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Revolutionizing Education: Greg Brown on Udemy's AI-Enhanced Learning and the Shift to Skills-Based Hiring

• Evan Kirstel

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Ever wondered how the shift to a skills-based economy is reshaping the job market? In this episode, we sit down with Greg Brown, CEO of Udemy, to explore how the platform is revolutionizing education for over 70 million learners and 16,000 organizations globally. Greg shares his insights on the significant skills gaps uncovered by a McKinsey report and emphasizes the transition from degree-based to skills-based hiring, which promotes equitable access to professional opportunities. He also delves into his personal passion for education, a commitment rooted in his family's legacy of learning and teaching.

Prepare to be amazed as we journey through the evolution of hybrid work environments and the essential power skills needed to thrive in this new landscape. Learn how Udemy is leveraging generative AI to create personalized, adaptive learning experiences that cater to individual goals and progress. Greg shares compelling success stories of corporate clients who have utilized these innovative tools to enhance employee engagement, retention, and skill acquisition. Wrapping up, Greg offers a personal glimpse into his summer plans and his family's dedication to continuous learning, proving that education is a lifelong journey. Join us for an enlightening conversation that promises to inspire and inform.

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Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, Absolutely intrigued and excited to have one of the leaders in the upskilling and online learning space, CEO Greg Brown from Udemy. Greg, how are you? I am great.

Speaker 2:

I'm good to be with you this morning.

Speaker 1:

Well, good to have you here. I'm such a fan of you and the team and before we dive in, I have so many questions. Maybe you could chat a little bit to the audience here, introduce yourself and who is Udemy? For those who aren't familiar with the amazing site, the amazing destination.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, sure, I'm Greg Brown, CEO of Udemy, and Udemy is an online skills platform for individuals and professionals. It's effectively a global destination, with over 70 million learners on the platform now. For anybody that has a desire to upskill or reskill themselves in, anything from it could be software, software debugging, all the way to learning how to be an AI developer or an AWS developer, and what have you. So it ranges from soft skills, power skills to technical skills. We serve organizations over 16,000 around the world and they're skilling endeavors. So that's a little bit of background on who we are.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's an amazing mission, an amazing site, and you're such an advocate for what we call the skills-based economy and, of course, you're playing an important role in this transition. Maybe introduce the topic around the skills-based economy what is it and how do we get there?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a good question because there's a lot being written about it as of late.

Speaker 2:

Look, I just talked a little bit about what we do as far as being an online skills platform and what have you.

Speaker 2:

And look, in the age of generative AI and the other massive technological innovations that we're all in the midst of, we really do aim to be the destination for upscaling and are playing a critical role in this transition to what is now known as a skills-based economy. This idea, this concept, really emerged as a part of a global skills shortage, and McKinsey came out with a report that revealed that 87% of executives are facing massive skills gaps. And, as a result of that, our goal and we really have pivoted our messaging around the fact that our goal is to help professionals and organizations make this transition to a skills-based economy by putting skills out in front rather than just solely focusing on degrees or job titles. A lot written about, but quite a few large multinationals that have come out, like Google and IBM and Walmart, that have come out publicly and stated they've removed degree requirements from many of their job descriptions in terms of their talent acquisition process. So, yeah, it's definitely a movement that's gaining steam, and for good reason.

Speaker 1:

Indeed, and I've seen you speak and talk on this topic in the past You're so personally passionate about it, beyond just a business leadership perspective. How and why is that so personally interesting and important to you?

Speaker 2:

if I can ask, with my upbringing, with with my father. Actually, he was a foster child and was one of five siblings that and he was the only one that was able to go to college fortunate fortunately for him, through a sports scholarship football scholarship that opened a door for him that would have otherwise been closed and his sisters, unfortunately, because they were not as fortunate to have the opportunity that that he did, regardless of the skills or intellect they had, because they were very, very smart, but they did not have an opportunity to go get that education that my father had.

Speaker 2:

So you know this is something that you know I watched growing up.

Speaker 2:

You know my dad being very involved in the foster family community in the town that I grew up in and giving back as much as he could.

Speaker 2:

He was a teacher and a coach and his mission was to give back so that he could help kids that were in similar situations have a different outcome than many kids that he saw in those foster families have, and so, anyway, it was definitely something that I grew up with. You know, a passion for education, a passion for learning. My brother's principal he started in education, followed my dad's footsteps and now he's a principal in the town that I grew up in. So this is education is something that has been really embedded in me, and investment in other people's, you know, development it's been embedded in me and investment in other people's development it's been embedded in me since my youth. So, yeah, something I'm very passionate about, and that really is what led me to Udemy, the opportunity to come here, and our mission is to transform lives through learning, and when I had an opportunity to get to know the company and get to know the team, it was something that I just could not pass up.

Speaker 1:

A wonderful mission, wonderful sentiment. And beyond the value and importance of education and learning in general, let's talk about the skills-based economy, because this is a brave new world economies, entire economies to transform and compete on the global stage, of course, for businesses, large and small, to compete and for individuals to grow our knowledge, our income, et cetera, it's so important. But what other opportunities are there for taking advantage of this great transition we're seeing?

Speaker 2:

Well, there's a number. I'll touch on two of them for you at the top of mind. First is and I just touched on this more equitable access to professional opportunities. I think this is a big one. So, when hiring managers are screening people for skills that they need for the job, more so than degrees, and even, in some cases, know the skills are really what are going to make or break that individual's ability to have success in that role, you know that's something that we're starting to see, as I just mentioned, become more and more to the forefront. And you know, just like for so many people in the workplace, you know, and at large, a traditional university education just isn't accessible and so it's just going to open more doors.

Speaker 2:

And along those lines, you know, for organizations like ours and you know many others, you know it really broadens the talent pool and enables us to move faster and to innovate faster, right. So just think about what's going on with generative AI. Right now, we're seeing this massive demand for AI skills. You know we had, you and me, just on our platform alone. We saw over 4 million enrollments this past year and over 2,000 generative AI courses. So imagine if, you know, a hiring manager has the ability to open up the aperture and open up these roles to a much larger population and the impact of that in terms of the ability to acquire talent, bring talent into the organization much more rapidly, efficiently, and give these folks an opportunity that they would maybe not have had if they didn't take that approach. So there's a lot that is positive about this movement.

Speaker 1:

Oh, it's wonderful and I would add selfishly the opportunity to teach and to be as a content creator and podcaster and live streamer, to teach those skills to others and to monetize that in the process. Pretty cool. What about the role of leadership? Business leaders like yourself, c-suite leaders, obviously play a role in this, but what about political leaders, leaders in education and other areas of our society? What role do they play in this new skills-based economy?

Speaker 2:

and I talk a lot about this in our organization. We have to lead from the front, and there's no doubt that organizations right now have a massive opportunity from a leadership standpoint to again, you know, get out in front of this. I'll tell you. You know how we've done it and how some other organizations are doing this. We well, one of the things that we did is we just wanted to level up the level of AI literacy in our organization. So we rolled out an AI boot camp of sorts, and I challenged all of our leaders, first ones, through this boot camp. So when we actually posted the leaderboard and started to show the progress across the organization, we were out in front and that set the tone.

Speaker 2:

And I think that any type of new technology that's coming online, especially something that's transformative, that's generative AI if the organization doesn't see leadership jumping in and learning and growing and developing a competency and a capability in that specific area, it sends a strong message and I think that that's something that's really important.

Speaker 1:

More recently.

Speaker 2:

You know, some data came out on this and we've actually done some of our own assessing across our 16,000 customers, and roughly, and this is something this data we're going to be releasing in the next month. 83% of senior leaders report that leadership is important to the success of becoming a skills-based organization full stop. But less than 30% I think the number was 28% of employees believe that their leadership team is effectively communicating their company's strategy and executing that strategy toward that transition of becoming a skills-based org.

Speaker 1:

So there's a big gap.

Speaker 2:

And so, really, what that presents is a big opportunity, and that's an opportunity that we at Udemy are really excited about, because we know we can help a lot of organizations through this transition, and a lot of what our customer success team does and a lot of what we do is not just deliver the platform, but we deliver a lot of best practices and insights in terms of how to think about and then how to execute this transition of becoming a skills-based economy, and we're learning every day. We're learning from some of the more progressive organizations we work with and imparting that knowledge on the rest of the companies that we're helping through this process.

Speaker 1:

Wonderful approach and you've probably read hundreds of books on leadership over the years, over the decades, no offense, but I wonder how much of those skills are timeless and how much are kind of becoming obsolete, given this new world of generative AI and new work trends and uncertainty we're all facing. Do you think about some of the essential skills that leaders will need moving forward and how to focus on those, versus maybe some of the traditional skills that we've all talked about for decades?

Speaker 2:

Well, we think a lot about it and I think what's important to call out on this front is that, as much as we're focused right now on the technical skilling and aptitude to be able to leverage you know, to be able to leverage technologies like generative AI and others that are moving very, very rapidly through the process of becoming widely adopted. Look, we've just gone through one of the most difficult transitions from a global community perspective that we've gone through in my lifetime, that's for sure, and that was going into a global pandemic and then coming out of it. We've gone through my lifetime, that's for sure, and that was going into a global pandemic and then coming out of it. And so for all of us, we've had to learn that and I'll speak personally from a leadership standpoint we've had to learn how to navigate our organizational makeup and how we communicate from a world where we almost immediately, overnight, went to a hundred percent remote, and then now we transition into this hybrid, overnight went to 100% remote, and then now we transition into this hybrid world, and it takes a lot of adaptability, and then that adaptability leads to okay, what are the skills does our organization need and do organizations at large need?

Speaker 2:

Because, again, we're in the business of helping organizations develop skills and capability. What do they need to be effective at working in this hybrid world? Well, it's things like, you know, change management and communications and truly operating, leading in a hybrid environment, creative problem solving, you know, and decision making. And those types of things bring a lot of focus on soft skills and what's now been called power skills. On soft skills and what's now been called power skills, and in terms of organizations coming to us and really what they're looking for, the types of skills that they believe that they need to thrive in this environment, which, look, if you were to rewind four or five years ago, that wasn't the conversation that we were having, the organizations were having. It was a lot more around technical aptitude and maybe internally focused. But now, based on everything that we've gone through and the pace of change and how it continues to accelerate, I think these soft skills, power skills, are more important than ever and I think that's going to remain the case for the foreseeable future.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, important insight. So you guys at Udemy have been at the forefront of the Gen AI wave and putting out amazing online educational content courses, etc. Leading the charge and upskilling with Gen AI skill as a tool set. This new tool set what is needed, and you know what is needed in terms of content and the way we adopt and leverage these new tools.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a really good question. So, generally, ai isn't just increasing the demand for upskilling, it's also making it easier and more effective. And you know, online education initially offered, you know, kind of the first opportunity of 4A to open doors to millions of learners to access to education that they had not had access to before. But today, generative AI offers what we kind of believe is the second opportunity for us to disrupt the way we learn and just make it that much more accessible. And so, really, what excites us and excites me most about the future of education is the power of generative AI to transform lives through learning for billions of folks around the world.

Speaker 2:

And that really is our endeavor, and there's no doubt that this represents the biggest learning inflection point since water school was embedded in the beginning of the 19th century. I feel strongly about it, and it gives us the opportunity to create a very tailored and adaptive learning experience for everybody that's engaged in content on our platform and matching up for those individuals exactly what they need to know when they need to know it. And we're talking quite a bit about our roadmap and what we're developing and what's coming, but we did not have the capability to deliver this type of learning experience prior to getting access to this technology. So it really is informative and we're just on the first inning of this. We're on the cusp of some really exciting developments in the next year or two.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that's so exciting. Can't wait to see it unfold. And when I personally go online for learning and when I see organizations go out there, it's a very fragmented, very challenging environment. You just have to take a look at YouTube and everything else and it's a bit overwhelming. How do you make sense of that and how do you think about things like personalization and curation and just staying ahead of this landscape which is so diverse and yet so overwhelming sometimes? How can you make this process easier for individuals and organizations? How can you make this process?

Speaker 2:

easier for individuals and organizations. Yeah, I mean, look, we think a lot about that and we think deeply about the level of personalization and curation that we can now bring to the process. So that I'll give you a scenario. So, envision a marketing leader inside a workplace and she's a new manager and she knows she needs to quickly have skill to be successful in the role. But she not only needs to develop skills to integrate you know generative ai and everything that we just talked about but she also, uh, knows she needs to produce a really high quality work product, but faster, and she also needs to learn how to lead others through change. We just got done talking about that. In this hybrid environment, all of this is in the mix Instead of throwing into what we historically have done some of this in our platform before.

Speaker 2:

We had access to generative AI into a one-size-fits-all leadership training program. Imagine she gets a personalized experience from beginning to end. She takes an assessment in the beginning to identify what are her current skills and then she identifies where she wants to go as a professional, where the company would like her to go, and the outcome she wants to achieve. And then from there, almost instantaneously, leveraging generative AI, you get a pre-built hyper-personalized learning path right that enables her to develop the skills at her pace, adapting to the content, adapting that content, you know, to the environment. She's operating in the difficulty. The lessons can modulate based on her progress and she has a 24-7 tutor, which we're coming out with by, you know, between now and the end of this year. You know a tutor, a learning assistant, on for the ride. So she, and then at the end of that process, you know, or even through some segments of that process, she's got workspaces so she can practically apply if it's dense learning, if it's technical learning, she can apply what she's learning. And then she has a lab environment at the end to display that she's acquired those skills right. So she's demonstrated the knowledge that she's acquired and that she has the skills now to do the job or to do the work that she wanted to prepare herself for, the company wanted to prepare herself for. And you have the ability to validate that with an assessment as well as, and then, at the end of it, with a badge or a certificate.

Speaker 2:

So there's a whole workflow, a whole process that is completely in the process of being automated, and it could not be more exciting, because it's really what we all want. It's what I want for my employees, it's what I want for myself. It's a hyper-personalized learning experience that is not going to take me through content that I already have acquired or skills that I've acquired. It's going to be tuned to exactly where I want to go and the outcomes I'm looking for, and it's going to give me the tools to be really efficient and effective at acquiring those skills, at learning, and then I can display that learning at the end of the process. So, anyway, you know, that just gives you an idea as to what you should expect, what everybody should expect, out of our platform and our relationship with Udemy over the next couple, three, five years.

Speaker 2:

But you know, and then, beyond that, you've got avatars and you've got voice recognition. We're working on some really progressive stuff to be able to enable our instructors with tools and capability to if probably many of our listeners and followers saw Reid Hoffman's video that was out there. It was an avatar that looked like like Reid Amazing, we've got that ability to bring that technology on platform as well. So it enables that can enable all our 75,000 instructors and growing the ability to not focus on video and editing but focus on what makes them world-class instructors, which is the content, developing that content and making it that much faster and easier for them to get that content to the world. So anyway, there's a lot of exciting stuff coming and we're at the tip of the iceberg.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's unbelievable. I just sort of regret I wish a bit I had had this 10 years ago when I was in middle management in tech. It would have been quite a game changer for my career and my progress, that's for sure. Better late than never. And accessibility what is Udemy? What is the industry? What do your peers need to do to kind of get where we need to be in terms of accessibility, for example, and opening up learning to a wider swath of the population?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's an area that we're also very focused on and that generative AI, without question, is going to be a big enabler for In terms of the accessibility on our platform. We have done a lot to make our platform accessible for not only folks around the world, but for folks that have disabilities and what have you, and we're seeing some very innovative technology being developed leveraging generative AI, that's going to accelerate our ability to you know, to do just that.

Speaker 2:

So you know again, you know it's something that's at the forefront of what we're focused on. You know it's and again, on a broad basis. We're in over 125 countries right now on our platform. So accessibility from a global perspective is very broad. And we've got we're in our Udemy business collection, which is a collection that we serve up to our corporate customers. We've got over 14 languages on that platform and we're in over 70 countries on that platform, in addition to what I just mentioned was on the broader marketplace.

Speaker 2:

But in terms of global accessibility, we're very proud of the work we've done and that our team has done to enable our platform to be that more you know, functionally accessible for you know different types of categories of folks.

Speaker 1:

So anyway, there's a lot more to come on that, I bet. I bet you must hear so many amazing stories and anecdotes from individuals. Friends, colleagues. Organizations of all sizes care to share any of those with the audience, or it's probably too many to tally here on a short podcast today.

Speaker 2:

But you know, from a corporate perspective, some of the things we're most excited about sharing companies telling us that you know if we've helped them create a boot camp or an AI. You know curated AI learning experience and the impact it's had on employee engagement, on employee retention, on their ability to truly lead in their organization in terms of bringing you know these types of platforms but, more importantly, learning experiences to their employees so they have access in a way that they had never had before. And so you know that those are the types of things that I spend a lot of my time with our corporate clients, with the, you know, I would say, fortune 500 clients, and in fact, I was just in New York and Boston meeting with some of those customers this last week, and you know hearing these examples of how you know they're being able, they have been able to significantly accelerate the pace by which they're delivering learning and the outcomes that they're able to derive. We had one, I had one customer tell us that.

Speaker 2:

In fact, I mentioned this example on our last earnings announcement that, using our GiveMePro, our immersive learning product, they were able to increase the first time pass rate and certifications for this specific certification by 17% and do it 15 days faster across hundreds of employees. And now they're going to deploy that across thousands of employees, so you can imagine the cost savings for the company. That's one thing, but imagine the impact on the individual right to be able to acquire those deals much more efficiently and effectively much faster, so they actually get to where they want to go faster, the aspiration they have to get that new job or to get that, you know, that next level in their current role. And yes, there's monetization implications there. They make more money, but it's really about the growth of the individual and that's really what we're all. Again, it's that notion of transforming lives through learning that we're so passionate about here and, yeah, we're hearing more and more of those examples as more and more organizations are coming online and being able to leverage the platform to develop skills.

Speaker 1:

A fantastic story. So we're entering the summer months. You know we slowed down a little bit and looking forward to anything, in particular any travel, personally, professionally. What's on your radar the next few weeks, couple months?

Speaker 2:

I've got two teenage boys that are both excited and getting ready for their football season, which is coming up in just a few months. They've given me a week, so I'm taking them. We're going to Hawaii for a week and we're going to go relax and unplug a little bit and then, uh, when I get back, I'll be, I'm gonna, I'm going to some some camps. My oldest son is aspiring to play, uh, division one football. So we've got a, we've got to go visit and so I'm gonna have a busy summer with him and my younger son is also just a couple years behind him, but training pretty hard as well.

Speaker 2:

So I've got a busy summer ahead, but I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 1:

This is all stuff that I love. That's the best. Well, it's so fun and my son is a freshman home for the summer and I showed him Udemy. He signed up for a couple classes. I love it, Despite, you know, glad to get out of the grind of finals. He's going to keep learning and what a great time in the summer to think about, you know, reading more and upskilling and educating yourself. Well, thanks so much, Greg. Thanks for joining. Really appreciate your insights and the amazing work you and the team do.

Speaker 2:

Evan really enjoyed it. Appreciate you having me Take care.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much.