Name: Skills and AI: What Your Employees Think and What To Do About It
Uploaded: 2025-02-04T14:16:03.515Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 36 s
Description: Skills and AI: What Your Employees Think and What To Do About It

Transcript for "Skills and AI: What Your Employees Think and What To Do About It": Okay. Hello, everyone, and welcome. Just gonna wait for a few more people to join us today before we get started, but very excited for the session today. Whilst we're waiting, feel free to post in the chat where you're joining from. We'd love to hear where in the world you are, and we'll get started in just a minute. Mexican joined from Paris. I love it. Wow. We've got very fast spread audience today. And I can tell this can be an interactive session, which we love. Okay. Well, let's get started. I can see the numbers still coming up, which is great. So as you can see, I'm Amy Colverhouse. I'm the head of growth here for Better Works. I'm normally in London, but hosting this, I was gonna say from beautiful Devon today, but it's very rainy outside. So excited to have you all continue chatting in the chat box amongst all of you. It's great to see where you're dialing in from. I'm just gonna start with a question that you can chat amongst yourselves in the chat box. How ready are you to reimagine how your organization builds a future ready workforce? Very keen to see what responses you have on that. Today, we'll be exploring the game changing role of skills and AI in shaping talent strategies that don't just keep up, but lead the way. Now we're obviously a lot of us here in the UK or in Europe dialing in today, we know that we're struggling with the much talked about skill shortage due to the impact of Brexit, which we're obviously still talking about and feeling the impact of an aging workforce, a shift in labor supply and demand, and a lack of alignment between education and industry needs. So upskilling the workforce will really impact the success of your company. In fact, a Guardian article from last year cited that will have a significant impact on the UK's economy. As an example, the Chartered Management Institute here found that as many as 82% of managers in the UK are what is called accidental managers. So they're barking upon the role with no formal training in management or leadership, and this is dragging businesses down and dragging the economy down. But I'm not here to depress all of you because we do have a thought leader with us today that is gonna help us answer this question. We'll be joined by Ben Eubanks who's chief research officer at Lighthouse Research, highly respected researcher and author, and someone who really lives at the intersection of data and organizational transformation. So together, he'll guide us through a session that's part road map, part reality check, and all about action. So we'll get to the heart of why skills matter now more than ever and how to make them a cornerstone of your strategy. So this isn't just a webinar. It's a conversation that will really challenge how you think, especially about the workforce of tomorrow and give you the tools to start building it today. So you've already got used to the question in the chat box there, but please keep submitting any questions in the q and a on the right side of your screen. Ben, I'm sure, will pick some up as he goes along, but also I can ask some questions at the end. Now as I'm sure you all know, Betterworks can help address these problems. So Betterworks really empowers organizations to address workforce misalignment, manager burnout, and employee disengagement with a modern performance management tool that can drive business results. So companies like HelloFresh, Colgate, and Intain use Betterworks to align teams, build trust, and achieve their boldest goals. And this people fundamental series exists to provide HR professionals, like all of you on the call today, with the tools and knowledge to shape your workforce for the better. So we really believe in your ability to make an impact on your organization by really addressing the issues that face you today. So whether you've been to many of these webinars or if you've just discovered us and this is the first one, we're very excited to have you here. And before we dive into today's webinar, I want to share a couple of exciting opportunities that are coming up. So first, we are super excited to be sponsoring a booth at HR Tech in March again this year. If you're attending, stop by a booth. I'll be there, and we'll have some colleagues giving out some free chocolate. Those of you that have seen us at these events in the past, you'll know how popular the chocolates at the Betworks booth are. You can also get a copy of the book make work better, which is written by our CEO and our VP of HR transformation. So definitely excited to see you there. We'll also be speaking there with HelloFresh vice president of people, and he'll be sharing some insights through leading successful HR transformations. So hopefully, see some of you there. And a little offer for you, feel free to ping me on LinkedIn if you'd like to attend because I might have a few passes that I can give you away. The next event, so we have our 4th annual Empower HR on May 15th. So we'll have and space it around 5,000 HR professionals as we dive into how to shape teams that aren't just ready for the future, but are defining it. We have a bunch of powerhouse HR leaders as speakers bringing insights, and it'll give you the opportunity to network as well. We'll also be unveiling key insights from our state of performance enablement report, which is very popular every year. So, yeah, we'll be excited for that as well. Okay. So now you'll be pleased to know it's time for me to properly introduce Ben. Ben Eubanks has a talent for taking complex topics and turning them into compelling actionable insights. His best selling book, Talent Scarcity, tackled one of HR's biggest challenges, finding and retaining quality workers. And his first book was literally the first book on artificial intelligence for HR. Now that is quite a claim to fame, Ben. I love it. Ben has a clear passion for people and purpose. Just recently, he returned from Guatemala where he worked with young adults on career counseling and development, And that same commitment to building better opportunities for people is woven into everything he does, including the incredible research that we're here today. So please join me in welcoming Ben. Ben, I will pass over to you. Awesome. Thank you so much, Amy. And hello, everyone. So glad to be here with you today. Looking forward to a fun conversation, sharing some data with you, sharing some stories and some examples, and helping you to get a bigger understanding and a better understanding of what's happening in the world skills and AI. I will go ahead and admit this to you right now that we could spend probably 3 hours here and not cover all the ground. So I'm gonna do my best to give you some good food for thought, directions to explore, and actions to take so that you walk out of here with some good takeaways and things to think about, things to go and pursue on your own time as well. So it's my hope to really whet your appetite for that. One thing you'll know about me is I love telling stories. I love tying those in and helping those to to make something very clear to all of us. And I'll start with this one. And by the way, you're welcome to steal any of the stories. Use them yourself. The the morals are always a good one there. So the story I wanna start off with is I don't know if you know what this picture is. Any of you who are in track and field probably can guess immediately, But this is a high jump bar. And when I was in school, I was a track and field athlete. And there was a day where the high jumper was injured and coach said, hey. Listen. We need someone to go do the high jump. Who's gonna do it? And it was one of those moments where everybody else stepped back, and I was left in the front row. And he's like, oh, okay. Ben, you can go do the high jump. I was not made to do the high jump. I failed miserably, and he never asked me again. But what I love about it is if you've ever seen people do that, you run up and you jump backwards over the bar. It's this really awkward sort of looking thing. But that jump, that way of jumping, that style started back in 1968. See, until that point, people run and jump right over the bar head first and or jump and, like, straddle it, kind of split it. And the person that did that first was a man named Dick Fosbury. He ran. He jumped backwards over it, and everyone kind of laughed at him. Look at this man. He he doesn't even know how to do this until he won went and won the gold medal in the Olympics using that weird strange jump. And what's most fun to me is 4 years later, the next Olympics, more than 70% of the athletes competing in the high jump use what they call the Fosbury flop as their way of doing that event. And I tell that story because we all know. We have a front row seat to this. As HR leaders, as talent leaders, we know that things change. We know things at work change. Sometimes that's hard. Sometimes that's challenging. Sometimes that's difficult. But like in this example, sometimes that change allows us to reach greater heights, literally, in this case. Sometimes that change allows us to accomplish bigger things, to solve bigger problems. That doesn't mean it's not difficult. It's not hard to adapt, but it is possible. I wanna leave you with that one as we go into the conversation today that this conversation around skills and AI is gonna require us to change some of what we've done. It's gonna require us to think differently about some of the work that we do. But at the same time, it can lead us to better opportunities and ways to serve our people and to know what they need from us as talent lee as talent leaders. So really quickly about the research, you can actually access the report we wrote last fall in the docs section here. But about the research, just to use my idea here, this is the global study of both workers and of employers, leaders like you. We surveyed with over 40 questions to each group to I'm trying to understand what's happening with with skills, what's happening with employability and growth, what's happening with the challenges around that, how people feel at work from an employee perspective. Are the things we're doing, the way we're trying to serve and support them, are those things meeting their needs, or are we missing the mark? See, when I started my career as an HR leader and worked in the trenches, that was one of the things that mattered most to me. I didn't wanna do busy work. I didn't wanna do things that were off in a silo somewhere. I wanted the work that I was doing to impact our people. And so we'll hear about some of the data in this study as we'll go through today and some of the stats that tie into that. The big three things I wanna cover in the next 45 minutes or so with you are why skills and why now. Why does this matter? I'm gonna talk about some of the approaches we've seen. I'll tell you some good examples there. I'll tell you some things that we may be doing wrong. I I've done them wrong myself. And then we'll talk about some the value overall to the organization, to your talent practice around having that skill strategy in place. So to start off, why skills? Why now? Why is this a conversation we should be having in the marketplace, you should be having in your organization? If it's not already happening, why should you start things up a little bit and start this discussion? We'll start off skills with the currency of work. This is how things get done. We've talked about jobs and the shift, all the all those, to to skills and all those kinds of things. But what I want you to hear is think about this. If you went to your CFO, someone in finance, and you said, hey. Listen. How much do we spend last year on coffee? I don't know. They could tell you down to the penny. If you went to someone on the property team and said, hey. That that desk over there, how long ago do we buy that desk and what's it depreciated to now? They can tell you those things. But that person that just walked by you in the hallway at work or the person that joined the virtual meeting a few minutes ago, do you know what their skills are? Do we see what they can do, what they can accomplish? Not really. It's really hard for us to be able to see that level of insight into our people, and that creates problems. That creates risk for the business. I'll talk more about that in a little bit, but it creates real problems because we can't tap into their strengths. We can't leverage those great things they bring to the table. The kind of skills they're bringing that bring them to life, that make them excited to do work, we can't tap into those because we don't know what they are. Not only that. When we look in the research, we actually found that about 63% of leaders say that the people in their workforce are not highly adaptable of change. In the last few years, we've seen arguably more change than ever before in my working lifetime. The workplace looks very different in some ways than it did before. And because of that, we have to be more adaptable. We have to be willing and able to change. But what we're hearing from leaders is that people are not ready. They're not able to do that, and that doesn't just affect the work we do. That affects our ability to compete in the market. That affects our ability to respond to competitive challenges. When they create a new product or service, how do we catch up? If we're not adaptable, we can't. So this is bigger than just the work that we put our hands on day to day. And our people, they have some real concerns. What we see in the research is about 7 out of 10 workers, again, global study, so put any 10 of your workers in front of you in your mind right now, 7 out of 10 of them have some worry, have some concern about how AI is gonna disrupt the skills that they have and they need to do their work, to get paid, to feed their family. They're worried about that, and it's creating it's creating some friction in the work they do. The good news is, though, they say that this isn't just a hopeless thing. They say that if you are helping as the employer, if you're helping develop them, helping them grow, helping them upskill, they feel like that helps them to adapt and to react to those changes and to have sort of a hedge against that. So it's not gonna just happen to them. They can go and happen to it. They can go and take some control over this bigger thing that they don't really have a whole lot of control over. And last but not least, when we look at the data, we asked employers like all of you, are you actually looking at the jobs in your workplace? Which ones which jobs and which skills or tasks may be affected by AI? Which ones are gonna be automated? Which ones can be disrupted? Only about 1 out of 4 leaders said they are have done that. So if you have not yet done that, you are not too far behind. But I would encourage you to be thinking about that and leading the conversation. For better or for worse, we don't want you to think about these things in our own work, but we also have to think about them in the broader context of the organization. We have to help this conversation happen because it's not gonna happen naturally. It's not gonna happen accidentally. We've gotta be intentional about it. Here's a stat that I wanna want you to really understand deeply. So this is a study that did that was done a couple of years ago on the s and p 500. So look at the stock exchange here in the US, the 500 largest companies on the stock exchange, which represents essentially the economy here. I'm looking for a global study on this, by the way. So if you have a study or you've seen data like this for for Europe or for the rest of the world, I'd love to see it. But here's what the data tells. Back in 1975, about 70% of the value of that entire set of companies was in intangible assets. The rest of it was in property, plants, equipment, resources, tools, all those physical things you can go and pick up or look at and put your hands on. The intangible stuff is from things you can't do that with. It's from intellectual property, patents, copyrights, and I would argue the skills inherently available in our people, in our working population. And what you see here is from 1975 to very recently, that number has dramatically shifted. The value of these companies is no longer massively in the plants, the equipment, the property, the tools, those sorts of things that you can put your hands on. The value is in these other things that are intangible. And those skills of your people are incorporated, included in that big value. And I share this because for a long time, we've we've looked at ways to to tap into the skills of our people. There was a a wave of competency models years ago. But the problem with that, we all know, is when that big old thick notebook is done, you put it on a shelf and it collects dust. It's too hard. It's too static. It doesn't change. So these sorts of things tell us that the world is changing. It's evolving. And this is why skills is a big conversation in the workplace and a big conversation for employers right now. Now I've got a question for you. I want you to chime in in the chat. I want you to be active here. Let me know which of these. You can drop a 1, a 2, or a 3 in the chat. But out of these three statements, which one is most concerning to you? Number 1, our workers are not building their skills for the future. Number 2, workers are only doing training because it's mandatory, because someone makes them do it. Or number 3, employees say that their teammates, the people around them, cannot handle change. They can't react or respond. I'm gonna take a look at the chat here. We're getting lots of twos, lots of ones. Thank you for chiming in. Okay. Lots of twos. Got a 3 in there. Helen, thank you. 3. Excellent. Okay. So I mean, we can make the case, any of us. We could sit down and and kind of debate this a little bit. All of these, if we had this, admit it, are a little bit worrisome. They're a little bit concerning. And while I don't pride myself in being the person that brings the doom cloud, I do wanna paint the picture. This is very real. That mean I'm trying to show that we have to do this. There's some urgency here because these aren't just hypothetical. These are real. Look at this. So for those of you who said number 1, the data actually show that only 16% of the workforce say that their company is helping them develop their future skills. Now more than that are saying they're helping me right now. Yes. They're helping me do the work I need to do, be developed for this job, but only 16% say they're helping me for what's coming next. And catching that vision, helping me know the skills I'm building are the right skills. The second one, the ones that are learning only because they have to or because they're made to, the number one reason people tell us they're learning at work isn't because of career growth, isn't because they wanna perform better, isn't because they're getting ready for this promotion or this move, this big shift they're excited about, it's because someone told them to do it. And if we have to tell everybody to do something and we're having to sort of micromanage their their their learning and their skills, this thing is never going to work in the long run. And then 3rd, only 13% of people say that the people around them are adaptable to change. And if you stop to think about that for a second, think about the people on your team, on the HR team, on the talent team, the learning team, wherever you reside. Think about those people. If they are not adaptable to change, do you trust them? Do you trust you can hand something to them and that's gonna get done? When you get together, do you think the ideas they're sharing are good ideas? Probably not. You're worried about that, you're concerned about that, or you like, I'm gonna have to work harder to overcome their inability. All of these things are very real. But as we've seen already, learning, being being able to grow, being able to develop is a way we can we can address this. And that's the the big thing. Whenever something like this comes up, we can put our head in the sand. We can do nothing. We can just avoid it and hope it goes away, or we can step up. And from what I know of being an HR leader myself and of meeting 100, thousands of HR leaders over the last 15 years that I've been working in this field, We don't back down from a challenge. We step up to the challenge, and we're ready to take it on. So I wanna talk for a little bit now about what we can do about it, some of the approaches that are out there, the ways companies see this, the the good and the bad, and, some of the things we can avoid doing, and some cautionary tales about how to approach this to get the best possible results. Now last week, I had the pleasure of chatting with Sandra or Sandra Laughlin. She is a brilliant brilliant leader. If you follow her on LinkedIn, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't, you can go and check her out there. But she talks about skills. She posts videos. She shares about this because she works as a chief learning scientist for a company called EPAM. And EPAM, in her words, has been doing doing skills for over 30 years. They've been looking at ways to validate them, looking at how to use skills to to influence decisions, to to know which way to go as a company, to know where their strengths are, to know where to compete and where to maybe no. Listen. That's not a strength of ours, and we don't need to compete there because we're gonna get beat by someone else who has more strengths. And in her words, skills are part of everything that they do, every decision, every strategy. And that's the big vision here. The big hope of this conversation today is you're gonna walk away thinking about ways that can happen. But even she will tell you this is a decades long journey, and she is standing on the shoulders of the giants who've been putting these things to practice for all that time. And even then, it still is a challenge. It still requires effort and attention intentionality and all those sorts of things. But their story is one of the good ones, one of the ones. Again, you can you can follow her on LinkedIn. She's incredible. One of the things that I have seen years for over many years is that we often assume that years of experience is a proxy for skill level. I grabbed this funny image from Twitter or X, and it made me smile because this is so true. So this gentleman here created a new coding language that did not exist before. He had created it about 18 months ago, and he saw a job posting that required that level of skill and that that coding language for over 4 years because the company is looking for a senior person in that role. And as he says here, and as I'll say, years of experience do not equal skill level. For many of you, you may know someone that's been doing the job for for 20 years, and they've got that same one year of experience 20 times instead of having 20 years of progressive building experience where their skills are more valuable today than they've ever been in the past, where they're getting smarter, they're getting more capable. But that doesn't always happen. It doesn't happen, again, naturally. Things tend towards chaos, And if we don't have a path there, then we end up falling back on things like that. So if you have not heard these these terms here, here's a quick snippet on this. There's 2 different terms to get thrown around a whole lot when it comes to skills, a taxonomy and an ontology. A taxonomy is essentially a way of creating a hierarchical framework for the skills. So we know that writing is a bigger bucket than copywriting, for example. Copywriting is a specific application of a writing skill, and you can pick any skill and break it up into smaller pieces there. But you can also look at the the competency level someone has, the ability, the proficiency, and how important that is in the big picture. For your company, if you run a marketing agency, writing's probably pretty high on that list. But if you run a manufacturing plant, writing may not be the biggest and most important skill. It may be something else. On the ontology side, it's about looking at skills and their relation to the jobs and to each other. So this is a great example of when you are looking at, hey. I've been in this field for a while. I've been I'm talking to a friend of mine right now who is in the learning space. He's head of learning for an insurance company, and he's like, I wanna be more broad talent. So what skills are I gonna be building? What applications do I have? How much overlap do I have? I've got a 40% overlap in my skills for one of those talent roles. How do I build those gaps so I'm able to adapt to that? And you can apply that same idea there to any of the jobs in your organization, either job families in your organization, and you see how ontologies give us a different look at the relationships between those and how they fit together. Again, we could spend a whole hour going into those examples, what those look like, but I wanted to sort of set the stage there because if you're having a conversation, they don't mean the same thing. And sometimes we talk about one would mean the other. And so for you, you'll walk out of here today with nothing. If nothing else, you'll have at least some idea of what those 2 are and how those fit into this bigger conversation of skills. Now let's let's get a little more specific here. When we look at the research, about 1 out of 5 employees tell us they're not sure if their employer knows what their skills are. If you put yourself in the shoes of that person who says, I don't know if my employer or my manager cares enough about me to know what my skills are, my strengths are, my abilities are, It's hard to imagine them being engaged and excited and bringing their best ideas to work if they don't know if their employer cares. So there are different ways we can know what their skills are or we can infer or guess what their skills are. We've all seen these tools come up in the market in the last few years. There are things like resume parsing. Look at the resume. Let's parse or infer the skills from that and assume that this person has those skills. We all know that people put things in their resumes that aren't always true, and they don't put things on their resume that are true. When was the last time you saw someone's resume that said, I'm not a good team player. I don't work well with others. Don't ask me questions before 10 AM when I have my 3rd cup of coffee or I'm gonna bite your head off. No one puts those things on their resumes, and yet we have those people on our workplaces right now. So resumes aren't perfect. They don't give us the full picture of someone. You can look at things like training completions. Let's assume that if someone completed this training, then they have at least a base proficiency in that skill. Or let's look at their digital footprint. Let's say your company has an internal, Slack channel where questions get asked and you can answer. And you step in every time there's a question around analytics because you love data and you love HR metrics, and you step in and answer the questions every time. Well, over time, some of these AI tools can start inferring that you have a proficiency in analytics and measurement and data and start assigning you a skill related to that because you're doing that with your digital footprint. So these are different ways to infer and guess those skills. But there are other ways as well. We can try to get a little more validated, a little more proven. I have manager observations here with an asterisk, and I'll tell you why in just a moment. But manager observations are a way to do that. That's how Saundra at EPAM talked about their team does this. They have people who are experts, and they step in, and they watch you do it, and they give you a thumbs up. They give you the stamp of approval when you've done that skill to prove that you have it and to validate that. We can look at performance data. The work that you're doing, the work products you're doing, you at least have some insight there into that. You have some agreed upon rules, and you get to use that data to say, yes. Ben's able to develop a forecast and a budget because he developed this, and the manager gave me that as a task and my performance review, and I he signed off on it. Maybe it's feedback from other people or even assessments. Using those as the way to really validate that. I wanna talk about the manager piece for a second. Let me let you all chime in here again in the chat and let me know what your thoughts are. I get I put an asterisk on manager observations. Why do you think those might not be the most accurate? Even though we they can be a way to validate, what sort of issues might pop up that keep those manager observations from being the most accurate way of telling what skills the workforce might have. Yeah. Good. Michael, lack of subjective criteria, bias, Inge. Excellent. Yes. Yes. Y'all are spot on it. There are a tremendous number of biases that affect how we make decisions every day as humans. If those biases affect how I decide to buy bread at the grocery store, then they absolutely affect how I'm looking at the skills of my people. There's a codex out there that looks at over a 180 different potential biases that humans have, how they influence our decision making. And so this is just a snippet of that to give you an idea of how this can affect that. But if you're only relying on manager observations to give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down on someone's skills, you may be missing stuff. For for positive reasons, they think, hey. Listen. Sandra over here is really great at this thing, so I'm gonna give her some credit for these other things even if she doesn't have those. That's an a bias, but it's a positive one or negative. Sandra is not great at this thing, so I'm gonna assume she's not great at the other things. We can go through all these biases. This is not new to us, but it's a reminder for all of you that these influence their decisions. And if we're only doing the manager piece, we're missing out on getting a real clear picture on what our skills are in our organization, what people can do, and, ultimately, how we can tap into them. This this isn't this whole exercise isn't to understand skills so we can just sit back and catch our breath. We wanna know what those skills are so we can leverage them. I have been guilty of stepping over someone who is qualified and interested to do a job to hire from the outside because I didn't realize they had that skill. I didn't realize they had that interest and aspiration, and we stepped right over them. And that person was discouraged and ended up quitting because we didn't even consider them for the job. I don't ever wanna do that again. I've been guilty of hiring someone, thinking they had the right skill because we ask a lot of questions and finding out pretty quickly they did not have the skill we needed to do the job. I don't ever wanna do that again. I've had people that we put into a manager role thinking they had the right skills. We saw this earlier, the accidental manager, and they don't. They were picked because of their tenure, because of how long they've been there, because they have a a friend who's a manager, any number of things. They wanna get paid more money not because they love leading people, not because they love serving their team, but for all these other reasons that don't end up making them a great manager. Okay. So there's my my my take on that one. I'm gonna show you this this quick piece here. Know that this is a work in progress. So I've been evolving and adapting this over the last couple of years to look at different ways we can understand the skills of our people. And I think it's a unwritten rule somewhere that every nerdy researcher has to have a 2 by 2 grid of something. So this is one of the first ones that that I put together. But it looks at how quickly we can scale one of these ways that I showed you a moment ago to verify skills and how accurate they might be. For example, you look here at the bottom right, the the self reporting, that's pretty quick. I can ask all of you right now, drop into the chat one of the skills you have, and you would share all those things. That'd be very fast. But it would it be totally accurate? For HR leaders, I'm sure it would be. But for the rest of the workforce, I don't know. They they may not be totally accurate. And the same thing is true with resumes. It's it's fast. It's easy. It's AI driven, but it that doesn't necessarily mean that it's accurate. On the other side, things like skills test and assessments, those can be expensive, but they are very accurate. They are highly accurate, and they are very scalable across the questions as well across the, the workforce as well. So we see all these different layers of this. And when I'm looking for this, I'm looking for a couple of different vectors, a couple of different pieces tied together to tell us what the skills are of our people. Because once we have that understanding, that framework I talked earlier about skills being the currency. Once we have that framework and we know what people can do, then we can start leveraging those. We can start building on those. We can start letting them play to their strengths and build on that. We did a piece of research last year, early last year, and we found that companies with better revenue, better retention, better employee productivity, all those metrics that all of us care about, those companies were more likely than those with negative metrics in those areas to look at employee strengths and look for ways to leverage them on a consistent basis. It's not about saying, well, you know, you're weak here, so fix those weaknesses. The poor performing companies, the low performing companies, focus on the weaknesses. The high performing companies, focus on the strengths and focused on how to build those in. Okay. Alright. Let's let's move on ahead. I wanna share 2 things really quickly from our from our that learning research report I mentioned earlier because it ties into this really well. I was having a conversation maybe 10 years ago with with a leader at a massive organization, and she said, we're doing all this great work on talent, this great work in HR and learning. She said, I just want to have a workforce that is self developing, a workforce that wants to build its own skills. Not that I'm worried about to tell it tell everybody to do this all the time, but people that want to develop their own skills. So what we found in the research is that there are 2 things that are necessary for that. If you have one or the other, it's not enough. You have to have both. So if you want to have a workforce that develops the skills productively, that is upskilling or reskilling or adapting themselves or whatever terminology you wanna use there, they need autonomy. They need the opportunity. Here's what I mean by that. So autonomy means I have the chances to say, I wanna develop that skill. I wanna develop that I wanna develop this proficiency. I wanna know how to use this technology. I wanna understand how this process works. They need to have that autonomy to have some choices in that because if it's all so narrowly defined, they don't have choices, then it kills their creativity. It kills their interest in developing. But it's not enough to just say, I wanna do those things. They have to have the actual opportunity to do that. If you say if you have a manager that says, hey, Ben. Listen. I know you wanna develop this skill. You're welcome to develop that skill, but you still have 40 hours of work to do. They don't have the opportunity. There's no white space. There's no there's no chance to actually stretch and develop that. And this doesn't have to just be courses and content. This can be experiences. This can be coaching. This can be a leader that steps in to mentor someone. But those two things have to be present if we want people to feel like they have some control over their path, if we wanna feel like they have the chance to grow those skills that they wanna grow, to be successful at work. Those two things are necessary and not either one separately. And here's what what it changes. Okay? This isn't just Ben's opinion of the world. Here's what the data show. We have companies that actually lean in and give the opportunity and the autonomy. You see those in the right column here. We call that an empowered learning culture, an empowered skills culture, and it creates a very different set of outcomes. People are more likely to say that their company offers them the learning that they need to grow their skills and their performance. Their company's more like they're more likely to say they're manager supportive of them as they grow. They're more likely to say that they can see the opportunities in the business, and they can step into those. They can take advantage of those. They can raise their hand and say, hey. Can I try that? They're more likely to say that when they have the autonomy and the opportunity. When they don't have those things, when the company is really focused just on training people because they don't do the the job well, we have a saying here in the south where I'm from in the in the US called a whooping stick. It's a whooping stick. We're using it against them instead of using it to build them, and that's not a place we want to be. Unfortunately, a lot of companies are like that. You've probably had that come to you whether you're overtraining or not. People see a problem like, oh, that's a we need some training for that. Like, no. That's a motivation problem. We need training for that. No. They just don't have enough time in their day to do the work. Training them won't change that. It's a different kind of problem. Excellent. Excellent. Okay. So one last piece here, and then I'm gonna transition to the last part talking about some of the impacts of a skill strategy and what's happening in that world. As you are thinking through this, I want you I heard I said this earlier, but I'll say it again. This bigger conversation around skills is not about skills and and focusing on skills for his own sake. That doesn't help any we don't need any more work to do. I don't know about you. Okay? But most HR leaders I talk to don't need any additional things on their plate, and yet this is on our plate. So if we're gonna go down this path, if we're going to explore this and learn how to use skills and we're gonna understand how AI affects them and all those sorts of things, we have to know what we're trying to accomplish. What are the end goals? I talked to a financial services organization a little while back, and they were telling me that they were building these digital teams to embed in different business units. And it was this really creative strategy to to embed some innovation into different areas of the business. I was super intrigued by it. But they said, listen. We started this, and we got we got stuck. It's like, okay. What happened? Well, we ran out of people that we knew that had the skills we needed to do this job. I said, okay. How many people in your organization do you know the skills for? Do you understand them? They said, well, we have 40,000 employees, and we know the skills of about 10% of them. My heart about stopped. I said, you have 36,000 employees walking around. They got paid last payday, and they don't you don't know what their skills are. You don't even know what their last job title was because your HR system only keeps the current job title. So you can't even infer things about their career path. They just know what their current title is. That was a scary place. Okay? For them, they knew what they were trying to accomplish, but they didn't have a good enough foundation to get to where they were going. They had to understand more about those skills to get there. Okay. The second piece here, this is a bigger conversation as I'll show you in a minute. This is not just about doing the work we're doing in HR. I've talked a lot about the use cases that we care about, hiring and development and succession planning and groomability and all those sorts of things. Those things matter to us, but our leaders may be looking at things like competitiveness and customer satisfaction and innovation and sales and the other things that matter that drive the business. Know that this affects those things too. This isn't an either or. Well, let's do the HR stuff. No. This is about feeding and influencing all the other side of that with what we do here. Our companies become more more resilient, more adaptable. Again, in that report, I talk about some of the some of the data we have on that around organizational adaptability that ties into this. Your company can be more agile if you have an agile workforce. It is required for that to happen. Excellent. Okay. And then how do we get behind not just from the leadership but from the workforce? So as we're talking about this, I mentioned earlier that about 1 in a 5 workers say, I don't know if my company even knows what my skills are. How do we support those people? How do we make sure that they're excited about the the work they're doing and the skill path they're on and what they're gonna be able to accomplish? We have to bring them along the journey. So we talk about we wanna know what your skills are so we can tap into those. I love putting it this way. Think about what you felt like when you got a job offer, that feeling of being desired, of being wanted, of someone seeing what you had to offer and saying, we choose you. Okay? When we are tapping into the skills of our people for the purposes of growing them, of developing them, of finding a new career path in the business for them, we're recreating that sensation all over again. We're telling them again, I see what you have, and we want that. We wanna leverage that for our organization and for for what we're trying to accomplish in the world. That's a pretty powerful place to be. Okay. Let's cruise in here on our last section. I've I'm seeing some of the some of the the back chat over here around q and a and stuff. We'll have some good questions to address. I know there were some great comments here as well. I, look forward to chat chiming in and taking a look at those in a moment when I get to catch our breath. Let's talk here in this last bit about the value of the benefits here of this skill strategy and what ties in. So one of the things that is exciting to me is mobility. I talked about this feeling of being desired all over again, and this is an example of that. When you see the skills of your people, you can start moving them in different ways. You can find ways to level them up. You could take someone in a lower paying job relative to another job and move them into that higher level job if they have the right skills or if you know what skills to develop in them. This is an example of that. So we were talking with an organization recently. They're like, listen. We don't have enough technical sellers. We're trying to hire them. They're too expensive. We're not sure what to do. So we looked at some of the data they had on the skills of their people, the human skills, the specific human side of that, adaptability, communication, all those things, but also the technical skills. Did the person present well? Can they negotiate and handle the technical side of that, all that? What we found was for their sales team, they had certain basic level of skills, but their technical sellers had those and then one more layer. They had the ability to look at the technology and figure out when something wasn't working or how to set that up in the right way. They had specific awareness of the tech. And so for them, instead of saying, let's go and just hire someone and and do that, what if we could take some more people in this internal role and develop them by adding this layer of skills? It's cheaper. The data we have say it's cheaper. It's less risky to the business. That person, strangely enough, performs better than someone hired from outside because there's that moment of adjustment, that period of time to get up to speed. So there's all this data that back that up. And yet we all know that right now, some company is probably saying, yeah. That's probably too hard to do that. Let's just go and hire someone even if it is more expensive. This gives us the ability to do that because we see the skills and we can make those decisions. Excuse me. One of my good friends that I worked with for many years, he is a program manager, and his life revolves around risk. He looks at the the the talent risk on his projects. He looks at the schedules and are they gonna hit the the the milestones and deadlines. He looks at all the other inputs. Do we have the things lined up so that they'll arrive in time to build this machine we're building? All those things, he spends his time looking at risk. And I will tell you that we we're talking about this bigger conversation, and I don't ever like to go negative. But if we don't know the skills of our people, that creates risk. It's not just a frustration. It's not just an annoyance. It's not just the inability to tap into their strengths, but it creates risk for us as a company. If you think about your sales pipeline at your organization, how your company makes money, If the data in there are cluttered, if they're outdated, if they're inaccurate, that's gonna cost your company in terms of sales. It's gonna create risk there. If your financial systems are incomplete, they're inaccurate, all the data aren't up to date, that's gonna create risk for your business. And the same thing is true here. If we don't know the skills of our people, we don't have that awareness, it's creating a risk. In the research study, 7 out of 10 leaders just like you said that not knowing the skills of their people creates a cost or burden to the organization as a whole. The data back this up. So, again, I don't like to go negative on it, but that is a real risk. And so if you're trying to get buy in, you're trying to get support from your leaders, you're trying to figure out how to convince them that we need to be investing here or leaning in here, that's an example of the data that helps to back it up and some of the examples around that that really tie in and show how important this can be. Now I told you earlier, this is not just about our our set of outcomes that we get excited about and our processes, because I I love talking about hiring and developing and all these things. You can tell probably from how I've shared today. But, ultimately, it's in service of business. How do the things we're doing here influence the rest of these? I'll give you an example. 1 of my good friends used to be the chief learning officer for a health care company. And they had these medical devices they were selling. And their sales team, they had they had started looking at their performance over time, and they found that one group was really selling well, and one of one of them was below the line. They were not doing very well. And they said, ultimately, let's do a training. We're gonna train all of our salespeople and get them up to speed so they can all be above the line, essentially, in their performance. And he said, okay. Hold on a second. Do we know what the actual skill is we're trying to build? What separates this group from this group that's down below the line? And so I looked at the different skills capabilities, and they found that there were 2 or 3 skills that the group above had, the ones that were meeting their sales quota and exceeding that, and the ones that below did not have. So they went in and did a targeted training. Instead of giving it training for everybody for 100 of 1,000 of dollars across this massive enterprise organization, they focused on the group that needed a certain set of skills and the ones that didn't have them. So it cost them a fraction of the cost, and they did authorize skills and push their performance up where it needed to be. That's an example of how the skills conversation ties into things like sales and other areas. We can go into any of these and start really elaborating on that and diving in. So for your organization, if you're listen. Our focus right now is efficiency and knowing how that works. Great. Do we have people in the organization that have skills around lean and other principles that look at reducing waste and being more efficient? Use the skills. Use those to tie into business activities and really connect into what matters most. I'm gonna tell you a quick story, and I'm gonna call him back to join me in just a little bit that that helps me to, so we can answer some questions, things like that. So if you have questions I know there's been some great conversation, but you have some questions, please drop those into the q and a so we can see those because it's the chat has been bubbling through, and I have not been able to keep up with it. So there's a a book somewhere back there on the shelf back there called Giftology, and it's a it's a fun book about using GIFs as a way to build relationships written by a gentleman named John Ruhlin. And John, years ago, was going to propose to his girlfriend. This is back when The Notebook movie was very popular. And so he was going to fill up this whole notebook, pull up their stories and their times together, all their great memories, and then do something really pretty outrageous. He was going to get someone to doctor him up so he'd look like an older man. He was going to get the notebook snuck to her before she got onto an airplane. He was gonna buy the seat next to her, watch her read this notebook, and then, like, pop the question to her randomly at some point during the flight. Okay? That's weird and strange. But in his mind, it was a great idea. It was gonna be very touching and and and special. So he goes through all this process, gets the notebook ready. He gets to the airport, and he's been so busy he forgot to eat, and he passes out when going through security from low blood sugar. Well, I I if you didn't know this already, security does not like it when you doctor yourself up to look like someone who you are not. And so he wakes up in the, in handcuffs in the holding cell, and he's trying to explain to them this whole elaborate thing. I'm sure it sounds as outrageous as it does, and I'm telling it to you now. It sounds outrageous. He's like, just get her off the plane. She'll vouch for me. She'll prove that I'm not, you know, lying about this. And he eventually gets out of trouble and and gets on his way. And she turns to him and says, you could've just asked me. You could've just asked me. You didn't have to go through all this. I just wanted you to ask me. And I I tell you that story because so often, we get in our heads the picture of what we need to be doing and what we need to be offering, what we need to be giving. We get this picture of what great looks like and how we've gotta impose that or provide that to our people. And instead, I encourage you to pause and think about, if they just asked you, what would it be? Is it the ability to grow their skills? Is it the ability to know their skills? Is it a manager who sees and acknowledges that they have certain strengths and competencies? It's not about us just telling them what they need. It's about us knowing and listening to what they're asking for and acknowledging that and letting that play a role in this bigger picture. So often in the skills conversation, it's all about top down, and this really can be a bottom up approach. We know what people can do that builds on top of each other, and we can see it across the entire organization. And we're taking into account not just what they can do from a human skills perspective, a technical skills perspective, but also their aspirations. What do they wanna be? A year from now, 2 years from now, where do they wanna go, and how do we help them get there? I'm developing a survey right now on a a segment of the workforce, and that's one of the things we're really looking at how to dig into is, how do we know what people wanna do, where they wanna go? And then how do we, as a community of HR talent leaders, how do we help them get there? Because that's what wins today. That's what helps us compete against other companies. That's what sets us apart and makes us more supportive of the needs they have. Alright. Amy, I'm gonna jump over and and, welcome you back in because I know there were a couple questions that the team was chatting about on the on the back channel over there. Try not to pay too much Yeah. You go here. Love love that last story. I'm gonna be telling all my friends that story later. It's brilliant. And and listen. When I tell that story in front of a live audience, you can hear all the women in the audience go, like, what is wrong with him? And all the guys are like, hey. That's actually a good no. So it's it's one of those things that's it's a lesson learned for all of us that may have thought that's a good idea. No. Bad idea. And lesson learned, they ask in the way they wanna be asked, ultimately. It's the thought that counts. Right? So there's lots of chat going back and forth. It was great to see all the interactivity in the chat. There's actually a question that that you can address that's just come in and it's right there, and then I'll address some others. So, from Michael, is there a globally is there a global skills taxonomy? I feel like if there was more consistency benchmark, then it would be easier to have skill conversations internally. Michael, I feel like that's the the conversation I had with my 14 year old the other day. Why do we have metric units, and why do we not? I mean, why do we use different things? So, like, it's one of those things where it's hard to get everyone to to pick a a set standard and stick with it. The, I mean, it may come out that at some point, you know, one of the international accrediting organizations, ISO, or someone is willing to do that, to take that on. But when you are in Europe, it's a different prospect. When you're in the States, people go with the the the data the government collects. And so how they collect it strangely enough, I was listening to a a piece yesterday. I'm writing a a book right now, and there is a person talking about how how these jobs and skills have changed over the last couple of decades. If you look back at the fifties and you see, you know, this certain type of job title, and today, that job title may have morphed or adapted. In some cases, it's just sort of inflated. You know, used to you were the I don't know. You were pumping gas, and now you're the gas pump engineer, like, whatever. You know? Like, we inflate them a little bit, but some of it has dramatically changed and become newer types of jobs and more specialized. You know? There were doctors 50 years ago, and now they're pediatric oncologists because it's so narrow and so specialized. So all that to say, your your guess is as good as mine when that's gonna happen. There's not a set unique one there. The the, companies that are doing some work with skill intelligence at a global levels and, are are probably the closest to actually cracking that and trying to make sure they're they're tying those things together. But the the challenge is each country, each region has their own sort of unique flavor and stamp on that, and it makes it really tough to standardize. Yeah. And that ties onto a nice follow-up, actually. So, you know, as we move into a world where the skills are new and we can't rely on yesterday as a proof of skill, so there were less tangible strengths, you know, like emotional intelligence or curiosity or learning agility. How would you anticipate that AI can measure that in an equitable way? It's a really interesting question. That's a that's a great question. So one of the things I'm talking about that I talk about when it comes to AI is the things that AI is really good at, data analysis, you know, looking across tens of 1,000 data points and coming to a resolution there, things that are hard for us. The things that are easy for us, though, the curiosity, the creativity, the compassion, and collaboration, those human skills are really hard for an algorithm. So how is it gonna measure those things if it's hard for it to actually produce that in the same way we do? The the things that I would say there is looking at actual interactions and using those. There are tests for these things. There's a test for creativity. I wrote about that a couple of years ago. There was a a gentleman who created a test that measured the innovativeness, that is a word, innovativeness of company founders and found that ones that are more innovative ended up producing created more jobs for people, which is job security for us, created more revenue, all those other things. So there's ways of measuring things like creativity. Those are out there already in assessment form. And a lot of the AI advances you see in the assessment world, just look at all the different pieces and usually make the assessment shorter. So I would say that's part of part of this is really using some of the things that are already out there, the tests and and ways of measuring that. AI overall, though, to say, I'm gonna look at the conversations that are happening and see who is most curious. That person may ask a lot more questions than other people, more open ended questions. Not yes or no questions, but open ended questions. If you are interested in the curiosity piece there, that's a thing that you're you're, keen to explore. There's a great book written a couple years ago on leadership called Turn the Ship Around that looks at a a great story of how curiosity can change an entire workplace, an entire workforce, and how they perform on the job. So curiosity is a thing you're curious about, but that's a really good question. Yeah. And also just, you know, you find by just experimenting and bouncing ideas around with, you know, Claude or chat g p t, it can really help to think about how you evaluate some of these things. I know, I know I've been doing that myself. Okay. We got lots of questions coming in, which is great. So hosting of skills data and keeping it updated is massively challenging. Any recommendations to guide our thinking on this? Goodness. So I think part of it is you do not need don't feel like this thing needs to be updated every 10 minutes. Okay? There's a there's a spectrum like anything. We can't have this updated once every 5 years or becomes no different. I used to keep a notebook right here by my desk. I could pick up and wave at you. That was a big 3 ring binder. I don't have it right here. But it can't be that static. But it also doesn't need to be so dynamic that someone is spending their entire day all the time trying to keep up with and keep tabs on those things. So that's one reason we see tools like AI being really powerful there. When I was talking to, a a large health care organization, they were using AI to help look across the workplace and see when certain things change for their people to flag where a skill needed to be adjusted or adapted. And in some cases, those were skills that needed to be verified by a manager, so it'd kick out a note to the manager to confirm that. And in other cases, it was just a sort of flag on their profile to say, we've seen some some things. We're gonna infer this skill, but it's showing different than one that we've actually seen them do on the job. So if I see Amy actually moderating a webinar, I can say, boom. We've seen that. We've proven it. Let's give her a check mark for that. We can all give her a rating later on. It's okay. But, you know, if if Amy joins a meeting that talks about forecasting and budgeting, we don't know that Amy actually was the one speaking and leading and driving that. So, you know, AI can help us to in person of those things, and I would encourage you not to feel like this is a burden that requires an all the time constant update. If it's more than 2 minutes delayed, then it's completely no. It's it's probably not that necessary. So it's somewhere in the middle there. And I think if it's driving the right decisions for your business, but if your leaders are referring to the data, if they trust the data, great. And you may find that, listen, if we update this once every other year, we update this once, you know, every 6 months, that's enough for us. That that works for our leadership. They don't wanna invest anymore in that, and that's okay. But you've gotta sort of feel that one out a little bit. Really, really good question. We can go from there. We often find that, you know, we're helping organizations every day to drive change, and we often find that, you know, companies or people just end up paralyzing themselves by trying to make it this complex thing. I know, you know, Betterworks, we've tried to do with our platform, some of the things that you just mentioned, like tagging skills on profile and having people endorse it and just starting really simple so that everyone can see what your skills are. So I think start trying to start as simple as possible and just kept getting people do it is, is the way forward. Okay. I guess we can have we'll see. 1 or 2 more questions. So according to research, what are the top AI related skills that employees should start investing in? Oh, interesting. Okay. One of the things that I always encourage is we have to know how these tools work. Right? All the gen ad tools, things like that, those are the ones that we're gonna be putting our hands on and interacting with as employees ourselves and as leaders in the business. So knowing how those work, how to craft a good question, how to do the follow ups to get to the the outcome you're looking for, that's an important skill to have. Counterpoint to that. Data are coming out from different organizations around the world. University of Toronto just finished a study that says people that use tools like Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and Chat and So I don't know about you, but I'm I I don't know that HR can afford to be less creative in the work we do. So you need to be selective in when you're using that. Use it to do something that you're gonna you're gonna do anyway that's automating it, that's making it faster. When it comes to idea generation, maybe you say, I'm gonna not do that. I'm gonna do my own work first. Because they find that even when someone quits using it and following tests, that person that the creativity doesn't come back immediately. So we have to grow that back like a muscle. You get to build that muscle strength back up again. So I would encourage you definitely look look at that. A lot of the education around this is, well, here's a a 100 prompts, a 1000 prompts, and we don't need a 1,000. You need one good one. You need to go deeper with that. Amy, do I have, like, 40 seconds or so to to share a quick example of that? Okay. Yeah. You do. So an example of that that I that I'm sharing with a lot of our audiences I'm speaking with is when I was in HR, one of the things that my leaders tasked us with is creating a leadership development program. And so you could say, okay. Give me a syllabus for a program, an outline, a curriculum, and it would do that. But you're not done. You we know there's a lot more work to be done. So beyond that, it's okay. Give me a way a communication for our managers to tell them about the new program. There you go. There's your email template. Okay. I need an icebreaker activity when they show up on-site. Okay? Now I need a takeaway list because we know training them, they're not gonna do it all. They're not they're gonna forget some of it. A takeaway list so they can take back to work and remind them of the key principles. And then I need a feedback survey. And then I need a 30 second script so our CEO can do a quick video on the importance of leaders, reminding them of the importance of this 2 weeks later. So it's not about 1 and stopping. It's doing all these things around it, building around so you have this this little universe of insights and expertise around a certain area. That sort of thing is how I would use it to get the most out of it, not just give me the one thing and then stop there because we know where the real value is going deeper, going deeper as as leaders. I'd love to go deeper on that, but I know we're out of time now. Yeah. No. That's great. We really appreciate it. And I have to say the the last question from Anna intrigued me, but I'll just say, Anna, you can feel free to contact Betterworks on that one. What are the risks with not having any talent management or performance management system. We have a lot of research on that as you can imagine. So we'll send you some, some information, but thank you so much, Ben. We really appreciate it. Really interesting and some great stories that I'll definitely be sharing with with friends and colleagues after that and great interactivity from everyone listening in as well. Absolutely. Thank you to everybody out there for for chiming in, for being active. It's been a tremendous session. Wish we had more time for more questions, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Great. Thank you. I just remind everyone of some of the events that we have coming up. So, hopefully, we'll see some of you at HR Tech, next month. So I'll be there in a few weeks. I hope to see some of you there. And then, of course, Empower HR as well that is, that is coming up in May. So yeah. Thanks, everyone.