Kamal (00:01):
Welcome everyone live from New York. This is Kamal president of eightfold and your, his host for, uh, today’s webinar. Today, we are joined by industry analyst and guru Josh person. It’s gonna share an exciting new initiative global workforce agents project. We are absolutely privileged to partner with Josh to guide business and HR leaders through the workforce trends that none of us saw coming, but they’re absolutely shaping companies, industries across the globe, as well as our individual careers. So after Josh was the overview of the project, we’ll move into a CA panel discussion with Kathy and DARS also from Josh person company, Roger cue from, uh, actually fantastic career in HR leadership most recently from Humana and right now enjoying four inches of snow in New Mexico. So Stuart Logan from BNY Mellon and mark Starfield from Vodafone joining us from all the way from UK. And if any point in today’s program, you have questions for the speakers. Please enter them in the Q and a box on the webinar console. And we’ll try to get to as many of them as we can, but otherwise we’ll follow up because I, I think with panel that you’re seeing, we will run out of the yard very quickly with that. I will turn it over to Josh, all yours. Josh,

Josh Bersin(01:31):
Thank you, Tomo and welcome everybody. Um, this is a absolutely spectacularly, interesting time in our lives and our careers and our companies. And so let me take a couple of minutes and introduce you to the topic and the work we’re doing. And then we will, um, listen to the highly esteemed group we have online, cuz really we wanna spend most of our time talking to them. The project that we’ve undertaken in support with support from eightfold is really a big project. Cathy and I are. Kathy’s really responsible for a lot of this work to look at the skills jobs, um, career pathways and roles of the future and of today and of the past in specific vertical industries. And, and as many of you know, eightfold is not just a software company. Eightfold is a data company. Eightfold has, I believe the largest database of workforce profiles around the world, a billion plus people.

Josh Bersin(02:33):
And so working with eightfold, uh, we are looking at industry by industry, the roles, jobs, and skills of the future and finding some very interesting thing that Kathy will tell you just a tiny bit about, uh, which will be available in, in a series of industry reports and the big theme. Of course, for most of you that, you know, this is the job market. The job market is at an unprecedented, um, level of activity. I have never seen this before. Uh, roughly one in nine jobs are open in the United States. Other countries are experiencing the same problem. Um, and it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. Even if we have a recession, the fertility rate is Farlow replacement in the us, UK, Germany, Japan, Nordic countries, all of the developed economies have decided people are postponing having children. They’re having fewer children, uh, 2.4 million people retire during the pandemic early, according to the BLS.

Josh Bersin(03:35):
Um, so it’s gonna get harder and higher, harder to hire and what that means. And by the way, that means you’re not gonna wanna lose people. And as you know, um, workers, employees are moving out of, uh, and between companies at another at, also at unprecedented rate, it’s roughly four to four and a half million people are voluntarily leaving their jobs in the United States every month, starting November, December and January, you multiply that by 12, that’s almost 50 million people out of a workforce of about 160 million in the us. That’s almost a third. So imagine if a third of the people in your company decided, you know, they’re gonna leave now. I know in the healthcare industry, that’s not unusual, but in a lot of other industries, it is, is so we’re in a very, very strange period of time to say nothing of the role of wages and the need to change the employee value proposition change the way we reward people, improve the employee experience.

Josh Bersin(04:34):
Um, all of these things are, you know, really colliding on HR, people on an HR teams at the same time. So when we started our, the GWI project and we’ve been talking to eightfold about this for really a number of years, um, the original thesis of this was let’s look at the skills and jobs and roles and careers of the future in a bunch of different companies. And we realized actually it’s a much bigger problem than that. It isn’t just identifying how many data scientists you need or, or how many, uh, you know, machine learning people you need in your software company or how many sales people you need. It’s really, um, a, an issue of industry by industry. Um, most industries are turning into something new and we’re gonna talk about this with the folks on the line here. Healthcare companies are moving into, uh, new forms of clinical service delivery data, um, and to some degree, uh, pharmacies and other businesses banks and, uh, other financial services are moving into FinTech and crypto and all sorts of different things there, uh, to the communications companies are moving into media and they’re turning into media companies.

Josh Bersin(05:46):
Automobile companies are turning to an electric motor and we were talking earlier, maybe they’re gonna get into video communications in their cars. I mean, I don’t need to go through all these, but every industry we’re talking to is going through this reinvention. And we used to call this a digital transformation only a decade ago, but it’s much, much more than that. Digital is not just, uh, a digital is sort of the me the necessary, um, you know, invention, but it’s really more, it’s learning how to be something that you weren’t sure you really needed to be. And that’s really what we’re gonna talk about with the panel. Now, just to give you a, just a teeny tiny sample of what we’ve been looking at with the eightfold data, we’ve looked in two industries so far, we’re looking at healthcare and financial services. We’re gonna talk to, uh, Roger and Stewart and mark about this, um, in banking, for example, over the next, over the last five years in the coming five years, the front office jobs in banking are disappearing.

Josh Bersin(06:47):
The it jobs or the technology jobs are exploding. And so the profile of the workers in a bank, or, you know, a bank, you know, commercial bank or, or consumer bank are going to become very, very different. And they are competing for the same staff, as many other companies. They are also competing with a, another bunch of companies, which we call FinTech companies that are way ahead on that transformation. If you look at a bank on the left that has 15% of its staff in it in tech, a FinTech company has 55%. And if you look at the job titles, job levels, skills, and capabilities of the people in that orange, um, slice on the right, they are completely different from the skills and capability of the people and that orange slice on the left. So if you’re in a bank and you’re trying to become or compete with a FinTech type of company, and, and by the way, JP Morgan chase has written a whole big sort of treatise on this.

Josh Bersin(07:46):
Um, you’re gonna have to think about the jobs, the roles, the careers, the skills in a very, very different way. And, and that’s really what we’re studying. Um, and if you look at just that one industry, you can see that I, I could, you know, pretty much predict that the banks that can move quickest into this new world of FinTech related technologies are going to be the ones that grow the fastest and stay the most competitive. And that’s true in healthcare telecommunications in every other industry. So that’s really what this is all about. And in healthcare as I’ll let Kathy talk about in a minute, it’s even worse. The healthcare industry is largely dependent on nursing and nursing related roles. And based on the research we’ve done with the eightfold data so far, it looks like we’re gonna be short, almost 2 million nurses over the next three to five years.

Josh Bersin(08:40):
Uh, those people are not going to come out of nowhere. You’re going to have to transform your company, transform your jobs, transform your organization in order to deal with that change. And so, you know, that’s what this is all about is really understanding this. Um, so let, let me move to, uh, the panel. I don’t wanna spend too much time on the topic. There’s many, many dimensions to this. Um, and so rather than, you know, oops, sorry, cum. I was gonna go to the, I guess we don’t have a picture of the panelist anymore. Um, let me, let me start by introducing them one at a time and have them talk a little bit about, uh, their company, um, their role in the company. And, um, what are some of the biggest talent challenges that you’re working on in your organization? Roger, would you like to go first and talk a little bit about HCA and, and your experience in the healthcare industry?

Roger Cude (09:33):
Yeah, I’d be glad to. Thanks Josh. Roger cue. And, um, I’ve been in the healthcare industry for, uh, nine years prior to that was in, uh, major retailing and, and financial services before then. Um, and I would say, you know, the key priorities, uh, that we have, and I would say these are, uh, much broader in the, in the healthcare industry is that many healthcare companies were going towards digital transformation prior to the pandemic. Uh, but the pandemic absolutely accelerated everything that we’re doing. And that’s just probably the case with many of the companies represented on this call in the audience and, and so forth. But, uh, particularly in healthcare when you’re a healthcare company and the healthcare, as it tends to make things accelerate, uh, quite rapidly. Uh, in addition to that Josh, uh, uh, healthcare companies, we were focused on integrated health and wellbeing, which is really taking the whole industry and, and looking horizontally in not just acute care, um, palliative care, other kinds of things, and then insurance companies, uh, it is really looking at that integrated, uh, seamless experience and the way interoperability and the way that the whole healthcare experience is delivered.

Roger Cude(10:51):
There’s, there’s a lot of opportunities there for efficiencies and effectiveness as everyone can probably guess even the us and, and, and much more broadly around the world. Uh, but there’s also a lot of, uh, parts of the customer experience that need to be improved there. And then third and, and final one, I’ll just say, uh, is the changing demands of the customer. Uh, again, felt that during the pandemic, but even before that, uh, the patient, the customer, the, the me, if you’re talking about it from an insurance standpoint, their demands are just constantly evolving. And so care is starting to get delivered at where it’s best delivered, not just in a clinic or not just in a hospital. You see a big push towards the home, uh, a, a big push on telemedicine and telehealth, and all of that requires a much different workforce and much different skill sets, uh, for, for healthcare companies, particularly I integrated healthcare companies.

Josh Bersin (11:47):
Great. Roger, thank you. We’re, we’re gonna talk a little bit more about that. Kathy. Let me, let me have you expand a little bit on this. Um, you know, you’ve been doing a lot of in depth looking at the healthcare industry and the future transformations needed. Can you give us your perspective, um, a little bit broader on what you see going on in that industry, and then we’ll move over to Stewart and mark.

Kathi Enderes (12:09):
Yeah. Great. Thank you, Josh and Roger, I, I echo all of that. What you just said. We heard a lot of these same themes as we talked with, I think 15 CHROs of very large healthcare systems here in the us. Um, the clinical shortage, the, the shortage of nurses, physicians, and nurse, um, related physicians is, um, what we hear and what we see in the know the biggest issue that all of the healthcare systems experience, because Josh just showed you the, um, 2 million gap that we might have in the next three years. Well, you can’t fill that by just hiring more nurses, because they’re just not out there. There’s only 160,000 that graduate every year and 50% of them leave the profession together in the first two years. So there’s all these nurses out there that actually don’t work in nursing. And why don’t they work in nursing anymore?

Kathi Enderes (13:01):
It’s probably cuz the job was not what they thought it would be because we hear that only 30% of, uh, nurses’ times is actually spent practicing at what we call top of license. So they are doing nurse stuff. They, they are uniquely qualified for only 30% of the time. So how can you design, um, work in a different way so that nurses can practice most of that time, top of license and other people or automation gets the other 70% of the chunk. So it could be patient care physicians, uh, uh, practitioners, for example, or technicians or helpers or machines that could take some of the lower skilled areas and lower level things that nurses have to do. So you get more work out of the nurses and, and of course in the, in healthcare I could go on and on. Um, there’s a lot of regulations, of course that require you to staff to certain levels. So that’s lots of complexity in the healthcare system that we are all unpacking in addition to just getting some interesting data on new skills, new capabilities of digital telehealth, home health, all of those kind of things.

Josh Bersin(14:10):
Thank you, Kathy. You know, um, this, this idea of, of working at the top of your profession, which is a, a, a phrase that comes out of healthcare actually applies to everything, what you find. And we’ll talk about this in the other industries in a minute is in a lot of companies, what happens as the, as the company transforms is you’re doing less and less of the work that you were design that you came to the company to do, and you’re doing stuff that maybe you shouldn’t be doing. And that’s part of really building the organizational, uh, capabilities, not just training and educating and skilling people. Um, Stewart, let me, let me introduce, uh, you, and have you talk about sort of what’s your role at BNY Mellon cause you you’ve really been, you know, in some ways pioneering this and what are some of the big talent challenges that, that you see going on in, in your company or in the financial services industry in general?

Stuart Logan (15:00):
Sure. Thanks Josh. Um, so I add up, uh, um, operations and technology HR here at BNY Mellon. So we have about 53,000 employees, about 33,000 of them work in tech technology and, and our operations functions. Uh, BNY Mellon is, is, is sort of a, a trust bank. It’s sort of a bank of banks. We sit in the middle between different financial institutions and make sure that we digitize and document the, those transactions. And, and hence, we’re sort of right in the center of the, of, of, of the trusted advisor, of moving money, you know, around, around the world. And, and, um, you know, we, we’ve got relationships with obviously governments for where money gets into the market and obviously, you know, very key in, um, you know, supporting the financial markets in that kind of way. Um, but in many ways, um, you could imagine that we’re sort of a, a, a back office for financial is we, we digitize and document, um, the movement of, of, of money.

Stuart Logan (15:55):
And with that comes the complexities, given the scale of, um, trillions and trillions of dollars of moving, uh, movement of, of assets and, and financial assets and, and, and money, how do we, um, how do we sort of deliver that, um, high quality service, real time on demand, et cetera. So we’re becoming more and more of a technology organization. Um, as we progress down this sort of, uh, transformation of the financial services industry. So originally I came in to sort of support our agile transformation. How do we, um, automate, um, and build, uh, uh, skill paths for our engineers to sort of pick up new skills, uh, be on the cutting edge, um, worked with a number of different platforms on identifying, you know, what skills we wanted in those individuals and how we would develop them, uh, worked with a number of partners, uh, around that.

Stuart Logan (16:47):
And then obviously a year and a half ago, we brought operations and technology together with the, with the, with the strategy around the it, if op if operations is the operational delivery aspect and technology as enabler, if you bring the organizations together, you get sort of the best sort of return on that investment. You’re able to see how the operation is working and then digitize it, uh, uh, much quicker. So obviously one of the biggest challenges I’m trying to overcome, you know, with a talented group of HR and, and business leaders is how do we, um, how do we automate skills development growth, um, both for now and in the future in the operations functions, because a Java developer for us is a Java developer for Vodafone, et cetera, et cetera, but a financial analyst can be very different for different organizations. So you have to go deeper than the job description and the job title you have to get to skills of competencies.

Stuart Logan (17:39):
And then you have to sort of rebuild the organization from that knowledge. And if you think of, you know, your old organization, Deloitte, um, they know what their talent looks like because they sell their talent as part of their revenue generation, but there’s 80% of companies out there that don’t do that. So often their, their sort of digital fingerprint of skills and capabilities is a little lighter. So one of the challenges that we’re trying to overcome is how do we speed up our ability to get that digital fit fingerprint of the skills and competencies of our, of those individuals and how do we shape those roles that are, um, gonna be the roles of the future and how do we start to consolidate the roles that, that may be becoming less prevalent in our organization.

Josh Bersin(18:23):
Great. All right. We’re gonna talk a little bit more about how you’re doing that, because I think you’re really doing some F fascinating things. I, or mark you’re in what I consider to be the most disruptive technology industry of all. I don’t know if most people realize the telecommunications industry is probably the first tech industry that ever was created. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on at Vodafone and what you see as the, you know, the big, critical talent issues the next year or two.

Marc Starfield (18:52):
Yeah, sure. Josh, I mean, it seems you say about technology and how that’s changed. I mean, a little bit about Vodafone, I mean, with the largest mobile fixed operator in Europe and the largest 5g network, but more interesting is we are focusing and with the largest internet of things, connectivity at providers. So really focusing on how do we connect things. So there’s a hundred and millions of these devices from cars to lamps. Um, and we, we have to really transform our environment, uh, to, to keep up with that. So we, we’ve got our 96,000 employees in 26 main markets. Um, in terms of some of the challenges we’re facing, um, correlated to your industry reinvent point. So we need to transform and want to transform into a coms company. Now that means transforming to new generation connectivity and digital service provider. So it’s not allowed about just enabling the, um, connectivity, but actually providing new services and products, um, to ensure we have a sustainable growth environment.

Marc Starfield (19:45):
What that translates to into a specific challenges we have at a, a skill level is we need to attract, develop these critical digital and technical skills. Some of them are know now, but some are still developing. Uh, a really practical example is we need to add 7,000 software engineers to our, um, technology environment. Now we hope and believe a lot of that will be how we re skill people, but, but, uh, the challenge we face is that many other organizations are also, we recruiting and looking for these very specific skills. Um, we need to kind of reinvent ourselves in terms of having a, a highly skilled workforce with different skills, with a, a high performing learning culture where learning is part of our DNA. Um, skill wise in terms of the leadership level is developing the organizational capabilities and leadership skills to drive these new growth engines, drive these new environments. And then a big challenge for us is kind of how do we make sure that we are an equitable and representative, um, mix of people in those organizations. So that’s the kind of key things that we are facing with really, we, we want to need to change, um, and track those new skills.

Josh Bersin(20:50):
Okay. Wonderful. Okay. So telecommunications moving into internet enabled services, by the way, while you were talking, I was remembering the TCS or TT, the company that used to provide cable service to me was called forgot to name it’s it’s now. Yeah, it’s now Comcast. They were basically cable guys. Now it’s a big digital company. Um, there’s obviously the transformation that Stewart’s going through, the healthcare stuff that Kathy talked about. So the next next set of questions I’d like to talk about is how so, let me take a minute and just show you this slide. The, the issue that I think a lot of companies are, uh, dealing with. Let me see if I can present this. Um, if I click on a slide, will it show up? No. Okay. I’ll go ahead here. Um, the reason we’re working with eightfold, all of the companies on this, um, call is because of this problem, that in whatever the transformation is that your industry or company is going through, you have a whole constellations of things happening at once.

Josh Bersin(21:56):
New skills are required, you know, like Java or AI or technology skill, new business capabilities around those skills, which have to do with, uh, you know, maybe nurse, private practitioner roles that require nursing skills in a different way, um, new roles that are created and maybe new jobs and all of these things are taking place in the sense at the same time. One of the things that Cathy and my research has found is that just recruiting the same skill over and over again in this labor market, doesn’t work because you’re a compute competing with very, very sophisticated companies that are also recruiting those people. And B you may need to P find somebody who’s much more diverse than you thought to do that job, both from a diversity standpoint and a standpoint of actually finding somebody to do it. So what I’d like to do now is go back to the panel and talk about the hows. You know, how do you, um, you know, build a skills strategy? What is the, um, sort of fundamental organization structure and technology stack that you happen to be using? And where are you applying this? So, you know, Roger, let me go back to you first and talk a little bit about from your experience at a HCA, how do you manage the skills transitions taking place as you go through to home healthcare, uh, new nursing roles, new technologies, and automation, and the patient experience and so forth.

Roger Cude(23:22):
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks Josh. And so it’s interesting. And, and Kathy was mentioning this in, in the research that, that she’s been to as well, is that, um, you know, the skill shortage or the nursing shortage is going to represent, uh, quite a challenge for healthcare, particularly integrated healthcare companies. And, and you could think of, uh, care delivery systems, but you can also think of the home health and so forth, but we have a number of nurses that, uh, work out of their home and, and do telephonic, uh, interactions and, and care delivery with their, with our members and, and patients. So when you think about, you know, the way that we are thinking about, uh, the nurse shortage, how do we handle that? Where are the different kinds of opportunities that we can provide nurses, for example, and then what are the skills on top of their license that you need for those?

Roger Cude(24:16):
Because it’s very different for a nurse to be working in a home health environment versus a telephonic environment versus a hospital. And just thinking about that really required us, uh, to be on this journey for probably four years now, in terms of the skills that are required for those different roles. And, and I think you mentioned it on the slide that you just had is what are the capabilities that we need across all of those segments of the nursing workforce, and then how to, what are the skills that are required for that in addition to their license? And so that’s the journey that we’ve been on just with that

Josh Bersin(24:52):
Is just out of curiosity, when, as you were moving to more home delivery, how did you determine what these new skills are?

Roger Cude(25:00):
Yeah, we, we, we looked at, uh, yeah, a couple ways. We looked at, uh, best performers and what skill as they had. And then we looked at what, what are the skills that were actually required by the role and, and so forth. And, and so just even managing time and, and the kinds of things that you would do in a panel of 30 patients as a home health nurse, very different than what you would do with the Teon nurse, both have a nursing degree, but very different requirements in the role.

Josh Bersin(25:30):
Yeah. So, so let me just reinforce something that’s important as part of, part of Roger’s comment, you know, there, there’s this belief among, you know, a lot of the HR organization that if we buy a product like eightfold and we turn it on, we’re gonna know all these skills, we need to know. I mean, that’s to some degree true, but you’re gonna have to do what HCA did. You’re going to have to study the new roles and understand them. And they use that data to come back and create the talent practices. You need to, uh, scale that up now, Kathy, you and I let talk a little bit about this idea of career pathways, if you would. Yeah. And yeah. What is a career path? And then I think give the example of what Amazon is doing, cuz it has relationship to nursing and healthcare, believe it or not.

Kathi Enderes (26:14):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s a fascinating story. So that when we think about how to develop people for these roles, you can think about skill building or hiring or something like that. But, um, the, the, the, one of the most creative concepts that we discovered was the concept of a career pathway and the career pathway is not a career path. So think about the career path is maybe you enter the workforce as a nurse and then you’re gonna be a nurse manager, and then you’re getting chief nursing office. So you kind of develop in your function or your financial analysts. You get to be a director of finance, a finance VP, and then the CFO for sometimes. So that’s a career path. But what, um, companies are doing is creating these career pathways from one kind of job. And it’s usually a lower paying lower level job that might be automated at some point into another job.

Kathi Enderes (27:01):
And another, another professional together that includes things like education could include a nursing degree, for example, could include rotations and experiences and online learning. So everything that you need basically to, um, move from one job into another kind of job role all together. And so what Amazon has been doing for 10 years is actually they’ve been studying, which of their jobs are gonna go away. So their warehouse workers, I think no surprise to anybody, most of these jobs will be at some point, automated replaced by robots or something like that, that very low, low level, lower paid jobs that don’t have a lot of future. And so what they have been doing is income encouraging the people in these jobs for 10 years, actually to take one of five different career pathways. And one of these career pathways, of course, some of those career pathways go into jobs that are in Amazon.

Kathi Enderes (27:55):
So it could be an AWS kind of person, not software developer, something like that. But the, the most interesting career pathway that Amazon has been doing, I think is developing people into jobs. They don’t have even at Amazon. So somebody could actually, Amazon will pay for their education and have this career pathways of the warehouse worker into a nurse job. And of course they don’t have any nurses, but they partner with large healthcare systems. We talked with one of them, which was fascinating, uh, that, um, give these career pathways of people that Amazon develops. They pay for their education for somebody who had been a warehouse worker into moving into a nurse role in this large healthcare system on the west coast. So once somebody graduates with a nursing degree that Amazon paid for, they get placed into this healthcare system automatically. So it’s just like breaking the comfort on your

Josh Bersin(28:48):
It’s such an interesting, and you know, and thank you Kathy, for sharing that. It’s such an interesting example because if you ask the Amazon people, why are you doing this? They said, well, it’s only about 12 or $14,000 a year of investment. And these people are customers of ours and we ’em to go into their new career, buying more Amazon stuff where they went. Exactly. I get back to that chart where I was showing this industry reinvention. You may think you’re in this one industry, but actually you’re not, you know, your, your company is touching these adjacent industries. So these career pathways can be much more flexible than you think. Um, thank you, Kathy. So Stewart, you have done some amazing work at identifying the capability of networks in your company and, you know, looking at the skills by role and looking at job titles, using eightfold and other tools. I’d love you to just talk about your project and what you’ve been doing and share a little bit about your process, cuz I think it’s really an example of where most companies need to go.

Stuart Logan (29:53):
Uh, sure. So, so sort of have to go back sort of three years. And, and when I first joined, I was sort of really predominantly looking after the technology transformation by itself. So, you know, we it’s the same challenge. Um, but for technologists, you know, as I, as I mentioned before, Java’s the same in all companies, um, uh, pythons the same in all companies. So ultimately it’s, it’s a, it is a little easier and is probably better to explain a little bit the, the, the, the tool chain, um, and, and, and what we, we were able to do. But we sort of worked with, um, an, an organization that probably people are aware of called Pluralsight, very good skills, training, linkage organization. They’ve got a great sort of testing, you know, I’ll test you. And if you’re in the middle of the level, I’ll take te I’ll teach you from middle to expert.

Stuart Logan (30:38):
If you’re a beginner, I’ll teach you from beginning to intermediate. So sort of, it became sort of the part, the, the start of our, our journey. Um, but what we realized is our job library was outta date. So we ironically had a legacy, um, PeopleSoft system that we’ve just recently upgraded to Oracle HCM cloud. But you have to think about the sort of history, which is how is data stored. Um, most of our storage of data historically has been in a relational database and more in the last 10 years or so, we’ve moved to more of a graph database. And why is that important? Because if every piece of data has a timestamp to it, you can start to see the journeys, the people go on and you’re able to see the movement and the changes that are happening over time. So with that, um, you know, we did this project, we reimagined these, these jobs we argued, should we have a Java developer and a Microsoft developer, should it be one developer, should we have backend front end, full stack, all these kind of debates and discussions.

Stuart Logan (31:39):
And it took about a year and a so to, to, to do the work. And to be honest, my team was exhausted after it. And then all of a sudden we merged operations together and it was like, oh God, we really need to do this project again, but we gotta do it better than we were able to do it at that point. Um, plus also it, we have to take that nuance of not knowing, um, you know, like a, a financial analyst is, is different than a, um, than accounting services in every single organization it’s made up of different component pieces. So what we were able to do is we were able to partner with eightfold to do some AI machine learning work of actually consuming, um, available data within our organization. So we sort of consumed our learning history. We assumed our, uh, um, our, our, um, H data of movement of our people over time, we have resumes on file.

Stuart Logan (32:28):
So we’re able to machine learn that, and eightfold was able to marry that up against the external available data that they had and give us back what I call the 80 20 skills against that job. And it became a great starting point. So if you imagine what we did in technology, which was sort of blank piece of paper, how would we build these jobs and, and match them forward? What we were able to do with eightfold is effectively, um, get to sort of 80% roughly right information, but then we had had to build this governance structure. So these sort of community, these a practice, these groups of individuals that are accountable for, for certain job clusters and certain skills, and we needed to bring them together to help us with that 80 20 to make it a hundred percent, zero. So we wanted to decommission the 20% that wasn’t quite right because of the knowledge of those SMEs and then put in the skills that might be missing.

Stuart Logan (33:17):
And that sort given us sort of a, a great sort of foundation that then we can link to our LX P from a learning perspective that we’re gonna sort of build and great connection. I’m not, I don’t wanna give the impression we’re there yet, but it sort of gives you that vision and roadmap. It allows us to link to our talent initiatives, like talent marketplace, that we’re in the process of building mentor match and, and things in that space. And then obviously, you know, utilize some of eight, eight folds capabilities on automatically recommending internal mobility. Because if you know where that individual aspires to go, you’re able to offer up that job opportunity in a more proactive way. So everything circles back to this sort of skill, job taxonomy that has to be modernized, it has to be, you know, not one and done, but it has to have governance structure that keeps these jobs alive over time.

Stuart Logan (34:12):
Uh, just a, an anecdote, um, that the technology work that we did, uh, two years ago, we made the decision not to have a screw master because we felt like it was a designation for an existing scrum team. Two years later, we need to at, we’re actually doing a much more broader transformation that requires certified scrum masters. So we now build that role in, so you can’t sort of do it one time and then fix it five years later, we have to lead to a more frequent, fresh of job skills roles, um, and, and evolution, you know, the evolution of the skills that make up the jobs have to be kept much more fresh. And by doing that, we’re able to potentially really do some cool stuff off the back of that work. So that’s where we are at the moment. We’re not all the way there yet. We’re doing a lot of the foundational work, but we see a path forward for that future.

Josh Bersin(35:06):
Thank you, Stewart. You know, I, I really do think what you’re doing is, is a model for virtually every big company. Let me take a minute and then I’ll turn it over to mark for a sec, cuz he’s doing something even more interesting in other ways. Um, I think, you know, what I would like to sort of reflect for you guys on the line is this isn’t a problem of reskilling. It’s much more complex than that. It’s looking at the jobs, the roles, allowing people to operate at the top of their profession and building a muscle to do this on a constant ongoing basis. I think there was this idea in a lot of companies that let’s do a new job architecture, a big skills project, and then we’re done. And then we’ll look at this again in another 10 years, no, this is a, an ongoing muscle.

Josh Bersin(35:55):
You need a technology like eightfold to do this. Um, I think a graph database is another incredibly interesting technology we can talk about. And I think mark can probably talk about that too. And that’s really what this skills job and organizational transformation is all about. It, isn’t just sort of looking at a bunch of job titles and figuring out what skills they are. So mark you situation is even more interesting. Um, because I think you’re doing some of this, um, yourself. So tell us a little bit about how you’re putting together this all, you know, all these systems together at Vodafone and how you see the pieces working.

Marc Starfield (36:31):
Yeah, sure. So we, um, so we basically, we got a, a calling feature HR transformation program and, and at the heart of that is kind of using AI and skills in a way which really supports some of the key themes you want to get out is like people really feel they can grow with the organization. Some of the language I like is we wanna democratize opportunities. That means development jobs, specific, um, initiatives. Um, and how we doing that is so we’ve, we’ve been limited a, a car based kind of core solution. We then partnered with eightfold in terms of using eightfold skills, um, kind of environment, the point you need something that keeps that refresh and sustained, but we’ve added specific ver skills to that. And people when they go in can now see the global skills, but also the one that are specifically that we believe we need to drive.

Marc Starfield (37:18):
Um, and then what we’ve also, and then integrated that into a new learning experience platform. And we’ve developed some technology in the middle that kind of allows, allows us to understand what people have looked at. So to Kathy’s point around these career pathways, we use that plus jobs people are interested in do they develop, um, these personal and purposeful learning recommendations. So new learning experience, when you go in there, we linking you specifically to those things that you’ve had a look at, but also we wanna publish, um, we’re using that to integrate different and new talent, uh, pools, if you like, and people that have skills or people that might want to develop in a different area. Um, and we then using the model to continue to learn. So what is it that are exploring? How is that resulting in, in some changes? So states are we putting it into HTD workforce planning, implementation that we’re not finished?

Marc Starfield (38:08):
It we’ll go live, uh, in the middle of the year, but we wanna move away from STD workforce planning that is kind of head count based to skill based. So we wanna be able to take the skills that we’re gonna using a fold and all the other things that we learn from our employees. And then use that to say, what type of skills do we need in which markets and where could we potentially get them and then partner with other companies to say, where are those skills potentially available is in terms of I, to steward, is we we’ve, we’ve been, we’ve got about, um, a 1.4 million active candidates. Who’ve given us permission to put their data into our eightfold environment. We’ve got seeing a large proportion of people internally go and have a look and are registering and, and creating their own version, that profile. And that’s gonna give us a really powerful way to go and say, what’s skills. Do we have now? What are tangent ones? And how can we develop them? And then we use that to do personal and purposeful campaigns either to people that might not work for us, not a generic, Hey, there’s a job at a specific one to that individual saying you apply for this job before this is a different one. And internally also allow people to really explore that and democratize opportunity.

Josh Bersin(39:16):
Yeah. I mean, that’s really a couple of really important points. I wanna just point out there. Um, first of all, this idea that this is really a workforce planning, um, opportunity in addition to a hiring skills and growth opportunity, that you will get a sense. And let me just show you this picture. If you do what mark and Stewart and Roger was, were talking about, and you build this talent intelligence capability, all of these things are gonna be possible. You’re gonna be able to look at all of these things. I’m just giving you a few examples of here and where your company is going into the future. Interestingly enough, when Kathy and I were looking at the healthcare industry way, we figured out what was gonna happen. Nursing is we went back in time. We went through the eightfold database for the last five years and looked at what had changed.

Josh Bersin(40:05):
And we figured that if that trend continues, this is what it’s gonna look like. You could do that in your own company pretty easily. If you had this data, the other point that mark was making is this idea of the silver metal candidate and that, you know, one of the things that’ll come out of this kind of a research project or this kind of initiative, you might find out that all these people that are impossible to hire have already applied to your company and you just passed over them and there’s still there. So there’s all sorts of things that happen by doing this that are not intuitively obvious to make your company scale. Um, let me go through a couple of questions that came in from the audience, cuz some of these are really, really interesting. So the first one I wanna ask you guys is, um, somebody asked, how do you address the concern at HR about, um, you know, people feeling that if they reskill themselves, they should definitely get a promotion for achieving those skills versus, you know, getting a raise and skills, not being something that are used for development, but are being used for promotion.

Josh Bersin(41:12):
And maybe I think, um, um, I’m kind of implying from his question that, you know, developing skills could be a liability for the company because it might cause a need to pay people more. What, what has your guys’ experience been in, um, you know, sort of the culture of developing skills and people’s expectations when they move into a higher skilled role and I’ll let, whoever wants to answer

Stuart Logan (41:38):
I’m, I’m happy to, to, to give it a go. Um, sure. So obviously professional services organizations who typically build, you know, build their talent out for revenue needs to know that their individuals at the right level, um, to be built out at that level. So, you know, junior engineer, intermediate engineer, senior engineer, lead engineer, principal engineer, they’re all pretty standard standard titles. Um, and most organizations that, that, that are professional services have a very strict and documented, uh, set of skills attached to that. That basically builds a competency based model. So these things haven’t, these have been around for many, many years. It’s just that 80% of organizations that don’t use humans as a revenue generation, uh, you know, um, mechanism specifically by charging them out. Um, just don’t have no ever had the need to be able to prove it to clients. Why someone’s one level or another. But I also think the reason why people are thinking that way is because of our sort of older practices of job families and grades. Imagine you remove job families and grades and you actually paid based on skills. Now those skills go up, those skills go down and back

Josh Bersin(42:56):
To do that. Are you gonna start doing that?
Stuart Logan (42:58):
No, not, not, not in the short term, not in the short term. I don’t wanna give that impression. My boss would shoot me in, in that kinda way, but I’m just trying to be provocative to make people realize that that the whole concept of compensation is built are off how we built sort of job libraries, uh, great structures, uh, for, for some time. And actually it’s quite rudimentary in that. It’s almost like a ratchet. We ratchet people up because they are able to leverage in different ways, but sometimes people’s skills and capabilities go, you know, go down over time, they become outdated. And you talked a bit about that in, in banking that like Microsoft office skills are very predominant, but in fintechs they’re, they’re not. So I would imagine if we took a sort of average wage of FinTech versus a traditional bank, there’ll be a big difference, but their lies the opportunity to create those career pathways that Kathy was mentioning, um, that effectively allows people to take in, in their own control, a learning, uh, a learning agenda to move themselves into areas of more value. And look, you know, if a Java developer makes $200,000 and someone’s able to learn the skills strong enough to go do that and they make 120 grand, I don’t really care if they right, if they’re worth 200 grand, we, we should pay them 200 grand. And I think, well

Josh Bersin(44:22):
That, and, and you know, one of the things that that several companies have told us is this happens faster than you realize you hire this $250,000 software engineer and he or she is sitting next to somebody else’s making half that and they find out about it. And all of a sudden you’ve gotta pay equity issue. So this problem, isn’t something you can’t ignore. Kathy, why don’t you talk a little bit about a couple of the examples of this, cuz we’ve got a couple of interesting stories.

Kathi Enderes (44:45):
Yeah. So one, one interesting story we have from a healthcare organization, Bunco mercy who have career pathways, internal career pathways. So for example, maybe their receptionist like have this career pathway to be a nurse at some time, right? So they move them from, or like the environmental services worker, something, they get to be a nurse and they say it’s like the de counter. So once you’re a nurse, you have your, are, you are like, you have your ticket basically. And once you are up in line in the, in behind all these other people that have maybe graduated as a nurse, you get the news job automatically. So you get automatic placement. They don’t, they don’t even have people interview internally. They say, it’s just like the data counter. You pull your ticket. And once your time is, is there basically you get placed into that job because they have so many openings and they say, we don’t need our internal people interviewing, uh, like our recruiting people focus on interviewing internal people that have our education and our like pre-qualified program already in place.

Kathi Enderes (45:48):
We just place them. So that’s, that’s one, one way to do that. Like set that the expectation, people know that, right? So they say, I just have to wait until it’s my turn, but I don’t have to interview 15 times after I’ve graduated from this, this new career pathways. The, the other, the other example I’d make on the compensation. There’s a company called DCP midstream. There are kind of an oil, um, like yeah, yeah. Pipeline company. Exactly. So they have a lot of frontline employees that repair these, these pipelines or the, the machinery there. And they actually pay people, uh, like an hourly rate more when they upskill themselves. So if they can repair more of these machines, um, even if they don’t use it, even if they don’t get a new job, they get like an hour, a dollar 75 more or something per hour for their hourly, uh, like rate because they are now, they have now broader skills. And if a machine breaks down, for example, that they don’t have to ship somebody from another location and wait like how a day for that person to come over, because they have people that are kind of crosstrained and who are generally available. So they pay them more, even if they don’t get a different job. So they literally pay them for skilling. So that was those

Josh Bersin(47:05):
You. Thanks, Kathy. Okay. Listen, you guys, we’ve got about 10 minutes left and we need to do a wrap up, but I wanna go back around and I wanna ask you each one more. Um, so we’ve talked about, you know, the, the need to understand your skills, to, to sort of focus on the future of where your business is going, create new career pathways, bring outside data and inside data together, work as a team to, um, you know, define the new roles and the new jobs inside of your company and that this is going to become a muscle going forward. What have you learned in your projects that you think companies should be a aware of? That was a surprise. Is there something that you would say turned out to be the biggest challenge, the biggest surprise or something that you would like to have not done that you would like to do differently? Roger, You know, from your standpoint, you’ve been in this industry a long time.

Roger Cude(48:00):
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks Josh
Josh Bersin(48:02):
Wisdom.

Roger Cude(48:03):
I got too many learnings who have taken hour to more and more to, to unload those. But, uh, but here’s the, um, a couple things that we did early on is one is to try not to do it enterprise wide, to begin with start somewhere small. And, and usually its skills that really cut across multiple segments or business units or functions within your organization. And analytics is always a good one because do just about every organization needs some level of analytic skills and, and or some, some types of technology skills, but that can, that can be more narrow, but pick an area and give it a, give it a shot. You’ll learn a lot. You’ll learn a lot about that. Um, but I’ll tell you the other thing that we learned and I’ll be very quick. This is that don’t try to invent the skills taxonomy or what you, whatever you want to call it yourself. There are so many available on Josh, I think on your slide, you had some listed, but, uh, uh, just by that bias taxonomy, then apply it to your organization. There are several things you can do that accelerate this work and actually building your learnings much quicker than trying to have an enter enterprisewide project all at once. Ed gets bogged down so quickly and it’s such a cultural change and other things in the company that it can, it can die pretty quickly if you’re not careful with it.

Josh Bersin(49:28):
Right. Great advice. Completely agree to, um, Stewart, how about from your standpoint, you’ve done a lot of pioneering work. What would you say of some of the biggest learnings?

Stuart Logan (49:38):
Uh, I think sort of echoing that, I think, you know, you make it too big, you end up sort of, you know, waiting through Trico, you make it too small, it doesn’t make an impact. So it’s sort of that sort of Goldilocks effect of, of, of choosing an area. It really, um, needs to make a difference. But the, the big thing for me is, is that you have to attach the, the HR solution to the business problem, if you just doing it because it’s cool thing to do for HR, it’s not really gonna go anywhere. Um, so you know, the problems that we’re really trying to solve, uh, are real that they’re sort of, um, you know, okay, then we are about to onboard 500 new accounting services people, um, you know, how do we train them up? How do we get them up to speed?

Stuart Logan (50:24):
Could we do that before day one and, and get them trained up? So time to productivity is lower. Wait a minute, I can’t even get 500 people. You know, the market’s been sort of consumed, um, you know, what’s the adjacency of the skills of those individuals that we can, you know, we can go after. So a, a lot of it has to be attached to a real business problem that this is look looking to solve at the same time. Sort of, I’m sort of one of those. I have one of those habits of, um, trying to sort of explain to people the seven or eight or 10 chess moves you need to make, to achieve a massive transformation like this, because it is eight to 10 different individual moves that come together in the culmination of a real sort of integrated solution, longer term. And the reality is, is sometimes that confuses people.

Stuart Logan (51:11):
So you wanna make sure that those business connections are relative on each of those individual moves. That individual understands the benefit that they’re getting for that sort of one, you know, Bishop move out and, and, and, and effectively you then sort of sign other people up to, to, to different moves. And then individuals would see the real value over time. Um, and I think that’s, to me, the, the secret of, of, of driving transformation is to make it, you know, real solution oriented to, um, problem solving for every single, single area that you are go you’re going after. Um, and then obviously once people trust that you’re making the right decisions, um, they’ll, they’ll, they’ll sort of be much more engaged on, on driving to the future that, that we’re trying to get to together.

Josh Bersin(51:58):
Great. Yeah, my thank you very much. So, so in both cases, I, I could not agree more. I remember a very large insurance company. I visited four or five years ago, had a big project to build the, the enterprise wide skills database for every job in the company. They spent two and a half years doing it, built a big website, turned it on, nobody used it two years later, it’s dead. The whole project’s gone the head of the project quit. Um, and I’m not sure they got any ROI of it whatsoever. So business centric, pragmatic gore, the action is, um, and, and you are building a muscle here. Mark. What about from your standpoint? You’re, you’re looking, I think in some ways you guys in the telecommunications industry are used to these big transformational things. What have you learned that you think you can share with everybody?

Marc Starfield (52:45):
Yeah, I think the, the first one, I mean, we delivered design thinking and, and, uh, that the, what talks about empathy, some even described as love thing I would do again, is make sure that the personas are understood in terms of marketing function specific, the steward’s point, really speak to an outcome. What was fascinating we didn’t expect is why would people go do this environment? It was about search searching for opportunities in different areas. Then, and for me, I there’s like, like a new phrase that I like. It’s been coin this protein career phrase, which speaks to like the future workers professional life will be managed to find and evaluated from their own subject perspective and things like self fulfillment and psychological factors that are unique to individuals will be more a measure of success compared to just salary promotion. So for us, it is saying, how do we make sure these are personal and purposefully engagement? And also allowing people to see that there isn’t just a single linear type career path, that there are different other opportunities, but really making sure that what we offer is something that people recognize. That’s why investing the time in market and function specific personas. We even use them for our videos. We’ve got these, we call them mirrors in the market to talk about it. That that’s a big, different success. And then for me start small, but go live. Um, as soon as we went in, we started really understanding and learning so much more

Josh Bersin(54:05):
Great. I mean, you know, it’s, it’s really a good point. This idea of design thinking is, is very new in HR, but I think a lot of, you know, what I’m talking about, but, but creating a set of personas or roles that you focus on and understanding those needs and building a solution that, um, fulfills the desires of each individual employee. Actually, you’re almost guaranteed to be successful if you do that, as opposed to a project that sort of looks good for HR, that the employees are not sure what it’s about. Um, we have a few more minutes, Kathy, can you go really quick on one thing you’ve learned and then I wanna turn it back over to common?

Kathi Enderes (54:42):
Yeah. I think one thing that I have learned is that the concept of industry try transformation. So really thinking big around the industry, don’t just try to solve your industry problem in your industry. Um, the kind of Amazon example for healthcare, right? If you’re just trying to figure out the nursing shortage, uh, within your healthcare industry, you’re not gonna get there. And also related to that is, um, think long term because Amazon, if you wanna hire somebody as a nurse and they, they warehouse worker today, of course they can, you can’t hire them tomorrow. So you gotta play the long game and, and use data for that too. Use your own data, but then also industry data. And that’s the kind of insights we get from the default database is what is it happening? Industrywide and also what’s happening within New York. So that kind of outside in and inside outlook is, is really important too.

Josh Bersin(55:32):
Right. Thank you. Okay. Well, listen, you guys, thank you all for participating on this. There’s just so many things to learn here. I’m sure people are gonna wanna re-listen to this webcast again. Um, Kama, let me turn it back over to you. Thank you for bringing us all together.

Kamal (55:46):
Absolutely. Uh, this was fascinating time flew by. I think one thing that mark didn’t share is once they had their design down, he moved so fast to solve both for employees and for hiring in multiple countries. Yeah, I think both our teams were sort of amazed that we would be able to pull that off. So really good session. So folks, uh, thank you. And if you wanna continue the discussion in person or remotely, join us at cultivate May 10th and 11th, it’s gonna be in Napa or remotely. So join us there. But, uh, there’s more, Josh has this conference, which again was impacted by COVID, but will be in us, uh, USC actually with an amazing Allstar cast. So I think if you are not getting invited, you should figure out how to get invited to this one. And, uh, this thing will be very exciting, will be, I think

Josh Bersin(56:48):
Everybody should go to both.

Kamal (56:50):
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Stay, stay Napa, then move down to Santa Barbara for a week and then go down to irresistible. So lots coming your ways. Right? Lot of people, people who are undergoing the transformation loss to share. And then if you would like, uh, download a copy of the white paper, clearly you will be getting more and more insights throughout the year. There’s a very packed agenda and we hope to work with all of you soon so that not just reflected in all the questions here, so many things to sort out and all together. Thank you all very much and looking forward to see you soon.

Josh Bersin(57:31):
Bye everybody.
Speaker 7 (57:40):
Thank you.