The SkillsWave Podcast
Welcome to The SkillsWave Podcast, where we explore the challenges and innovations in corporate learning.
In each episode, guests from some of the most innovative businesses and educational institutions from around the world share their unique approaches to corporate learning. They provide specific, actionable insights into how they’re preparing workforces and learners for the future, and the ways they’re addressing the evolution of skills in their industries.
The SkillsWave Podcast
Use Real-Time Labor Market Data to Upskill Your Workforce | Matt Sigelman
This week, we're joined by guest Matt Sigelman, president at The Burning Glass Institute and chairman at Lightcast. He’s dedicated his career to unlocking new avenues for mobility, opportunity and equity through skills. He's a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and holds an AB from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard.
We discuss how companies can anticipate skill demands and the illuminating findings from The American Opportunity Index, which identifies America's 250 largest public companies that have the best employment outcomes for their workers—and why.
We also talk about the State of Skills report, which clearly lays out the skills that are most in-demand for jobs today and just how much they're changing.
Finally, we cover how upskilling and reskilling can help employers fill skills gaps by putting transferable skills to work in areas of need.
Resources we talked about in this episode:
05:00 How Skills Are Disrupting Work: The Transformational Power of Fast Growing, In-Demand Skills (The Burning Glass Institute); referred to as “The State of Skills Report” in this episode
17:09 The American Opportunity Index (The Burning Glass Institute)
21:41 Building From the Bottom Up: What Businesses Can Do to Strengthen the Bottom Line by Investing in Front-line Workers. (Harvard Business School)
29:07 How to Create a Strengths-Based Company Culture (Gallup)
34:42 IKEA reskilling customer service reps to work as interior design advisors (Reuters)
Intro:
Welcome to The SkillsWave Podcast—a podcast for organizations that want to future ready their workforces, hosted by Malika Asthana.
In each episode, guests from some of the most innovative businesses around the world share their unique approaches to learning and development. They provide specific, actionable insights into how they’re preparing their workforces for the future, and the ways they’re addressing skills gaps in their industries.
You're listening to The SkillsWave Podcast.
Malika:
Our guest this week is Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute and Chairman at Lightcast. He has dedicated his career to unlocking new avenues for mobility, opportunity, and equity through skills. He’s a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and holds an AB from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard. Matt, welcome.
Matt:
So great to be together.
Malika:
Absolutely. So Matt, let’s get right into it. You were considered one of the original leaders of real-time labor market data, a breakthrough innovation that has transformed the way that people understand and plan for the world of work. Can you share a little bit about how that field has grown, and what that means for businesses and workers alike?
Matt:
So first of all, let me just define terms. When we talk about real time labor market data, it’s a bunch of words there, and I actually have come to believe it’s a little bit of a misnomer. Not that it’s not accurate, but it’s maybe not even reflecting what’s most important and revolutionary about this approach. So it used to be—and I bet there’s some people out in the audience who remember this—that if you wanted to understand the labor market you had to go and get data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and their occupational projections and things like that. Which when you’re planning your workforce, whether it’s planning where do you find people, whether it’s planning what skills they need, those kinds of projections are nice. Those kinds of data series are interesting, but they weren’t granular enough to give you a basis for action.
The breakthrough innovation that we brought to the market was the realization that you actually can really see most hiring transactions that happen in a major economy today, and that’s because they’re happening online. So, if you’re creating a traditional government data instrument, then you’re tracking big categories and you don’t want them to change very often because you have to build it by a survey. The idea is that you could never possibly see all of the hiring that’s going on.
But the internet changed all that, just like it changed so much else. And so, we started saying, “Well look, we can go out and scrape literally millions of job openings every day.” And once you have them, you could actually read them and say specifically who’s hiring for what? Not only what roles, but what skills, what credentials are they looking for? And that’s been really, really important for a number of things in helping companies plan for their talent. So first of all, from a talent acquisition perspective, it starts to give us a sense of with whom we are competing, who’s likely to have a workforce that’s invested with skills that we’re looking for? But what it also did is it gave us a sense, broadly us, of what are the skills that are changing work? What are the skills that are becoming valuable? If you look at the kinds of sectors that are on the bleeding edge, if you look at the companies that are bellwethers, the geographies that tend to be out in front, you can start to see certain sets of skills reshaping work, growing super fast, driving significant premiums.
And so, that’s been really important for strategic workforce planning because you can start to actually look ahead and not just say, “Okay, oh my gosh, the hiring managers are saying they need people with these skills. Oh, wish we could train from within, but we need them now.” Now you can actually start to make L&D into R&D.
Malika:
Right, I love that line. That’s great. I feel like part of the challenge, just as you’re talking about it, is it’s not just about forecasting the types of job openings you need but really training your people and giving that information to workers themselves to also take charge of their own careers.
So, one of the ways that Burning Glass Institute is doing that is with one of your most recent pieces of research, which is the State of Skills report. So for our listeners, if you’re not familiar, the report analyzed hundreds of millions of job postings in the U.S. dating back to 2015, seems like yesterday sometimes, but it was fair bit ago. And it found that the most in-demand skills were cloud skills, social media skills, and project management skills with AI skills at the very top. What stood out to you from the data in the report?
Matt:
So first of all, I think what to me stood out most is really the breadth of demand for these skills. So, we define these skills as the skills that are growing the fastest and spreading the widest. And so, when you think about something like AI or ML, it still feels, even with all the talk about gen AI, and actually we undertook that piece of research before, a month before gen AI got unleashed on the world. But nonetheless, you think about those as being really technical capabilities, cloud computing, likewise, even things like product management, or data analytics, or social media. A lot of these felt like technical capabilities, and yet we saw them across hundreds of industries across any major geography. If you look overall, I think it was something like one in eight jobs overall needs, one of those core, one of those disruptive skills, one of those sets of skills that are growing the fastest and spreading the widest, and that’s one in five in manufacturing.
So we think of, again, AI as on this bleeding edge. Actually, it’s already been here and it’s already been reshaping work in meaningful ways. Even in government, which I think a lot of people tend to assume is lagging in its capabilities, specifically and particularly on the tech side, one in 10 jobs needed one of these capabilities. So, that says that this set of skills are going to be increasingly critical, to defining jobs, to defining people’s readiness for work, and to defining which companies are and which organizations are most ready for work.
Malika:
I think that makes a lot of sense. When you think about the challenges that workers have in trying to even fill some of these job openings, I mean, what’s the takeaway for workers? What does that mean for people working in these jobs where how much does it impact the employer as much as it does the person who’s executing it?
Matt:
So, I think there’s both a risk and an opportunity here for workers. The risk, of course, what happens if you aren’t acquiring those sets of new skills that are increasingly not just defining occupational specialties, but are actually defining the job that you’re probably already working at. And the opportunity, which is how much value you can unlock in your career if you get ahead of the game. And so, worth unpacking each of those. In terms of that risk, I’ll put it this way, and this is a risk by the way that’s shared by employers. Part of the analysis that we did in that report built in some work that we did together with the Boston Consulting Group, we found that the average job has seen, across all occupations, it’s seen 37% of its top skills replaced just in the last five years. When you think about how astounding that is, think by the way, like if you’re an L&D leader, 37% of my learning catalog changed in the last five years. I’m going to guess probably not, right?
Malika:
Yes.
Matt:
And so, for a worker that says that this isn’t just a couple of tech jobs again that maybe need some new skills, everybody in every job is going to need new sets of skills to stay current. And that sounds maybe hyperbolized, but first of all, worth pointing out when you think about their 37% was an average, so the jobs that are being most transformed, that top quartile, it was actually 76% of the skills were different.
Malika:
Wow, that’s incredible.
Matt:
Isn’t it? It’s breathtaking.
Malika:
It’s unbelievable if you think about it.
Matt:
I know. If it weren’t for the fact that we pulled a lot of data, I wouldn’t believe it. The bottom quartile tended to be more low wage construction, transportation, those kinds of occupations. But the other thing to bear in mind here is that this is affecting all sorts of jobs, but if you are in a job and you’re not acquiring new skills, look, I think it’s easy to look at this and say, “Well, people have always needed new skills,” and that’s probably true. I’m sure there’s been a significant acceleration, but the reality is, is that most people don’t necessarily get fired for not having the skills they need, but if they do get displaced there’s a lot of research that shows that people who … That’s when you really feel the brunt of it because employers want to hire for what they need in the future, not what they’ve needed in the past.
And so, that puts workers at significant risk. It puts workforces at significant risk as well. For L&D leaders, one of the things we have to worry about is, is the workforce that we have able to be the workforce that we need? But here’s why I think there’s a big opportunity here, and again, this is an opportunity for workers and it’s an opportunity for companies as well, and that’s this. When you see the pace of growth that we’re seeing here, and when we’re seeing that a lot of the new skills that people need to acquire are ones that hybridize different fields that haven’t intended to travel together, think about marketing people who suddenly need the data skills to be able to manipulate customer data when most of the marketing people are right brain people. When you start to see those kinds of changes take place, the people who can be out front and acquiring those skills are in the catbird seat in the job market.
The companies, the organizations who have a workforce that can be invested with those future-ready skills, those companies are likewise far ahead competitively in terms of what they can accomplish relative to firms whose workforces are further behind. So, having our antennae up to be able to see those changes in real time is tremendously important because it allows us the time to react.
Malika:
I love the way that you phrased that. I think one of the challenges when we talk about this sometimes is that it’s such a process oriented and top-down approach of “we need to do an audit of skills within the company and think five years out to what skills we might need.” And what you’re saying is not necessarily no to that, but how can we also look at the job openings that are already coming out, not just within your own company but across the industry, and positioning yourselves among competitors even to see what everyone else is doing and really what are the transformational skillsets that everyone is going to need in some capacity? It reminds me of something that I heard when I started working in this space a little over six years ago, and it was something like there’s no such thing as a digital job. Every job will require digital skills. So, it’s interesting how some of that just becomes table stakes after a certain point in time.
Matt:
By the way, we’re seeing the same thing with green right now. People go through all sorts of gymnastics to try to figure out which jobs are green jobs. And I’ll give you an example. If you’re a network engineer, I think most of us wouldn’t look at a network engineer and say, “Hey, that’s a green job.” But increasingly we’re seeing network engineers who need to understand power conservation. It’s given just the nature of these huge machines that they’re, and cloud servers and whatever, that they’re leveraging. Well, now you’re starting to see people having to leverage and integrate green sets of skills. So, very much the same idea. And by the way, I think this point you made is such an important one about timeliness. So, when we’re trying to plan out our workforce for five years from now, it’s easy to throw up our hands in the air and just say like, “Hey, this is too academic. Who’s got that crystal ball?” And you know what? You’d be right.
It’s worth going through the exercise, but the reality is that there are enough signals out there that we don’t necessarily need to be in the bleeding edge, we can be fast followers. And if we can say, “Hey look, here’s things that we can say, ‘Coming soon to a theater near you,’ and be able to plan for them,” that’s how we make sure that L&D can actually be a core mechanism for preparing the workforce. Because like I said before, so often I think a lot of companies have the right intentionality of wanting to invest in their workforce, wanting to invest in the training that makes their workforce ready, but they then get stuck with, oh my gosh, we need people with gen AI skills, and where are we going to find them? Okay, we’re going to rip and replace. If you can anticipate those changes really quickly and start planning for them, you’ve got the six months, you’ve got the year to start planning for what you’re going to need.
Malika:
Absolutely, and I think it’s also this feeling of we have to start things from scratch every single time. Like this is the skill that must be upcoming. Well, we need something bespoke because our industry is completely different, and sometimes that’s the case but there’s certainly a case to be made, I imagine, for plug and play content that can be adapted as you see fit for the needs that are there. Of course, the conversation within a tech company will be very different from the one in manufacturing, but gen AI is gen AI, so what you talk about there will be at least at a baseline the same sort of thing. So, one of the things that you talked about at the beginning was the opportunity that exists for workers, and thinking a little bit more broadly about what almost the social contract is between the employer and the employee. I wanted to talk to you about another research piece that you’ve got, which is called the American Opportunity Index. I would love for you to tell me a little bit about that and what it is that the index does.
Matt:
Fabulous. Well, the American Opportunity Index is something that we think really changes the game in terms of how we can help companies evaluate worker experience and to do that at scale. A lot of work that’s been done thus far relies on sentiment surveys, or you get to things that try to evaluate job quality by looking at the inputs, what kind of benefits people get and do they have flexibility and time off. Those things are super important to employees, to how they progress. But what we tried to do with the Opportunity Index, together with our colleagues at the Harvard Business School and at the Schultz Family Foundation was to instead look at what happens to workers, and how being at a given company changes their trajectory. So, it grows out of some past work that we had done where we looked at how people move up from what are often called poverty trap jobs, and we found that a lot of … There’s a number of factors, when you switch, what fields you switch that play out.
But one of the ones that seemed to have the biggest impact on people’s upward mobility was the specific company you work for. So, you could have two workers in the exact same job at two directly competing firms who have entirely different prospects for whether or not they move up. And so, the Opportunity Index measured the Fortune 500 based upon the trajectory of their workers, be able to understand which companies were doing the most to create opportunity for their workers, not based on, again, their practices, but based on what actually happens to their workers. So, we followed millions of their workers, and specifically workers working in jobs that don’t require college degrees, to see how they progressed over a five-year period. And we saw very significant differences. We measured the access the companies gave to opportunity, we measured the amount of upward mobility that workers experience.
So, can you get on the ladder? Can you move up the ladder? We measured the earnings that people have. Are you making enough to stay on the ladder? As we move toward releasing, by the way this fall, the 2023 index, we also are looking at questions of fairness. Are people moving up to ladder equally? And some measures of worker experience. What we found is that these measures really do distinguish companies. So, if you think about even something as basic as pay, we think that a given role pay is going to be fairly commoditized. Well, the people at top quintile companies in terms of how much they pay overall, are making typically about two and a half times what people at bottom quintile companies are making. The companies who were leading on upward mobility, their workers were about 60% more likely to get promotions. List goes on from there. So, what we found is that companies really do have a very significant impact on whether or not their workers are rising.
Malika:
Yeah. And I think what differentiates that from what you’re talking about is it’s not just the marketing speak if you will, but it’s the scoring is based so much on economic indicators that center on the worker themselves. And it’s not just a few stories of success here and there, but it sounds like there’s things that are embedded in the culture that are then passed on through the work that managers do as well to support their direct reports that move them up.
Matt:
My co-author in this work, Joe Fuller at Harvard Business School, has done some past work where he studied, he surveyed a large number of HR leaders, of hiring managers and of workers, and asked the HR leaders what practices they had in place. He then asked the workers the same questions and the differences between their responses were night and day. I don’t think that there was any lack of sincerity on the part of the HR leaders, but to your point about marketing speak, we all know what kind of programs we’ve implemented. We don’t really actually have a good way of knowing were they implemented well, were they sign posted from employees, how high quality are they? How integrated are they into a range of processes inside the company? And so, when we designed the Opportunity Index our goal was to create a yardstick. It’s not that the practices don’t matter, quite the opposite. What we wanted to do was to give companies a tool for being able to evaluate whether their practices are moving the needle, and specifically which of their practices are moving the needle.
Malika:
Yeah, I like the way that you phrased it also in the Opportunity Index about those, you call them categories of opportunity creation. So things like career launchpad, career stability, career growth, having seen this space for a little bit of time, so often it is really focused on what the top down approach is. And exactly as you mentioned at the top, here are our benefits, here’s our competitive compensation, here’s all of the things we give to you for the privilege of joining our company, but this is really focused on that ladder and making sure that it is more equal. So, we’re really looking forward to seeing that next report in the fall.
Matt:
I appreciate that you called out, also said how we broke out some of those different archetypes, if you will, of opportunity creation. It was something that we felt was really important to do because, look, if you get too single-minded and you say, “Okay, well all we’re going to care about here is upward mobility,” you see a lot of companies that are actually great places to work that aren’t going to come out near the top. Actually almost inherently, if you’re a kind of company that nobody ever wants to leave, then unless the company’s growing crazy fast then inherently people are going to be moving up a lot slower than at some other companies. So, what we wanted to do was to recognize that there’s very different models for how companies support their workers, and those speak to different kinds of practices.
So, a company that is a great launchpad that is not tons of upward opportunity at the company but they’re really good at investing people with skills, and capabilities, and they leave and go to better jobs, you’re going to have a different learning strategy than if you’re a company which has high levels of internal promotion, versus if you’re a company where there’s a good amount of stability you’re probably not moving people up the chain very much but you’re getting people become more and more expert in their own jobs. Each of those is a different strategy, and so thinking that there’s a single set of metrics here would be inappropriate.
Malika:
Yeah, I think that makes sense and it differentiates it so much from some of the other indices that exist because there’s an ability for, I think more flexibility in measuring success and defining what success looks like. So, if a company doesn’t grade as highly or doesn’t score as well on the opportunity index, what could they really do to improve? What are some specific actions they could potentially take to turn their score around?
Matt:
So, I think as those companies try to take a page from the companies that are leading, here’s what I’d suggest they focus on. The companies, as I mentioned before, a lot of companies at least nominally have similar sets of practices. There are a couple of things though that stood out among top level companies. One is that they were really good at sign posting the kinds of programs that they had so that employees really knew that they were there. It’s great to have a program, but employees need to know about it. And that often means not just having an email that goes out from HR that says, “Hey, take a look at this program, you should do that too.” But often it meant how do we embed that, for example, in the internal review, in the performance review process or things like that? How do we create sets of development mentors? How do we train up our own hiring managers or managers themselves to be able to coach employees more effectively and point them toward resources that are available?
The broader thing that really distinguish companies that are at the top is that they were able to see their existing workforce as being a pipeline of talent for where they were going to need people in the future. That sounds kind of obvious. Well, of course, as we have sets of jobs that are going to need to be filled we’re going to want to look inside the company to be able to fill them, but it’s actually really hard. It’s really hard to look at somebody not as the job that she’s doing, but as the job that she could be doing. It’s hard to look at somebody who’s a treasury analyst and say, “She actually could be a cybersecurity analyst.” There’s two jobs that actually have a fair amount in common. That takes a different kind of culture. And I’d say for companies that are looking to boost how they support their workers in rising, I think that’s where I’d start.
Malika:
Right. I like the way that you described that because I think it also speaks to the fact that you don’t want to necessarily only focus on that forward-looking journey of what skills your company needs. At the end of the day, you also need to think about doing some level of quantification with every person within the company for the skills that their job tasks require, and the skills that they maybe naturally bring to the position based on their experience. And you hear this sometimes in career coaching about this strengths-based approach, borrowing from Gallup, and this idea that there’s some things that you can naturally bring, and maybe you weren’t even recruited for that. So, it’s a challenging thing sometimes to try to do that on a larger scale, especially the bigger employee count that you get. How do you really quantify any of that?
Matt:
When we’re working with companies, one of the things that we do is look at this intersection between what are the skills that affect good transitions, or put a different way, what are the adjacencies and skills between skills of a given talent pool and the skills you’re trying to fill and the actual actually observed transitions? And very often you can uncover non-obvious potential transitions when you put those two methods together. You can find ones where on the one side we’re seeing some places where actually there’s, who knew, but there’s actually a lot of people who are making that transition right now even though it’s a transition that might not make a lot of sense on paper. How do we make sure we’re giving those employees more support and more visibility? And then conversely, there’s sets of transitions where there’s a lot of logic to it, and yet we’re not seeing those transitions getting made today. And those two kinds of quadrants, if you will, hold a lot of opportunity for how you can uncover hidden talent pools.
Malika:
That’s really interesting. I’ve heard that described from a higher education perspective in terms of looking at the specific skills that are maybe included in course material, and the difference between an engineering profession and some kind of rocket science degree. I’m not doing it justice by explaining it that way, but I wonder how you tell that story on the employer side because it feels like it’s almost a different type of skillset that L&D professionals might need to be developing, which is to be able to see those linkages and really to leverage the real-time labor market information to really be able to tell that story.
Matt:
So, one of the things that I think is going to be critical to the L&D professional of the future is the ability to start from demand. Because of the nature of what the L&D profession does, which is help people develop, we tend to lock in on the supply side, if you will, to sound kind of economist nerdy here for a second. We tend to start with the worker and say, “Okay, how do we help that worker develop?” But very often one of the most effective things we can do is say, “Okay, if we know that there’s going to be sets of roles that are going to become challenging to fill, if we know there’s sets of skills that are going to be really important, what are the capability sets that are going to be needed, and where can we find them inside the company?”
That also means by the way that talent professionals need to become the source of insight for the company in terms of what talent is actually inside the company. That sounds kind of obvious. Of course, the talent function should know what our talent base looks like, what our workforce skills are, but I think most of us would acknowledge that actually many companies have very little idea of who works for them. People’s titles, they used to know where you sit, probably not anymore, and they probably know your tax ID number and how much they pay you. But beyond that, actually at an aggregated level, most companies really don’t know what skills reside in each function and with each individual. There’s a lot of buzzy systems that are out there today which are professing to capture that, but they depend on people actually profiling themselves. And that only sometimes happens.
But if you can start to create a workforce map, you can more effectively inventory skills. And when you can do that, you can then say, “Okay, we know that we’re going to need these sets of skills here. Where inside the organization are some of those skills today? And people who are in those functions, what skills do they have, what skills do they not yet have? And how do we create the programs that bridge those gaps very efficiently and specifically?”
Malika:
Yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned companies that might not have a good idea of what’s there. I mean, I know you’ve got tons of stories from the Opportunity Index itself, but I wonder if there are examples. I’m trying to think of some examples, but there are some instances where given digital transformation, you’re looking at people who might’ve been in frontline jobs that are doing very manual and repetitive tasks, and you’re seeing the types of skillsets that they have very differently because there’s whole bundle of tasks that they’re completing or changing. So, one example that comes to mind is IKEA, I understand that they’re retraining their call center staff to become remote interior design advisors because it hands off a growing share of routine customer queries to an AI bot.
So, it’s figuring out the types of things they might be doing in some of those calls and doing things differently. And I mean, I don’t know that you would ever be able to think that way and make that segue had you not thought, “Okay, how do we actually serve this new customer expectation that’s coming up, and doing things like that?” I wonder if you have additional examples to share from the opportunity and decks, or just from your own reading.
Matt:
I think there’s dozens of them, of various people who can step up into a data science role or into … I gave you the example before of people in treasury who can move into cybersecurity because they’ve got the ability to audit processes and to investigate incidents. One example of a set of transitions that we’ve seen bear out that seem surprising but I think illustrate the power of being able to help people advance step by step, is of retail people moving into tech. It’s not a huge percentage of retail people who move into tech, but it’s non-trivial, it’s a few percent if you look at what happens in over five years. And the first time I looked at that, I said, “Okay, well these must have been people who were working their way through college or something like that and that’s what we’re seeing.” Actually more often it’s working at Best Buy selling consumer electronics, I get a little bit of training, I move to setting up consumer electronics at Best Buy. I get A plus certification, a little more training, and I’m moving to a help desk job.
And so, I think when we start to see those kinds of steps, it opens things up much broader because it says that people have much more ability to move and to be repositioned than we may think. When we’re thinking about transitions as requiring people to leap tall buildings in a single bound, then the scope of opportunity is actually limited. That’s scope of opportunity for workers, but it’s also the scope to leverage our workforces more effectively. When we can start to think about “how do we do this progressively in a step-by-step way,” then there’s big swaths of our workforce that we can unlock. There’s whole new sets of opportunities that we can make available to people.
Malika:
Yeah, I like that so much. I think that that speaks to the whole gamut of people that are within an organization that are responsible for what we would maybe traditionally title human resources. Maybe it’s something like people in culture, or talent and leadership, or whatever it’s called internally, but it feels like it’s a focus on people, what they bring to the table, what they could potentially bring to the table with additional skills training. Your example of retail also reminded me of Palette Skills, which is a national nonprofit that we’ve got up here in Canada, and they actually started out with a program called Sales Camp. And that was actually looking at people who primarily worked in the restaurant industry, bartenders for example, who expressed an interest in moving into technology sales. Because you’re working with people all day long trying to sell them drinks, so why couldn’t that same skillset be applied in a completely different setting if there was interest there? So, I think that’s really interesting.
Matt:
I think one of the things that you were telling before about AI impacts, and we’ve been starting to do some work looking at how those bear out. I think a lot of the work that’s been done to date is just looking at the percentage of a job’s tasks that are going to get replaced, and then you aggregate those up and you wind up with some dire projections, and I’m a lot more optimistic. And the reason is that what you start to see there is the skills that are left inside jobs. And very often, this isn’t true universally, but in a lot of jobs, those skills that are left are the high value skills. And inherently what that says is that we’re actually, by making the work more efficient, you’re going to create more demand, not less. So, there’s a whole set of jobs where we’re going to be able to use data in ways that just aren’t affordable today, and as a result, more need for people to do that work.
Or think about in the L&D and talent world, the ability to provide, exactly as you described, this really high level of personalization, just something that would never work today because it costs too much. But when you can start to be much more prescriptive, when much more of the function can take place in a model driven way, then you can deploy people on some of the highest value things, the kinds of things that L&D professionals have always wanted to do.
Malika:
Right. And as those develop, we can all become fast followers, as you said. Matt, thank you so much for sharing your insights today, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. We like to leave our listeners with something tangible to end with. So, you’ve said that the workforce you have can be the workforce you need for the future, I love that line, but only if you invest in worker skills. So to end, what steps can learning and development leaders take away to implement in their near term to get started on this?
Matt:
So, I think this comes back to the idea of looking a year out to demand. And saying, “Okay, if I can plan 12 to 18 months from now,” if I could figure out what are the sets of jobs and skills that are going to be more important to my organization, and then figure out which parts of my workforce could become those, you can then start to budget for L&D to be R&D, you can structure L&D to be R&D, and you can make sure that you’re creating an effective pipeline of talent and not wind up in the situation where you really wish you could but there’s no way that you can meet that timeline. And I think people have more time than they think, as long as they are being very focused about anticipating trends. Again, not multi-years out but 12 to 18 months out, and creating the structures that both build worker awareness of those opportunities that create high efficiency programs that can take people from the jobs that are into the jobs that are going to represent greater opportunity for them, and greater value for the company.
Malika:
That’s great. I love that so much. I feel like I’m going to include that in our forward-looking thought leadership. So, it’s fantastic. Thank you so much, Matt, for your time.
Matt:
So enjoyed this, thank you.
Outro:
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