Transcript

Kelly

You know, there’s a difference between consuming content and learning.

 

Sylvie

Hi, I’m Sylvie Milverton, CEO of Lynx Educate. This is Talent is Everywhere. We’re here to talk about how to keep talent and how to develop talent in order to build a strong business. We’ll interview leaders to hear their best experiences of how they invested in people.

 

So today, we’re lucky enough to have Kelly Palmer as our guest. She worked as Chief Learning and Strategy Officer at Degreed, as well as Chief Learning Officer at LinkedIn.

 

Most recently, Kelly was Chief Strategy Officer at Southern New Hampshire University as an investor in Lynx and we were lucky enough to have her on our board. Welcome to the podcast, Kelly.

 

Kelly

Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s great to be here.

 

Sylvie

So today we are going to take advantage of your grand expertise about skills and talk about concrete steps, “Seven steps to upskill your workforce” that you’ve written, worked on a white paper about this, and I really liked it because it’s very much like concrete actions that companies can take to tackle. It can feel like a pretty overwhelming problem, of, you know, tackling these big upskilling challenges. And so maybe before we get into the seven steps, we could kind of frame it up, like if we’re thinking, you know, we read this all the time, upskilling the workforce, biggest challenge of our time, the urgency of a billion people needing new skills. Clearly a top priority for CEOs. So this isn’t controversial. I think most people would agree with that. But how would you think about the framing of like, why we need to get to the urgency and how companies and CEOs should think about a skilling strategy?

 

Kelly

Yeah, I think it’s interesting because the I sat on the reskilling initiative with the World Economic Forum, and that’s where a lot of those numbers come from, this idea that we have to upskill a billion people by 2030 and, and that, and that CEOs should be invested in this because it actually can determine how successful their company will be in the future. If you have a skilled workforce with the newest skills, obviously that’s going to be better for your company. So you’re right, I don’t think there’s any controversy about the general points that we hear about, that we read about, that I’ve been talking about for several years now. I think the bigger problem is just what you said at the beginning.

 

It’s like, great. Okay, I know we need – it’s such a daunting problem. It’s such a big problem that people don’t know where to start. Okay. We need to upskill our workforce. So how do you approach that? And over the past several years, I have been asked to consult with a lot of the fortune 200 companies on, you know, on working with them specifically, to come up with this, you know, strategy for upskilling their workforces.

 

And the reason it’s different, it’s not like we can go through – we will go through the seven steps, which is more in their concrete steps, but you have to then apply it to your own company. So I’d say that that’s usually the biggest problem. It’s like if, if you have companies that are used to whatever they’ve got going now in terms of learning and helping their employees learn, they have to think about this problem differently.

 

And that means shifting, you know, the way they think about, L&D in their company and then the learning and development or the H.R or the executives also need to think about that. You know, what is, what’s most important for our employees to learn? Because there’s a million skills out there, right? It’s like, where do we start?

 

What skills are our most important? So that’s part of the problem is just getting people to think about, where do I start thinking about this? This big issue of upskilling or reskilling the workforce?

 

Sylvie

Yeah. Now that makes sense. And I feel like yeah maybe it’s yeah before getting overwhelmed, it’s almost like being a good CEO – like setting the strategy of your company. It’s like what are you not doing? And how are we focusing? Like for example, if international expansion is key, then maybe language learning is important or, you know, moving into new markets, you know, or thinking about digital, you know, narrowing it down, as you say, linking it to the overall corporate strategy.

 

Kelly

Right. And, I’d say there’s one company that I’m most impressed with that I worked with where the CEO actually said, look, our skills strategy is part of our business strategy. And we don’t think we can be successful unless we actually have that in our business strategy. That’s the most impressive thing. I think I’ve heard a CEO say, and actually, you know, go ahead and implement. A lot of times, the business strategy is created and then it kind of rolls out to other groups in the organization. And they’re saying, “Oh, okay. Now that we know what the business strategy is, let’s figure out what are the skills strategy is around that.” It doesn’t mean you can’t do that. It was just, it’s just so important to the overall strategy of the business. That’s it’s nice to think of it, more as, as a part of the bigger strategy as well.

 

Sylvie

Right, right. Which leads to like step one, which is the key thing: Identify future skills. And so the goal of this step is to answer the question: What critical skills the workers need in the next 1 to 3 years? And what I was struck with is that then you talk about like 3 to 5 skills. And so to me like identify future skills can feel so overwhelming.

 

I talked to HR leaders all the time, and sometimes it’s a blocking point to even think, what tool do I want? Because they feel like it’s this like massive undertaking. So maybe you could talk more about like how in concrete terms, what tool do you open and how do you start figuring out what are these skills.

 

Kelly

Right. And I’d say, you never want to start with a tool in this case because, well, we’ll get to that in a little bit later. But what I’d say is that this is an amazing opportunity for HR or learning leaders to say, look, I’m not gonna I’m not gonna determine what skills are most important for everybody in the company by myself or with my team, and then tell other people what those skills are.

 

That’s not a good approach. And it also doesn’t foster buy-in from the executives. So here’s the great opportunity. And, what we did. You know what I’ve done at LinkedIn, what I did at Decred, you know, you go and you talk to these business leaders and you say, okay, this business leaders in charge of, product development in this business, leaders in charge of finance and this business leader’s in charge of whatever.

 

And talk to them specifically about your area, your area specifically, what are the 3 to 5 skills that are going to make your employees most productive in the future of work? And by having that conversation with your business leader, then all of a sudden it’s not your idea of what’s most important. You can brainstorm with them. You can also bring data and say, look, this is what’s happening overall in the industry. The World Economic Forum publishes the top skills that are in demand. There’s – I’ve got a lot of data that comes from other places like Lightcast and you know that really look at jobs that are in decline and jobs that are in demand skills and declining skills in demand. You can bring that data, but then have the conversation and get the input from the actual business leader, because then you can say, okay, we did this together.

 

These are the three skills for our sales team, for example, or for our product development team. And then, as you as you move through the process, you’ve already got the buy in from, you know, from the leaders. I think the mistake that a lot of organizations make is they try one, they try to make it too complex.

 

You know, where companies are really used to competency models, and the competency models are very complex. Right? Here’s all the competencies that a person should have. I always give this example that when I was at Sun Microsystems, we had 32 leadership competencies that we were supposed to be good at. And it’s like that’s a lot of skills to, you know, to try to figure out just for leadership, let alone anything else.

 

If you narrow it down and you say, look, just for how many skills can you really focus on at any one time anyway? That’s why the 3 to 5 are good. Competency matrices tend to get so complex that people don’t even, they, they’re outdated before they’re finished, and then people don’t tend to know what to do with them because they’re too big, too many, too many skills to focus on.

 

So that’s why, really getting people to focus in on the conversation of 3 to 5 skills. If you can identify that, those with your with a business leader, you know, that’s a pretty that’s a pretty good start.

 

Sylvie

I love that you said that because even I make that error, like I remember in other jobs that we had these big competency models.

 

And I feel like when you start talking about what are the key skills, in fact, my brain goes back to that like, oh, there was a list of you had to be good at, you know, leadership and, you know, prioritization and managing people and having difficult conversations, plus Excel classes. So I like to sort of separate the idea of competencies and skills.

 

Yeah. And it definitely feels less overwhelming when you just think, what are the top three things? And it’s much easier when you’re just imagining you think of the people on your team. You’re like, what do I want this person to be able to be good at? And actually, right. Some of those things are like much more, much more vague.

 

So one could do that, you know, go on.

 

Kelly

What I was going to also say is, you know, I love this example and this is, this is, something that has been talked about at conferences, through Booz Allen Hamilton. They actually have a great example of their skill strategy. And instead of picking 3 to 5 skills, they actually picked one for their whole company.

 

So they took, at the time, 20,000 employees at Booz Hamilton, and they realized that they were getting requests for people with data science skills. And they realized, oh, we don’t have enough people in our workforce right now with data science skills. And yet we’re being asked for people with those skills, and it’s only going to get more intense in the future.

 

So they put together an initiative called Data Science 5K, where they decided to upskill a quarter of their workforce, 5000 people. That’s why it’s called data science, 5K over three years. And so the reason I bring that up is because 3 to 5, that not every company can identify one skill that’s so important. But they could.

 

And so that’s great. And so that’s a great example of saying, look, if you keep it simple you can actually say, oh, in three years we actually upskilled 5000 people in data science. And now we have the capacity to support our client base the way we need to. So just another example of why it’s important to keep things simple.

 

Sylvie

Right, okay. So step one: Keep it simple. Have meetings and you barely probably even need an Excel sheet. You probably just need to take notes even with a pen and paper. And you’re going to end up with a list by department of, you know, 3 to 5 things. So then step two is we have to assess to get a baseline.

 

And this seems a bit hard. So how would you think about, you know, doing this?

 

Kelly

So the other thing I wanted to say is, about, you know, picking the 3 to 5 skills because the other thing that people do to make it more complicated is say, well, and this goes to step two. Okay. So do you need to assess every skill that every person has, in their, in their career?

 

I mean, if, if I did that for you or for me, I’d be like, okay, that’s too many skills, right? It’s like you have to be more focused in terms of how you think about assessing skills. So the reason this step is number two is that if you’ve picked future skills and 3 to 5 of them, then you know how to say, well, where are you on that spectrum?

 

And the reason you pick 3 to 5 is you say, okay, well, what if one of the skills let’s take data. Data science is always a good skill to focus on. Say, say that’s one of the skills that you pick. Yet when you go to this step to actually assess people and you say, oh, well, look, I’ve got a whole bunch of people who are already strong at data science skills.

 

That’s the assessing part. Don’t assess every skill people have. Just assess them on the 3 to 5 that are most important. Maybe they have no, they have no competence in a particular skill. Or maybe they’re really good at that skill, but maybe they’re medium. Say like in Boozer Allen’s experience, they had some people who were already had data science skills, but they did, upskilling programs to help them get better.

 

So this assessing step is not about assessing every skill that you’ve identified that you have in your life, because that could be hundreds. It’s like really focusing on the ones that you want to, focus on building, you know, for the future. And so does that make sense?

 

Sylvie

Yeah. And so would it be, like, literally as simple as, like, you could kind of have like zero low, medium, high competency and you’d have a quick way of assessing is to have 100 people. And this number of people are in each level of this skill.

 

Kelly

Exactly. And so I think in the paper, I mentioned a couple of ways you can do that. Like there is technology right now that can help you assess. And I know that when I was at Degreed, we had a scale by which we could assess people’s skill.

 

I think it was a scale of 1 to 8 because it ticked all the math foundations, scale. But a lot of companies didn’t use that. And so maybe they had only four levels or only three levels. So if you have technology or if you have a tool that help you, that helps you assess skills, great.

 

If you don’t, it’s as simple as you can. You can just have the yeah, the low, medium high. And the other thing that I think is important, people are skeptical of people self assessing, saying, oh, well, you know, are people really if you, if you self-assess, if you let people self-assess, how accurate is that? But studies have shown that it’s actually pretty accurate and that in fact, people tend to underestimate their skills rather than overestimate their skills.

 

Of course, there are some outliers, but in general, if you again, are trying to get a strategy together that isn’t it doesn’t have to be perfect, but it’s close enough, you know, that that’s this is a great way to start. Also, a lot of companies already do 360 evaluations so that you can use data from that and other things.

 

You know, it kind of depends on what your, but if you want to just do it from scratch, keep it simple. Just. Yeah, let’s do it. The high, medium, low. And people assess themselves better. Then usually their managers assess them only in most cases. I’m not going to say always, only because managers aren’t in the trenches a lot of times with their employees to actually know how to rate them that way on a particular skill.

 

So, that’s, those are kind of some of the tips around assessing skills. But if you know, then you can say, okay, well, one of our biggest skills is, well, let’s pick another one, communication skills. And somebody scores themself around medium, then, you know, then you have, chance to say, okay, now we know what to do with this population in terms of helping them get better at this particular skill.

 

You know, we know what level to start at.

 

Sylvie

And also, I think it’s nice to go back also to the identifying the skill, since you’re just picking 3 to 5 as opposed to this huge competency models like with the competency models, you know like you know one could be identify talent. Well, I know for myself sometimes I hire the right person.

 

Sometimes I hire the wrong person. So your brain can switch like how do I assess myself? Sometimes I’m good and sometimes I’m bad. But when you’re much more focused on, like, you know, you make it a more general skill. Like, you know, good manager communication. Well then that’s kind of a more broad and you can give a good. Yeah, assessment. So you’re not like in the weeds of every, detail.

 

Okay. Cool. So we’ve identified our skills. We’ve figured out a simple way to group people in high, medium, low. And so far, pretty much we could have had a pen and paper and then Excel and gotten this far. So the next step is we have to set some upskilling goals.

 

And actually this one is important. It’s obvious, but you realize that it’s easy to just put, to make things available, put things out there, and then see who’s going to click, see who’s going to use it, but not really know. Like what is the measure of success? So how what is your take on this for setting goals?

 

Kelly

Yeah. Well I mean and I and I go back to the Booz Allen Hamilton only because it’s so simple. You know, if their goal was to upskill 5000 employees and data science, of course, it wasn’t that simple. Once they identified all the people that they were going to upskill, you had to figure out at what level you were going to upskill.

 

But the goal, the actual goal was 5000 people, data science skills, right? So that was their goal. Let’s see. Let’s try to hit that. If you look at another example, you could say, okay, once I write, so say your product development team, you’ve identified your 3 to 5 skills. Your goal could be, that, 80% of the employees in the product development group, could, you know, are upskilling in and the three skills that they chose, you know, like, but it has to be something that you can, monitor and report out on, you know, how are you going to how are you going to be able to tell whether or not people are actually learning new skills? So you have to make sure that that’s part of the program. But by putting these goals in place, this is actually very problematic with any company learning, organization or any company that has a learning organization. And then they try to put learning programs together for people because they usually don’t do this step.

 

They usually miss this step and say, okay, we’re putting together a leadership development program, and we’re going to put so many people through that program. That’s as simple as the goal is. But then you don’t know, like, did people actually learn something? What did they learn? What skills did they learn? You know, so so I think that this is just a good, overall, step to have whenever you’re thinking about learning, you know, to have a goal in place, like by the end of the first quarter, I want, you know, so many employees to have learned a language, skill or whatever language that they pick or, you know, these, these communication skills.

 

So that’s what I mean by the upskilling goals.

 

Sylvie

Right. And actually this makes sense in a lot of levels. One is to see like what is the goal. And one might just be access. We want to give access to 200 people to a leadership seminar, because it’s a nice thing that people might want to participate in. You might have a goal to say 5000 people need to know how to, you know, do this data science thing.

 

They need to be able to be staffed on a data science project. Therefore they need these specific skills. So yes, stopping and thinking. And it’s interesting because if you were kind of in any other department, like if you were in the sales department or in finance and manufacturing and operations, I mean, setting goals and targets is like very obvious.

 

But somehow with the learning, you know, we miss this step. And yes, it’s a little bit harder. Did the people actually learn? And of course this is like the endless debate in education, like how do you pass and exams and all this. But that aside is normal to say, like, I’m doing this, what I’m trying to achieve

 

Kelly

Right. Also, we missed something on step one that I’d like to just bring up is that, you know, what we’ve been talking about so far is either setting goals for your entire company, or setting goals for your departments or business unit. That’s so that the company can, you know, identify what’s most important. But the third part of that is actual actual goals for individual employees, career goals.

 

And what made me think of that is this idea that when you provide a content library or you provide lots of options for individuals, they can pick a goal, you know, for their career progression, in addition to the goals that, you know, your department may think are important. So the idea would be is that you could pick a company learning skill.

 

Skill to learn, Department 1 or 2 and then, you know, an individual goal for yourself. And that’s where the, you know, it’s more like pick your goal. And then did you find resources or did you have resources in order to actually progress in learning that skill? That’s good enough for the individual goal, you know.

 

But just to have it, to have that goal that it’s, I really want to get better at language or I really want to get better. I want to learn more about product management, because that’s what I see in my future. It’s important to have that individual personal goal as well, because it might not always align with your department.

 

Goals shouldn’t be too far off, but, you know, it might not always align perfectly.

 

Sylvie

Right. And of course, people yeah, it’s a good point because people are going to be much more motivated when yeah, you can see like your own career path. And you know how it’s for yourself in the company.

 

Kelly

I mean, and that’s what Lynx does, right?

 

I mean, you guys provide, you know, learning that people, individuals can choose what, what is most important to them for their career, development along with organizational goals, skills, right?

 

Sylvie

Yeah. Exactly. And then, yeah. And that’s what sort of this magic of education is to see, like, what are the company and department and priorities and then what kind of learning programs can you put.

 

And then obviously, if you can get an overlap of people are like motivated by the learning for themselves and it’s, you know, adding to what the company is, yeah, trying to achieve. Yeah. Which gets to like look for it’s like map the learning the skills. And so figuring, you know what to offer. And I have many thoughts on this, but I think, I guess it gets to everything you’ve been saying, like, there’s not just one solution.

 

Like companies need to teach a lot of things, like they need teach like basic things in compliance and just how to use the tools and how to work at this company. You need to teach, you know, higher level things. You also need to motivate people to develop. So what how do you think about, you know, the range of content and things that need to be?

 

Kelly

Well, and I’d say in thinking about a learning or still strategy in general, this is often where organizations get confused or caught up because there are so many things that any learning organization could be doing. They can’t do everything. And so, often what happens is that they, that learning organizations or HR organizations will take random requests from all over the company.

 

And then instead of figuring out what’s the best strategy for the company and for the group so that you can actually, so we only have so much budget, that you can have. Right. So, for, for learning. And so that’s why I say a lot of times when I’m helping people with the learning strategy, it’s usually two pronged approach, you know, usually content that is self-directed that people can go to to learn on their own, which is a variety of content, plus very targeted learning programs for skills in demand for the future that are going to be critical to your business success.

 

And sometimes those two things overlap. But I think having both of those available is like key. But then, especially for your targeted skills programs that you’re going to develop yourself, not so much the content libraries, they need to be very, very targeted towards the skills that are important for the future of the company, for the future work.

 

And then, and then hopefully your content libraries also contain content that complements those things as well. I don’t know, you don’t do, do you call them content libraries at Lynx or not really.

 

Sylvie

No we try to — kind of like a mid solution. Like if you’re thinking of a content library, like more like shorter form like videos, like a two hour or something on this, something, you know, kind of maybe some in-house content and then maybe an LXP that has, you know, more like training, compliance and even some external content, you know, like, what’s that in between where you’re getting sort of from external providers, certificates, degrees, language courses, digital skills courses, and getting a certificate, sort of a complement, external content that’s matching along with what are some internal internal tools.

 

Kelly

Right. More certified certificate type things that actually, help people realize that they’re building skills, not just consuming things. Right?

 

Sylvie

Yeah. And sort of like, yeah, more adapted. And as we know, like employees, when they have an opportunity to learn and grow their careers in a company, you know, they’re more likely to stay.

 

And so to the extent that a company can offer things, you know, like beyond the this is how you work at the company, these are the things you need. And something that feels a bit bespoke, like then you’re going to get like more mileage from the learning in terms of like engagement and retention and career progression.

 

But I feel like this is the hard part for companies. And I see it, you know, like, listen, with my startups, like I love my solution. That’s when you can start at the beginning kind of feel like, okay, this is like a better way to do things. But I’ve learned like talking to people, there isn’t a better , there’s just a lot of different things. And in this world, like with AI, I mean, YouTube, I mean like there’s no short like if you want to learn something, it’s like actually kind of not hard to do.

 

Whereas even just like ten years ago, it was harder to figure out how to learn something. And so it’s more like, how does a company organize itself to make the things easily available to their workers, right.

 

Kelly

Yeah, yeah. And I’d also say, and I think one of the things that you focus on is that, you know, there’s a difference between consuming content and learning.

 

You know, and, and learning is, and I write about this in the expertise economy, you know, that consuming content is the first thing. But if you don’t practice, whatever it is that it’s talking about, plus get feedback on what you’re doing and then, and then continue to get better at that skill.

 

That’s what true skill building is all about. Going through that, that learning loop where you actually get to practice and get feedback and then keep, keep going on that loop. Whereas a lot of time. But it’s all, you know, I mean, watching a video and getting information is great. And then I think a lot of times you need to go beyond that as well, you know, to really learn.

 

Sylvie

Right. And that’s one of the things with Lynx that we wanted to do. And actually, I’m glad you brought it up because I often think of the framework like learn about something, which I think a content library is good for versus like become somebody or something, which normally like the Lynx programs are more in that. And again, back to my other point, like one isn’t better or worse, like learning about something is also, you know, good.

 

Kelly

It’s fine, but it depends on – So again it goes back to your goal. What is your goal? So for example, we know AI is really important right now. And I would say that, most people, especially executives or most anybody should learn about it. Enough about it so you know what people are talking about. But how, if you actually want to be working in that field, you’re going to have to be doing some skill building, you know, on the various aspects of of what that is really understand, not just what a large language model is, but how you might choose the right one and use it in, you know, your work so far.

 

So you’re right. There’s all levels of learning and none is necessarily more important than the other. You need to understand, are you trying to learn about something or are you trying to learn to do something, right?

 

Sylvie

Yeah, yeah no it would. So then we’ve set our goals and we have the content which gets us to step five to your point. It’s like okay, so now we have to measure the progress. And I guess, you know, there can be endless debates about how do we measure skills, but how like high level, again, like an overwhelmed company where you’re just trying to like, okay, put a workforce solution and workforce skills solution in place? How would you think about what’s important about measuring the progress?

 

Kelly

Yeah. So there’s a couple of ways that you can do that. Again, I’ll go back to you know, the Booz Allen Hamilton example is so is so great because they actually had different levels, you know, like once they actually decided data science was the skill that they wanted to focus on, then they realized there were people that were beginner level, data scientist learners and mid, and then people who are more advanced, and when they put their programs together, you know, they put people in those categories, their measures of success were, when they built their learning programs.

 

It’s like, did we, you know, did we take somebody from beginner to, you know, like if you were in that set, did you – not just complete things because completions are not, valid, but you went through this program and you could actually do something at the beginner level of data science. Same thing for the medium and the end.

 

So I think what’s really important here is that when you’re deciding on step four, you know, how are you going to map your learning to skills, what learning is it. And then you can decide what you’re trying to measure. If you want people to, you know, to, a lot of people will pick completions because it’s the easiest, actually easiest thing to measure, right?

 

It’s harder to measure the other things. But if you can go beyond, the, the completions, then you’ll want to get to, you know, can can people actually, do something with what they know? I’ll give you the example of one. When I was at SNHU and you know about this, I, we created a pilot program around learning basic AI skills.

 

Right. And so the goal was how we measured that was, people had to produce something at the end of the two weeks. And, with AI. So they learned how to generate AI text. They learned how to generate AI videos, AI avatars. But at the end, they had to actually complete a project where they created a video with all these components. That was their, that was our measurement to say people had learned basic AI skills by, by effectively creating that and getting feedback on what they actually did. That’s probably at the more sophisticated level. I don’t, you know, but it’s an idea, you know, so you can go anywhere from completions to, you know, can they actually do something with what they know and, and then everything in between.

 

But that’s why it all kind of goes in order. When you’re mapping, you’re learning the skills. What learning did you pick? What is – How are you going to measure that? And then and then, and then once you know what you’re going to measure, then you know what to do in step five. Like, okay, yeah, I had all these people that were going to learn this skill at this level.

 

I can now measure it and, and be able to tell, you know, 80% of the people went through this or did this or whatever.

 

Sylvie

Yeah. And I was looking with a learning, new learning partner yesterday and their project based learning. And so you basically do the project and a whole series of tasks with the way the tasks are.

 

You know that as you’re moving through the tasks and completing them, you are gaining the skill. And so he was able to show me, like, this person is a sort of superstar has gotten from beginner to, you know, mid to high skills because you could see the number of tasks that were done and so you wouldn’t be able to sort of get through it without, you know, having actually like, you couldn’t fake it.

 

It wasn’t just completing it, like, do it.

 

Kelly

Right. I love that. That’s great. I mean, that’s a really great model. And I think more people are realizing that’s a great, that’s, you know, it’s more difficult to do, but it’s, in the long run, I think it shows the validity of, learning organizations when you can actually when people feel it, too, you know, if you’re an employee and you’re going through one of these programs and you can say, oh my God, I didn’t know I could actually do that.

 

And, and I did, and I’m proud of that. It’s a good way to think about it, I think.

 

Sylvie

Right. And even like that project based tool and it makes me think, like in hiring, I’ve started doing a much better job of giving people a test task. So I interviewed them, see if I like them, because I just think, like, what do I want this person to actually be able to do?

 

And by just a simple task, you’re able to super quickly assess, like, are they, do they have this competency of like writing this email or making this kind of Excel. So yeah, it’s actually yeah, measurement feels overwhelming. But in fact there’s probably fairly simple ways to get a sense of like, does this person know this? You know, or not? Did they learn it or not?

Kelly

Right. And we get to skill ratings too, on this step. Like if you did use a software tool to act or in anything like say somebody was learning a skill they rated themselves at a two and then you asked them to self-assess again after learning, you know, are they are they did they get to a three, did they get to a four? You can actually, you know, show it on a graph. You know how people are, you know, that’s another, that’s another method. You know, assess again, just like you were saying, like you’re assessing, you’re interviewing somebody, you’re assessing them, you know, for their skills. But if you had them on your team, you could assess them before and after too.

 

Sylvie

Yeah. No. That’s good. And I think it’s like important. And as you get more, yeah, sophisticated. You’re right. Yeah. I can start in a basic way and then move on to like a scale, like a rating scale so that you can know, like which is, which is more advanced. Which gets us now to step six, which is not doing skills opportunities in a company.

 

And this is one like I feel like people say different things about learning one thing. And a much of it drives me bonkers, honestly. But the one that drives me the most bonkers is that if you train people, then you’re basically training them out of your company. If you’re giving them too much education, they’re going to leave, which I think is so false because first of all, most people prefer to stay where they are.

 

And of course, the alternative of having, you know, you know, going down to a low, you know, to mediocrity, how is that a good way to run a company. So I don’t know how in terms of actually guilt opportunities, I think this is like the most important one, like let people thrive, right?

 

Kelly

Yeah, absolutely. I, you know, it’s I think it’s, it has to do with company culture and, you know, where, where people’s mindsets are on that.

 

I think in, in traditional organizations or, managers didn’t want, they wanted to keep their teams, you know, they wanted to keep their talent and not share it with other people. But to your point, I don’t think that ever works. It never, you know, because if you try to keep people and the other opportunities better opportunities, it’s so much better to say, look, I’m just like a coach would on a team.

 

You know, you want people to get better so that they have more opportunities. So a lot of times we talk about this too, because a lot of corporations have, have put together talent marketplaces in some way, or they’re using a tool or they’re doing it internally by saying, look, the way we’re going to help people, the way we’re going to get better as a company, and the way we’re going to help people grow is by saying, you know, if you, learn new skills, here’s the opportunities in our company internally that you might be eligible for if you have these skills.

 

And that’s a good way to keep people and then to your other point, I just when I was at LinkedIn, we had a motto that, you know, that whether you stay, LinkedIn for a year or ten years, we’re going to help you build the skills that you need for your career. And people thought back then, you know, when I first joined LinkedIn, that was 2012, people thought we were crazy.

 

Like, why would you say that? Why would you tell people that? Well, you’re and testing them and they can just leave? Well, it was because, it was the opposite was true. It was a huge retention tool, nobody wanted to leave. Because we kept investing in people and we kept giving them in our process. So you want to try this, you want to go work over here.

 

And, and so, so I think you’re right on that, that the more you give people opportunities to learn and grow, the more they’ll want to stay and the more motivated they’ll be to work for your company and do great things.

 

Sylvie

Yeah. And I guess it comes back, even back to the first point of like making it important.

 

And what is the culture of the company. And, you know, honestly, not every company has that culture. You know, they might make a calculation like, you know, we’re hiring people where they’re, basically commodity roles. And we can just get new people. And this is, you know, a different model. But I think the kind of company that does actually need to keep good people and keep growing, and a company that’s on a good growth trajectory, there’s a huge opportunity to say, okay, let’s put learning at the center of what we’re doing.

 

Let’s make it thoughtful, strategic, deliberate, and then use it as a way to fill jobs. I mean, I know, like when I’m a boss or a manager and I’m running my company, like, my greatest joy is when I hired someone and they were doing a junior thing, and then they learned a new thing and they got a promotion.

 

I mean, you feel so proud. Sometimes I see on LinkedIn, people hired years ago, now they’re doing amazing things. And they, I had a part in that journey. I mean, it’s just the best.

 

Kelly

That’s a great leader, in my opinion. You know, somebody who really wants to develop their talent and help them learn and grow. And, and so I think that we see that and plus it’s great for the company.

 

Let’s be honest. You know, a more skilled workforce is obviously going to be better for your company’s success rather than people who are languishing and old skills and old ideas, and they’re never learning anything new. Yeah. It’s just, it seems like a no brainer. But it’s still for a lot of people. A lot of people ask me, you know, what if I don’t have that culture, what can I do? And oftentimes just say, well, try it in your own group. You know, you can also try things in a group at a group level, even if maybe it’s not spread throughout the whole company or find another company.

 

Sylvie

Another company that believes as we do. Which gets to the last step around this, which is communicate metrics of success, to show how it’s impacting.

 

Yeah. And I guess this is really like at the highest level, CEO and team leaders is to show that, like learning at the core, retention and all that.

 

Kelly

Absolutely. I mean, and I think that this is key, like if you are running, and a skilling strategy or a learning strategy at your company and you can’t on a regular think of yourself as a business that needs to just like every other organization within the company.

 

Tell the rest of the company how your business is running and how it’s impacting them. And I again, I’m, I’m often shocked that people aren’t more vocal about, but probably because you have to go through all these steps in order to be able to report out on metrics like this. You know, if you don’t have a strategy and you’re just creating ad hoc learning based on requests that are coming in, you won’t be able to, well you might, you won’t be able to do a metrics for success dashboard to the executive team like this.

 

And this is where the real value will come in. If people are seeing that you’re running learning like a business and that these are the metrics. And, oh, by the way, you told us executive one that, you know, your employees needed these three skills. And let me tell you how we’re doing. And against that goal that we kind of set together on that, it’s just it’s a full circle communication that keeps reminding people. Look, we’re on this journey together through this strategy, and it’s going to make your team better. It’s going to make our employees better. And, and, create better retention overall. So any other thoughts?

 

Sylvie

Yeah. No. Completely. No, I guess just to get your thoughts, I mean, now.

 

So there’s, obviously you wrote a few years ago and I think it’s completely relevant. It is completely irrelevant today. And I’ll just, you know, recap the seven, and so identify a few future skills, assess the critical skills. So you have a baseline, set your upskilling goals, map the learning to the skills to figure out how you’re going to reach those goals, measure progress, match skills opportunities in the company, and then communicate metrics of success.

 

So those seven steps, how do you think about that now in this context of I, which probably would be like the big thing that would have changed since you originally, you know, got this framework.

 

Kelly

Yeah. I think that what we’ve seen in the workforce over the last, you know, two years, especially since ChatGPT came out and AI is all, you know, is fundamentally changing the way we work and the way we think about work.

 

Obviously, I would be surprised if, AI in some form or another, wasn’t one of your top 3 or 5 skills. And so that becomes almost a no-brainer that everybody needs to either. This goes back to our earlier conversation about it. Either need to know about it, you know, in general, so they can talk intelligently about it, or they need to actually learn skills, specifically for AI.

 

So I think that that’s one of the biggest things. And I think the other thing that’s really changed, and this is some of the work, the strategy work I was doing at SNHU in creating, you know, certifications. The first one we created as the pilot was for AI. And it’s actually how do you how do you use AI to be more productive in your job?

 

So learn the basic AI skills and then how do you, how do you apply it directly to the job that you have, to be more productive and efficient? And then lastly, AI is changing learning. I mean, we were using large language models to do Socratic questioning. So instead of little quizzes that you get asked, you know, for knowledge checks, you’d be saying, you know, well, tell me, ask specific questions, but then have a conversation.

 

So the chatbot might say, you know, tell me what you know about large language models or what is a large language model. Instead of picking a multiple choice, you’d say, oh, well, it’s, it has to do with artificial intelligence. And it would come back and say, true. Now tell. But what about, you know, be more specific in this area.

 

So we keep questioning, you know, keep digging deeper into your knowledge, which is better than the quiz because anybody can pick a multiple choice quiz. But can you actually have a conversation with an AI chatbot? That’s kind of cool. So that’s just one example of how AI is changing learning and how you might, how you actually might change step number four when you’re actually mapping, mapping learning to skills, you might decide there’s some AI tools that can help with learning as your as you’re moving through your strategy, which is very exciting I think.

 

Sylvie

Yeah. Now super exciting and nice to see. Yeah, there’s so many things right. How AI is changing everything. Yeah. Can make our launching a workforce upskilling program easier are the different things we need to learn about, but also shows, you know, like the basics. I always say, you know, back to the basics, just the basic thing. And if I, just to recap, that upskilling does not have to be overly complicated, and that you can, you know, start from a good base and follow a pretty clear, you know, path, and you can get to somewhere really advanced.

 

So anyway, this was a true pleasure, Kelly, love talking to you about these topics and super passionate about, and we’ll put a link in the show notes to a paper that has these seven skills so that people can follow, follow along.

 

Kelly

Yeah, that would be great. Well, it’s so great talking to you, too. And I love what you’re doing at Lynx Educate because I just feel like, we keep, you know, making things hopefully better for people on how they can learn. And I think you’re paving a new way to become a huge part of that. So, I really like what you’re doing.

 

Sylvie

Thanks. Thanks for joining us.

Sylvie Milverton:
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