value right away — or, in short, to Run Live.

SAPPHIRE NOW (#SAPPHIRENOW) and the ASUG Annual Conference (#ASUG2016) will run concurrently from May 17 to May 19 in Orlando. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak will speak on Tuesday, and Coldplay will play Concert Nighton Thursday.

Follow Derek on Twitter: @DKlobucher

This story originally appeared on SAP Business Trends.