From the new technologies and tools being implemented in workplaces, employers are accumulating vast amounts of data and valuable information. How can they effectively leverage this data to gain valuable insights into current skill landscapes and anticipate future skill needs? How can businesses strike the right balance between automating skills and preserving the indispensable human touch?
Panelists:
Note: This content originally appeared as part of From Day One’s virtual conference “The New Strategies for Upskilling and Career Mobility” on July 10, 2024.
The conversation focused on effective hiring and promotion practices in the maritime industry, with speakers emphasizing the importance of assessing current skills inventory, job-centered design, and talent-centered design. They also discussed challenges in accurately assessing skills, and strategies for predicting and developing skills necessary for the future workforce. Speakers highlighted the need for continuous skill development, individual development plans, and regular conversations between managers and teams to foster a culture of skill development in the workplace.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 0:00
I will be talking about technology and predicting skills of the future. Skills-based hiring and promotion are really popular at the moment. And a lot of companies are just getting started for the first time, but the folks who are on our panel today, some of them have been doing this for decades and like focusing a lot of their time there. So before we get into questions, I’d like to have each of our panelists briefly introduce themselves, who you are, where you work, and a sentence or two about what you do there. To kick us off. Let’s start with Michael at Fannie Mae.
Michael Trusty, VP and Head of Learning Officer, Fannie Mae 0:32
Hello, everybody. Good morning. Good afternoon, wherever you might be. My name is Mike Trusty. I am the head of talent acquisition and learning and development at Fannie Mae. I’ve been here for about five years. Talent Acquisition is a recent addition to my responsibility. Prior to that, I was the chief learning officer here at Fannie Mae.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One Speaker 0:52
Welcome. Happy to have you, Jenny.
Jenny Neuharth, Director of Talent-Centered Transformation, Eightfold 0:56
Hi, everybody. My name is Jenny Neuharth. I am the Director of Talent center transformation for Eightfold and located in the Minnesota area and really excited to be here today.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One Speaker 1:08
Happy to have you, Dion.
Deon Correa, Senior Director, Learning and Development, Carnival Cruise Line 1:12
Very good day or good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning to everyone, wherever you may be. Deon Correa, I had learning and development for Carnival Cruise Line. I’m an organizational psychologist by education. But I’ve been associated with hospitality and the cruise line business for many years. I stopped counting after 15. So that should give you a fair idea of how long I’ve been with the industry. But I’m excited to be here. Thank you, Emily.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 1:42
Thank you. And Lauren Adams at JLL.
Lauren Adams, Head of Leadership Development Programs, JLL 1:46
Hello, everyone. Welcome. I am the head of leadership development here for JLL. I have been here for eight years previously as the head of our learning and development within the work dynamics function. So got a little over 100,000 employees that we help support with the learning function here. Excited to be here talking to you today.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 2:08
All right, let’s get to it. I want to start with Deon because you’re in a unique situation. Carnival cruises employees just a massive global workforce and you have myriad job types, I would venture to say hundreds, maybe 1000s, you can clarify that for us. Something that I’m sure you have to do on a semi regular basis is just assess the current stock of skills that you have. How do you go about doing that?
Deon Correa, Senior Director, Learning and Development, Carnival Cruise Line 2:34
Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great question. Carnival Cruise Line is the parent and flagship cruise line for Carnival Corporation, which is a global cruise operator. Globally, we run a number of cruise ships and hire over 120- 130,000 people. And I can’t give you the exact number because most of our employees work on ships around on contracts. So at any point in time, that number could change but, to your point about the skills , you’re right in assuming we actually have a massive amount of jobs and roles. You know, any ship at any point in time carries about 1800 people, crew members, but four or 5000 guests. So, we basically manage a skill inventory across all positions. And these could be all different kinds of skills, there could be technical skills that you know, industry specific knowledge statements, soft skills, leadership skills, etc. So we constantly have to keep this skill inventory current and, and usable. We also are constantly listening to feedback from internal stakeholders, from leaders, from team members, etc. To gain insights into these skill gaps potentially, you know, performance reviews, for example, are a great way to to get a bit of insight into a skill gap or series of skill gaps. And then we also can compare our skills to job requirements as new jobs come online. You know, we have to cultivate a new set of skills. And hence we constantly compare our inventory against these requirements. And then of course, our training and development plans are very integrated into the skill development and the capability development process. So that again, is a reiteration of the overall process of how we maintain these skills and I know this is an elevator speech really too, to a very loaded question. Somehow, I hope, I’m trying to touch on all the important points here but at the carnival we also are very keen on continuous improvement. So we recognize that you know that the ski assessment process or the validation process for skills is an ongoing process. And we’re constantly revisiting these assessments and these skills to make sure that we are current, and that our skills are valuable to the industry and also to people’s careers, if that makes sense. So yeah, so that’s, I hope I could kind of hit all those important points. And thanks for the question. Yeah, it’s
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 5:26
not an easy one. For many people. That’s their entire job and what they do so I thought you did a very good, succinct job. Jenny, when we had the chance to talk before while we were preparing for this discussion, you mentioned something called job centered design and something called Talent centered design. Or you could tell us how that relates to skills based hiring promotion. How do you define those two things? And why does that distinction matter? Yeah,
Jenny Neuharth, Director of Talent-Centered Transformation, Eightfold 5:56
great question. And so a little precursor to this question is more like my human connection to this specific answer. One unique thing about me is I lost my memory in 2020, due to a head injury. And when I came back into the HR world, I was tasked with fixing tech. And I didn’t know at the time that I lost my design bias for how we would solve problems historically. And so I was going to rip and replace or fix an applicant tracking system. And within that process, this is the first time I had really seen an applicant tracking system. And I remember sitting there thinking, the infrastructure for this is entirely wrong. jobs don’t have skills, people have skills. And so at its core, historically, what we’ve done is we centered around jobs. So the person is attached to the job. So the skills of the person are connected to whatever job the skills are coded as a job. So talent center design is instead flipping the operating system to being centered around the talent. So what are the unique skills that the talent has that they bring to the table. And the important thing to remember, as humans are one size fits one, even if I have two identical twins in front of me, their skills in the back end are going to be dramatically different. And so having an understanding of those skills is really an important thing. And that’s really what we tried to do with the talent center design that helped answer the question, Emily?
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 7:28
Yes, don’t I think you make a good point even though it’s funny to think about the way job descriptions are written. Some of them actually are written that way already. And yet, I wonder if I’m the, if on the inside of the organization that have thought of that way, for example, I’ll see a job description that says, Our ideal candidate possesses these qualities. But maybe it’s not limited to or this isn’t the entire inventory. So people think about it that way. But I wonder when it actually comes to the hiring, they’re evaluating it against a rubric, maybe that is really more about skills associated with the job. So I wonder if that is starting to change as people are adopting a skills based approach and thinking about how people break down their skills and how they can be applied in the workforce.
Jenny Neuharth, Director of Talent-Centered Transformation, Eightfold 8:17
Yep. And historically, the way that we’ve done it has been guessing what the skills are that somebody brings to the table, as we formulate those job descriptions, we might have frameworks in the backend that are helping us to feed those pieces. But when we have when we’re when we’re operating off of a guess we’re not getting off in that alignment, right. And so there are definitely different ways to do that, which I think we’re going to talk about and some of the other questions. So we’ll
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 8:40
definitely get there. So I do want to talk about the how, how do we do this? How do you take stock of skills? Dan already mentioned things like performance reviews, listening to different listening techniques and tools to figure out what we are missing? What do we need to add? I’m curious, Lauren, and then I’d like to hear from Michael about what kind of tools you use to evaluate your workforce skills. And then importantly, how often do you do this? Maybe it varies by skill or job type. We’ll start with
Lauren Adams, Head of Leadership Development Programs, JLL 9:10
Lauren. Sure, yeah. So this can be a bit of a challenging one, especially when you have an organization like Dan was saying a lot of different roles, a lot of different types of workers that are coming into the the skill base, we really start with interviewing and making as much as possible trying to keep that human element to the process. But there is an element of bias that can be associated with that, depending on the manager, the leader, their favorites, the people they work with best. So we do also use really specific skills assessment processes for individual and manager assessment so that we’re seeing how I would rate myself and how my manager would rate me on the same set of skills and then can have conversation around that more a little bit deeper. And that helps us create as well, a kind of skill betting that we’re utilizing and kind of looking at overall holistically for an organization, where do we fall? That works really well with some of the softer skills. As we get into the more technical skills, more middle people in our plumbing or technical industry areas, those do have to be a little bit more concrete with specific assessments to test the skill and actually prove out the skill or things like on the job and shadowing to really see that that is taking place.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 10:40
I think you make a good point too, about the self reporting and self rating a Skill versus a manager rating, because pairing that with sometimes we just favor the people that we’d like working with or work with more closely, you might actually possess a skill that your manager hasn’t seen you demonstrate yet. So being able to raise your hand and say, I’m actually really good at this. I’ve never, I’ve just never been called on to demonstrate that in the workforce. So being able to find those places where, you know, people can be asked to do more and contribute in new ways,
Lauren Adams, Head of Leadership Development Programs, JLL 11:10
I think it is very valuable. Absolutely. Just giving voice to people. Yeah.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 11:15
Mike, what about you? What kind of tools assessment strategies?
Michael Trusty, VP and Head of Learning Officer, Fannie Mae 11:18
Yeah, well, for us, when we think about Fannie Mae, it’s very much in the financial services industry, but it’s very much business to business. We provide platforms and technology to lenders, loan servicers, banks, mortgage companies, etc. So over half of our workforce are technologists, data scientists, data analysts, those types of roles. And a lot of that starts with the architecture that we use. And so working with our chief information officer and a lot of our technologists to understand what are the tools and the technologies that they’re using, that helps us narrow down the type of the type of assessments and the type of programs that we want to put out there. We have a lot of technical assessments and application based lab based systems in our learning platforms. And so we use those to help our employees kind of guide their own development journeys and manage that, but it’s sponsored by what’s going on in the business and what the needs are. And then we’ve had some good success the past year, year and a half with badging. And so as we try to implement new technologies, or new approaches, whether it’s its AWS cloud, or some of the AI and some of the technology stuff, we’ll put together learning badges around that to really guide people in the way we want them to use the technology, how we want them to apply the technology. And then those badges, in turn, help them in terms of their own career progression and their development. And then last thing, I’ll say, it’s the good old, traditional individual development plan. We are very aggressive in terms of pushing those. And you know, sometimes simple things like that can help as well. And we’re fortunate that we’ve got, right now we’ve got over 75, or 70% of our employees have active development plans that are helping guide their learning.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 13:07
Yeah, yeah, seems very consistent as well. We’re here, of course, to talk about predicting skills of the future, which is difficult, and no one is gonna be able to have a surefire way of doing this. But I am curious to know how you guys are going about it, what you think are the best ways to do it? So Jenny, how do you predict what skills a given workforce will need in the future? That’s so hard? I think a lot of employers 10 years ago weren’t thinking about something like engaging with artificial intelligence, and that their workers would have to do that. How do you see something like that before it arrives?
Jenny Neuharth, Director of Talent-Centered Transformation, Eightfold 13:47
So how do you predict what skills or given workforce will be needed in the future? At its core, you have to connect the dots to connect the dots. And what I mean by that is, first, you have to start with putting that mirror up to humans and helping them be able to understand what skills do I have today. And ideally, that mirror is embedded in the flow of work. So we’re constantly adding to those skills, because it’s important for anybody else listening to this call. The only time your skills are static as a human being is when you’re dead. It’s a little bit morbid, but it’s true from the moment you’re born, and the moment you die, you’re constantly adding and evolving skills for who you are, right, so that constant continuous cycle is something that we have to have awareness of. And so when you have data that’s collected and connected the dots, right, we can start to see trends, where new skills are starting to rise or skills are starting to fall, or also skills are less future ready. Right with the development of artificial intelligence. There are some rules that are moving more to automation. And so if I have awareness of those skills that are potentially at risk, I could Ideally, change those out prior to the need for having a reduction in force. So it all kind of comes down to this concept of, you have to click the dots to connect the dots. And so once you do that, again, you’re able to kind of look at the industry, the market in different places to be able to ensure that you’ve sharpened them to get those right.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 15:20
Curious if any of the others here have a specific strategy for looking ahead forward looking something that maybe is not even in your workforce, yet something that, Lauren Yeah,
Lauren Adams, Head of Leadership Development Programs, JLL 15:32
I think, you know, some of the things that we try and really do is go out and do some industry research in other areas that aren’t our expertise, what’s coming in a completely different area other than corporate real estate that people are talking about, could that have a future impact on our workforce? Could there be an area where we’re going to be called on to do some of those things, or people are going to make an association between what we do and how that’s done? And trying to utilize that as well, that to just predict a little bit of where we could see some updates coming? Yeah,
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 16:10
you’re working like a journalist, you have your beat, and you think, here’s a world event? How does it apply to me? Like, how’s it gonna affect commercial real estate? What’s coming next? Absolutely. Our business? Yeah. Michael, I saw you nodding your head. Did you have something in mind? Or was that just an agreement?
Michael Trusty, VP and Head of Learning Officer, Fannie Mae 16:24
It was very much an agreement. I’m fortunate to work with a lot of people that are much smarter than I am. And so I just try to talk with them. And listen, I think, you know, one of the things that we’re trying to do, particularly in the AI space, we hosted an AI Expo. So we’re in the DC area, northern Virginia area as well. And we hosted an AI Expo open to all employees, just to the point to try to demystify it, to try to not treat it as a threat. And to try to build on employee curiosity. And encourage them to embrace where we’re going and to start to develop those skills, and not approach it from a perspective of fear. I think curiosity can be a great catalyst for learning. And so we’re really trying to get that curiosity and make it a positive experience instead of a threatening experience.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 17:16
Yeah, and rewarding that as well. People are going to seek out new skills, new information. Skill mapping is sort of an old school HR practice HR term, but it can be very valuable and has implications for future skill development as well. Lauren, I understand that you do some skill mapping, how do you go about this? How are you using data to build those maps? And how does that factor into what kind of skills you want to have in the Jayla workforce in the future? Absolutely.
Lauren Adams, Head of Leadership Development Programs, JLL 17:47
Yeah. So this is one that, you know, it’s been around for a while with a lot of skill mapping. But I think it comes really, for us back to a lot of what Jenny talked about, as far as the mapping to talent, rather than to job descriptions. So we, the starting point for us really has been going through and globally aligning a job description for the role based not on how it’s done in this region or that region. But what are the critical requirements? What do we have to have versus what’s just in there, because that’s what we’ve always included. Starting with that deeper view, and then taking it kind of to the next level of saying, okay, the skills that we have, as an organization, have to be consistent. So we’re not going to have a bank of 10,000 skills. Sure there are those out there. But we no longer need to list things that we used to list like, can you use a computer or your experience using Microsoft products, those used to be skills you had to list? We’re not asking that question, that’s not a requirement, we just, that’s an assumption we’re going to make. So keeping a consistent list that you can manage and keep narrow, and then build from there. So as we need to deepen it, we can for specific roles for technical skill needs, or specific certifications, but really looking at it to say when we talk about the skills needed for you to accomplish a role, it should be about five to seven skills, not 50. This is where we need to focus in and make sure that you have these capabilities that can help you really be successful in this.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 19:33
Just think about how much more approachable and accessible a job description looks when there are five to seven skills listed versus 1520. You know, there have been different studies and at different times. I think the first one was an HP study where they looked at the differences and men and women being willing to apply for a job. And for men, the threshold was something like 60% if they felt like they qualified for 60% of the skills listed. They would apply to women and they tended to apply only if they met all of them. So when you can narrow that and be really specific in the skills that you are looking for, not only is that a better job description, you’re probably actually going to open your talent pool a little bit more to people who are really qualified to do it rather than just for these different extraneous skills that might not have been relevant in the first place.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One Speaker 20:21
Yeah, absolutely.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 20:25
Dion, your company often has a lot of very hard to find skills. I’m thinking especially for onboard talent, people operating the ship, there aren’t a lot of that’s not that’s not a normal day job for most people is operating a cruise ship. How do you face the challenge of a talent shortage? Is that a big problem for you guys? And to what extent are you going out and actively, proactively developing the workforce that you need?
Deon Correa, Senior Director, Learning and Development, Carnival Cruise Line 20:55
Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, you rightly called out, you know, working on a ship isn’t everyone’s day job or a day job for most people wouldn’t consider, you know, working on a ship, it’s a very high, it’s a highly specialized skill set, regardless of the job that the person does on a ship. It’s just the environment that makes it complex. And then to add on to that the complexity of the job itself. So what we do is, is basically, we, and also something to call out is, the cruise line industry, or the maritime industry, specifically around cruise ships, has one of the highest turnover rates of any industry, you know, be hard to imagine, but turnovers across globally, is about 30 to 35%. Right. And when you consider that an average employee or crew member does six month contracts, or six months on, and then they leave and go home, and you try and do the math with the 30 to 35%. If you’re constantly training, and you’re constantly losing people, and then you’re constantly retraining again, so the, then the important thing for us is really how do we attract the right talent? And how do we just keep them engaged? Right, so, so what we do at Campbell, firstly, we build out what I believe is a pretty robust employee development program. And this has a number of initiatives attached to it from leadership development programs, we run summer internship programs, some internationally, we do early leader or emerging leader programs, we have rotational program assignments and things. So there’s quite a lot of stuff happening there. You know, at every level, we also focus on continuous learning opportunities, which means these are the opportunities that are outside the more formal development program structure. So, you know, our training is constantly happening. So there’s on the job training assessments happening all the time on the shop floor, you know, where people work, we use a lot of mentoring and a lot of real time coaching and feedback that comes in use as far as continuous learning is concerned. But we found that really helps. And people appreciate learning even something every day, right? We also have, you know, and I’m quite proud of this culture, across our organization that supports people growing and people development. And that couldn’t have been true for NEC could be true for so many people that have moved, you know, between roles, they moved from shipboard job jobs, or work on ships, to corporate jobs, and vice versa. We’ve had people from corporate jobs that decided they wanted to, you know, go live on a ship. So, there’s been a lot of that. And all of that is testament to the culture that we hold dear. So we also spend a lot of time on various employee engagement initiatives. And again, this fosters or you know, the need for people to grow, right? If you feel you’re growing in your learning, you’re more likely going to stay at that place, then leave and go elsewhere. And engagement activities and programs kind of help foster or reinforce that, as well. And then we also have career advancement opportunities through various career paths that we’ve created both on land as well as on ships, and as I was just mentioning, you could transition from a role on the ship to a role on land. You know, I’m an example of that. And the company supports this right and it has its own complications, because they are two very different kettle of fish. So it is complicated. But it’s possible and, and people appreciate it. So these are some of the things that we do to keep and retain our talent, especially the ones that have hard to find skills. So to say,
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 25:13
I’m curious, what was your job when you were on a ship?
Deon Correa, Senior Director, Learning and Development, Carnival Cruise Line 25:17
So I was a training officer for a while. And then I was an HR director. It’s not the it’s not the, the comparative of an HR director on land, it’s completely different. It just sounds similar, but you’re more of an HR officer, and it has a steep compliance and regulatory angle to it. And, and you’re doing some Employee Relations stuff. And, yeah, fun never ends when you’re on a cruise ship.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 25:46
So what about those skills that you just don’t have? So maybe a lot of people aren’t coming out of school with different maritime skills? To what extent? Are you partnering with schools or education programs or just young people before they’ve chosen a career? To what extent are you investing in that to develop the workforce that you need? 1015 years in the future? Yeah,
Deon Correa, Senior Director, Learning and Development, Carnival Cruise Line 26:13
absolutely. So exactly. To your point, it’s very hard to find talent at the scale that we need. I mean, if you think about it, we hire about 8000 people annually, eight to 9000 people, right? That’s, that’s a lot. And these are skilled workers. So there is a skill deficit, right, globally, especially in certain areas. So what we’re doing now is we’re trying to cultivate this talent at school level. So at a very early age, you know, closer to, even before they graduate, they’ve already made up their minds, they want to, they want a career in the maritime industry. And, we partner and work very closely with the schools, you know, to get their curriculums aligned to what we need. And then we continue that education process when they start working for us for various other programs and initiatives. And then they get to go back and graduate or, you know, and so we have different models of how we build regular education or regular academic curricula into our workforce. So but that’s a great question. And I wish more companies would do that, because I think it’s getting more and more evident.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 27:32
Yeah, there are a lot of thinking specifically of the accounting industry, I reported a story earlier this year, where more and more companies and industries are having to start even at the high school level where they didn’t have to go for it just go, Hey, there’s a career out there that you thought was one thing, it’s actually becoming something else. Or maybe you never considered this as a career. And employers are being far more and even trade or business organizations, right, are being very proactive, and going out and developing a workforce that is still in their teens. At this point. They haven’t even entered the workforce really? Okay, I want to talk about some AI skills. I know. Michael, you mentioned that your developer, you hosted that event where you were getting folks excited about the AI skills. How are you helping your workers focus on specific learning goals? It’s one thing to say, hey, we want everyone to start using this. And we encourage creativity and explore things. Can you map that to specific goals that you want them to achieve and applications that you want them to use in the workplace? Sure,
Michael Trusty, VP and Head of Learning Officer, Fannie Mae 28:34
with us a couple of ways. I wanted to talk about that first. And I wouldn’t have answered it this way, a year ago, this has really changed as we started to explore more of this. The one course that we did was one of the first courses that we built that we pushed down to all of our employees, and it’s mandatory. So not all of our employees today have access to things like co-pilot or chat GPT or something like that, it is something that we are, we are taking a very planful approach to how we roll those tools out to the organization. But if you’re anybody can take this course. But if you’re a participant in one of those pilot programs, it’s a course on the ethical use of AI. And I think when you think about AI when you think about how it works well, and just as an aside, where we’re trying to develop this with our company, if anybody has tried to get a mortgage in the United States, you know, you think about a process that’s right for automation and AI, that’s got to be it. And so operational efficiency, how do we get better at underwriting? How do we get better at appraisals? Lots of opportunities that our organization is working on there. But you have to do it in an ethical way and you have to understand what AI can do. You have to understand what AI can’t do. What it means to be a good prompt engineer. Again a year ago I thought that was a ridiculous job title. Today he had it. As that is a good, that is a core skill. And we’ve started to roll out some programs on what that looks like. But also, how do you understand when you’ve written a bad prompt, or you’ve asked a bad question, or created a bad query, that then causes some biased information or for the AI to, they call it hallucination, which then can lead you down a very bad path. So it’s not just the technical piece we’re using, you know, a lot of what we’re piloting is in a technical area, areas of our organization to help our coders work faster to help our analysts and data scientists do better. But we also, you can’t take the human out of the middle of what we have to train, we have to ensure that our people have the capability to make good decisions and be able to use that data in an effective and fair way and not not succumb to some of the biases. So it’s really interesting, it’s a balance of some of the technical stuff, but also ensuring that it’s still the human that’s making the decision. It’s still the human that’s driving things. And we’re not we’re not letting the machines kind of run the business, so to speak.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 31:04
Learning how to be a prompted engineer, this reminds me of being in university and sitting down and learning like Boolean search, do you remember that? And at the time, it was like, Wow, this, this is amazing. And we’re just in a new phase of that. And answers are getting better, even better.
Michael Trusty, VP and Head of Learning Officer, Fannie Mae 31:22
If I had to, if I had to predict today, I think, Emily, people with your background and your profession that actually can write, they can put a noun and a verb together to make a sentence are going to be the coders of the future. Because your ability since the model that a large language model is trained on language. To be a good prompt engineer, you have to understand language. It’s not just it’s not just Python coding or coding or something like that. It’s as much the language pieces as anything.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 31:49
They heard it here first. Lauren, from your perspective, how do you keep your employees forward thinking about their own skill development, picking new things, introducing new things to the business pursuing it themselves? What are your strategies? Yeah.
Lauren Adams, Head of Leadership Development Programs, JLL 32:06
So you know, we really want to make sure that kind of Michael touched on a little bit, but individual development plans are a real priority for us, and that those regular ongoing conversations are happening between managers and their teams on where do you want to develop, we asked people to put that into our system, like actually formalize it, so that we can then go search it and create content around those things, or make sure that we’re providing an identifying outside content that’s going to address them. And then it’s one of those areas where we’ve had to help people. Think about the next level by curating some kind of what’s next, the future of this role trading series that we market to people. If you’re currently a facilities manager, what’s the future of that role look like? What do we see and have some of our C suite come in and hold roundtable sessions that share with people we see that this is where it’s going to evolve, if you want to continue to evolve, here’s how you can start thinking about your next skill development and your next ways to continue to improve and really stay relevant and on top of your game with with the position not only that you have now, but maybe where you want to be going in the future. So it’s a little bit of finding that balance between the actual training for people and providing them learning opportunities. And then just marketing the need, right? Here’s we know these things are needed, we really want to support you please go out and, and dive into where you can continue to develop and what you want for your next step. So a little bit of cheerleading along the way.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 33:52
They only mentioned folks going from chips to land and vice versa. Do you often have folks raising their hand saying I want to transition one way or another with this specific job in mind? Or is it because I want something new? How does that typically go?
Deon Correa, Senior Director, Learning and Development, Carnival Cruise Line 34:10
I wouldn’t say it’s, it’s all too often. Because someone who chooses to work, you know, on a ship has really made up their mind to do work on a ship. It’s seldom and you know, one of those things that you step on on a ship and want to change your mind about but we do have some jobs that are transferable. We have and again based on capability and skill sets. There’s a significant number of skills that can be transferred, especially if you have the educational background, etc, which many people do. You know, again, depends on what the job offering is on land. And if it requires that sort of skill set For someone to be coming off from a ship, if it’s an operational role, you want to have someone from the ship because they understand the operation very deeply, right. But if it’s if it’s a generic role, like, I don’t know, corporate finance or something, then that might not really interest even someone who’s working on a ship. In fact, they’ll find that also boring. But no offense to anyone who’s in corporate finance. But, it appeals to a certain type of individual and it’s not for everyone. But yeah, to answer your question, the short answer is, some people choose to transfer between jobs, and most people don’t.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 35:44
The two most interesting people I know are jugglers on cruise ships around the world. And it’s a very different kind of lifestyle. They don’t really ever have a home, they come home and stay with family occasionally. Yeah, it’s it’s, we see them every 18 months or so. Jette for folks who want to get started with a skills based approach and want to say approach. Sometimes that’s hiring, sometimes that’s moving people internally, sometimes it’s just how you help someone’s career develop? Where do you recommend that they begin with this? Maybe what questions should they be asking? What processes should they be probing reevaluating? What’s your take
Jenny Neuharth, Director of Talent-Centered Transformation, Eightfold 36:26
and in my role, I get to come alongside very large organizations who are adopting a skills based approach. And one of the big things that we frequently tell these organizations like Netflix or Starbucks or Activision, Blizzard, right? It begins. It’s not about like, you’re never going to get it perfect. We got to start where you’re at. But the most important piece is understanding that unique problem that you have, like what’s on fire, not necessarily actually on fire. But what’s really important to your organization, is you know, for John Deere, it was electrification. For Activision, it was being able to look outside the box at talent. So they needed 3d modelers, and they couldn’t find those within the gaming industry. And so leveraging, leveraging eight filled, we were able to understand the unique skill makeup of what, what the right person looked like, and then actually go find that person out of Invisalign, or like, the people who do 3d modeling, and they were able to then go out and attract those people back in. And so the common thread with all of this is, people have chosen to begin from where they’re at. And, a skills based approach is not something that you should ever be done with, because continuously improving is something that should be continuous. I always joke, it’s not project based, which has a start and a finish and a period, like a period or end. It’s a program you choose to begin. And there’s always that comma at the end, because you’re constantly going to iterate and elevate and continue. So the most important thing is to start. There are a lot of organizations out there that can help you begin, but making the shift is like operating around town instead of operating around jobs. It’s important, we haven’t historically helped humans understand their skills, and where they fit, what opportunities they have. And being able to put that mirror up and run to that human and help them see their paths is a really important thing. That’s why a lot of us got into this world, too. It’s like how can I find the right person? How can I think outside the box to what good looks like when I’m looking at, you know, a lot of people are afraid about AI. But I always challenge myself like the most impenetrable black box is the human brain. I can be hungry today and make a very different decision for who fits from a talent standpoint, then I would tomorrow. And when we’re talking about something as critical as, who fits in a role, we want to make sure we have guardrails around that to help us make the right decisions. And now I’m monologuing. But that would be my answer is to get started, just start. No,
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 39:10
It’s wonderful. I’m sure the folks who did 3d modeling of teeth are quite happy to try something in the gaming industry. I mean, not the 3d modeling teams wouldn’t be great too, but they may not have envisioned that for themselves either. And
Jenny Neuharth, Director of Talent-Centered Transformation, Eightfold 39:24
that’s the thing, often our talent we haven’t they don’t know how their skills might fit somewhere else. So it’s really important on the skills journey, to not only put that mirror up to us as a company, for figuring out who outside the box might fit but also putting that that that connection point to the talent as well so they can see their skills and how they you know how they fit or how they are aligned to the to a specific role and that’s how we get really high conversion rates for traditional people who haven’t, we’re looking for that 10 out of 10 match right if I can actually show you here your skills, sometimes the naming conventions that you think you have aren’t necessarily the naming conventionsthat the organization is using, if I can show you your match, and here’s how you’re fit the conversion rate to those rules a lot higher. And so you see a lot of different pools of people that are coming into those roles, too, which is great. Yeah.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Journalist, Contributing Editor, From Day One 40:16
And I would imagine more, more tangential skills than you would get otherwise. So if you’re bringing if you’re, if you’re in the gaming industry, hiring folks who have always been in the gaming industry, you probably have some really good engineers and modelers, but you might not have people who’ve worked in a totally different industry having to answer different types of questions, different problems, different types of teams, and I would imagine you end up with a stronger mix of, of people there. Well, we’re at the top of the hour. I want to thank our panelists very much, Dion, Mike, Jenny and Lauren. Thank you so much for being here and for sharing your knowledge with us. It’s much appreciated, and I’ll hand it back to Steve from From Day One.
