The SkillsWave Podcast

How a “Skills And” Talent Strategy Can Help Companies Fill Open Roles | Meena Naik and Cat Ward

• SkillsWave • Season 1 • Episode 3

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This week we welcome two guests from Jobs for the Future (JFF): Meena Naik, director, skills-first design, and Cat Ward, vice president, employer mobilization. In their roles at JFF, our guests work to drive transformation of the education and workforce systems to achieve equitable economic advancement for all. 

In this episode, we talk about what defines a quality job, and how JFF is striving to create more equitable access to these positions. Cat and Meena also unpack the topic of skills-based hiring—not only what it means, but also why it may not be the silver bullet many L&D leaders hope, at least not without taking a step back to build the support needed to make it a successful hiring practice.  

Tune in to learn more about the role skills play in hiring and job mobility and advice on how to overcome challenges faced by companies looking to move past traditional ways of thinking and doing.  

Resources we talked about in this episode: 

16:22 - LinkedIn 2023 Talent Connect Conference 

20:43 - JFF Horizons Conference 

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 join us from Jobs for the Future, a U.S. nonprofit that drives transformation of the education and workforce systems to achieve equitable economic advancement for all. Here with us today is Meena Naik and Cat Ward. Meena is the Director of Skills First Design at JFFLabs. She focuses on partnering with organizations and education providers to support the implementation of best practices for skills-based approaches. 

Cat Ward is Vice President of the Employer Mobilization Practice at JFF, leading the organization’s efforts to engage the private sector as a strategic force for good. She leads a team that advises major corporations on envisioning, developing and implementing strategies that are good for multiple stakeholders, including workers, businesses and communities. Cat, Meena, welcome to the show, and thank you for joining us. 

Cat: 

Thank you. We’re excited to be here. 

Malika: 

Likewise, likewise. So let’s get started and tell us… I would love if you could tell our listeners a little bit about what Jobs for the Future is and about your new North Star. Meena, maybe we can start with you. 

Meena: 

Yeah. Thanks for having us and for this question to get us started. So Jobs for the Future, as you mentioned, is this national nonprofit, and we sit here sort of at the intersection of workforce, of policy of education, and really at the center of a variety of systems that have to work together to support the learner and the worker. They’re the systems that help people progress through their life cycle, from learner, student to worker to advancement into professional careers and journeys all the way through to the other end of the cycle. And our North Star is just as ambitious as that whole process of sitting at the middle of these systems is. 

And that is that in 10 years, 75 million people facing systemic barriers to advancement will be in quality jobs. And the big thing there is this idea of quality jobs. So the first part is that 75 million is a big number. We anticipate, based on our current studies, that nearly half of our community and our population are, in fact, already in jobs that are of some quality. They are in places where they have opportunities for advancement. Their wages are where they should be. They have stability. They have agency. They’re able to do the things that they need to do within their work and place of employment. 

But there is a large number–half of 75 million is a really big number–and that number of people, these are individuals who face systemic barriers to advancement. They face systemic barriers to being able to access quality jobs. They face risks and challenges as it relates to being able to progress through those jobs. And that’s where we’re trying to do our work. The other part of this equation is that quality job piece that I mentioned. It’s this idea that historically, in the past, we’ve often thought about quality jobs as, “Hey, I make a living wage. I can pay my bills. We’re in good shape.” 

And where we sit at JFF is pushing the limit on that, and we’re really trying to say that, “It’s not just good enough that I can pay the bills. Is this additive to my life?” And the way that we’ve tried to figure out how to measure that is, “Do I have a quality wage? Can I, in fact, advance in my career, or am I ending up in a job where there’s really nowhere else for me to go? 

And if so, what are the consequences of that? Do I have stability? Do I have clarity in what it is that I’m doing? Is there agency for me to be able to move around and do the things I need to do? And how does all of this playing together actually then lead to something that is of quality where my work is additive to my life and I’m additive to my work, and I’m able to do the things that I want to do that are beyond my place of employment and, of course, paying the bills?” 

Malika: 

Right. 

Meena: 

I’ll pause here, though, and Cat, I know you’ve got some additional thoughts and ideas here, particularly with how we, as JFF, are thinking about the North Star and then also the populations we serve and how this North Star could actually affect them. 

Cat: 

Yeah, no, thank you, Meena. That was a great start. And I would just say, so JFF has been doing the work that we’ve been doing for 40 years. We are working at the national level, and Meena teed this up. I mean, these are systemic issues that we’re trying to address, and we’re working at the systems level against these issues. And when we think about the worker population that we’re focused on here, and these are individuals who are facing systemic barriers to advancement, only one in three of these workers is actually working in what we classify as a quality job right now. 

Malika: 

Right. 

Cat: 

So that’s pretty concerning for us here. And again, as Meena pointed out, this is more than just making minimum wage or a living wage. For us, a quality job is about one’s mobility potential in their lifetime, right. So we want to make sure we’re going at this work in a comprehensive way and thinking about it as early as possible in someone’s learning journey and preparing them for those quality jobs. 

And saying to employers, “Hey, you’ve got to be creating quality jobs, and you’ve got to be making sure that when you go about recruiting that you’re opening the aperture so that you’re creating an equitable playing field for people getting into these quality jobs.” We’re saying to policymakers, “Hey, you’ve got to be making sure that you are making the policies at scale at both the federal and the state level that are going to create the conditions for people to step into these quality jobs.” 

We’re working right now with innovators at JFFVentures, finding those promising solutions whereby we can actually get some new ideas in the field that have equity at the center of them and have scalability potential. So Jobs for the Future has a real vast array of ways that we go about addressing this challenge. And it’s a big one. But for those of us who’ve worked in workforce development and learning and education reform, we’re pretty excited about the quality angle because not just any job, which, sometimes, when we’ve made big pushes in the past, it’s been get a job any job, and we’re saying that is not enough. 

Malika: 

Right. Right. I think one of the things that strikes me out of this conversation is JFF’s concern with systems change but also doing that at the ecosystem level, which is not just, “We’re going at this alone, but here’s a goal that encompasses so many things in a person’s life. It puts the human first in that conversation, and it can have so many knock-on effects to have so much more positivity as a result of having a quality job. It’s a family-sustaining wage. It affords you the opportunity to build generational wealth. 

It helps close that economic mobility gap between racial populations or first-time college goers, et cetera.” When we talk about the things that are tying these conversations together, one of the things that’s been coming up a lot in my research over the last year is this idea of skills first. I mean, it’s in Meena’s title as one example. So I’d love if we could shift gears a little bit and talk about the benefits of sort of a skills-first talent strategy, including how it creates equitable opportunities for advancement. So, Meena, I’ll pass it to you. 

Meena: 

Yeah, no, thanks for that question. And skills is definitely front and center in a lot of conversations right now. And truthfully, a lot of it comes down to what is the unit at which we can actually have conversations around what someone knows and can do. If we look at the way that our systems have been set up thus far, folks move through education pipelines. If they finish at a certain level as they exit, they get some sort of indicator of that completion. And then, that indicator becomes the measure that folks are able to then apply to jobs, access jobs and move through employment pathways. 

And the limitation there is not everyone has access to those pathways, first of all. Not everyone has access to the same opportunities for education. And when they do, they also have… there’s significant inequities in that as well, from financial burden to being able to pursue those all the way up through the actual access, like physical access to those locations and being able to do that. But more than that, it also doesn’t take into account what an individual actually brings to the table. It only looks at the skills that I got because an education provider said, “Hey, Meena, you learned this.” That’s the only signal that seems to matter. 

And what is shifting is, and there’s a lot of reasons for this from what we’re hearing if you ever hear the term, the tight labor market, meaning that there are more jobs and there are skilled workers to actually fill them, all the way up through recessions that have come out of the pandemic. And I don’t mean economic recession. I mean the actual movement of people in jobs, individuals, the quiet quitting movement, things like that where folks have actually been reevaluating what they bring to their jobs and what they’re valued for. 

And so when you put all that together, the conversation is really shifting to, “What is it that I bring to the table that could be valued? And is that only signaled because an education provider or a credentialing provider, be it a test that I took or a path that I pursued, says I can do the thing?” 

Malika: 

Right. 

Meena: 

And that’s where skills have started to step in. And on one side of the pipe, when we think about the demand side, it’s really thinking about, “I need to be able to access the right workers more quickly. And so I need to be able to identify those skills.” When we think about the supply side, it’s individuals actually wanting to garner that agency and being able to show what it is that they bring to the table. And if they don’t want to show it or if they’re not at that point, it is also them being able to signal what it is that they know, right. Even if they don’t want to do it, that they’re able to actively communicate what that is. 

The other thing that’s happening is our workforce is rapidly changing, and our ways of working are rapidly changing. And when I talk about this, I’m talking about things like climate change and how that’s shifting, which jobs are growing. If we think about within the United States with investments into infrastructure manufacturing in green jobs, if we think about the shortage, for example, in cybersecurity in the United States. And then, more recently, the biggest buzzword that has, I think, also taken over skills is artificial intelligence and AI. 

And being able to respond to that with agility doesn’t happen if we’re still structured in these very blocked and chunked ways of accessing skills and knowledge. The only way that we can really do that in a way that is effective for our whole workforce and the jobs that are being filled is if we actually shift the conversation towards, “What it is that I know? What it is I can do, and how that fits in with what’s in front of me? And then also incrementally then what is it that I need to learn to continue moving forward?” 

And so all of that coming together is what we’re talking about. The reason we’re at this place is because our systems, to this point, have actually been super uncoordinated. When we think about our education systems responding to a workforce need, this happens over the course of years. It doesn’t happen immediately. Computer science was a degree that existed five or six years after computer coding was a job. That rate of change is no longer appropriate because the technology itself is so rapidly evolving that five years is a lifetime in this new cycle. 

Malika: 

That’s fantastic. I wanted to give you a moment to finish that thought because I could have listened to that for another hour. But I think you gave a really great segue into the next portion I want to go into, which is really about what employers are experiencing right now. And I think you capped it off perfectly with that last example. If there’s a need to find workers to fill jobs, how can adopting a skills-first talent strategy support employers? Cat, I’d love to hear from you on that. 

Cat: 

Yeah, so I would just say, let me start this by saying I think we’re seeing a lot of really hopeful indicators among employers that this is the direction that they’re moving in. 

Malika: 

Right. 

Cat: 

And I think that one of the debates that we have internally that, frankly, I also talk about externally with our employer partners is is a move to a skills-first economy in inevitability, or is this just a fad conversation that’s going to pass. And what we hear again and again is actually people feel it’s an inevitability. I mean, there certainly are some naysayers, but people are feeling that we’re going this way. And I think that that’s happening for a couple of reasons. One is the tech infrastructure that especially large employers are using to manage talent, your HRIS, right, and your ATS. These are moving in the direction of being skill-centric. So there’s that. 

Then we’ve got, as Meena was talking about, the language that we use to understand readiness for a role is starting to really center around the language of skills. And that’s because you can, for better for worse, Meena, I’m going to say it in this podcast, it’s like atomize down to–and by the way, there are some real drawbacks with that concept of atomization of an individual–but you can break things down to their sort of most measurable, smallest component, create a common denominator, so to speak, around skills when you’re looking at candidates. 

That is easier than for, especially as we get into a better people analytics, just more data collection, greater sophistication among talent leaders in the use of technology, and managing people and management at scale on a lot of this stuff. So the tech is taking us there. Just earlier today, I was on a call with Workday, and they were saying, “Look, we’re seeing some common barriers.” Maybe if we get into barriers, I’ll bring you some of the hot takes from that conversation. 

Malika: 

Right. 

Cat: 

But the tech is taking us there. There’s the sort of broader social argument for this. There’s also… Just generally speaking, employers are feeling as though the labor economy is really tight, right. It is still a worker’s job market right now. There’s still a little bit more control in the hands of the workers than in the employers. We don’t know how long that’s going to last. Frankly, it’s been going on for much longer than I think any of us had expected in the labor economy right now. But employers are trying to make sure that they can attract and retain the best people. So you’ve got this new language. You’ve got the tech infrastructure. You’ve got the high demand for talent, high competition for talent. You’ve got a social movement happening at the same time. 

You’ve got a strong need among employers to be agile in the face of constant change in our labor economy. And you’ve got businesses coming through with whiplash, like all of the changes we’ve been through in the last few years, realizing that at a premium is the ability to be resilient as a business. So if you start to calculate all of these externalities that are weighing down on your typical talent leader, it becomes pretty clear that your path to a more agile system is going to be ones where you move into the language of your HRIS, the language of artificial intelligence, which increasingly is helping talent leaders make decisions around who they hire, internal mobility, et cetera. 

And frankly, you’re more agile. I was just at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect conference last week, and I was asking some talent leaders, “Why are you focusing more on hiring internally, moving your internal talent into roles internally? Why are you placing a premium on that?” And they’re like, “Listen, we just need to have more levers of optionality in the way that we move. Again, it’s the agility play, right. It’s like we can’t only look out when we need to make a hire because we frankly don’t have the kind of talent pools that we need. We need to be able to build them here, right.” Which is part of a whole other conversation around the blurring of workforce planning, talent acquisition, and L&D, and really, what’s happening in the employer space around that. 

Malika: 

Just to summarize a little bit, I think it’s about… what you’re saying is sort of reducing that friction that happens, that last point, especially that blurring, I think we could have an entire extra opposite on that. So maybe next season, we’ll have to have you back to talk about it. 

Cat: 

Please. We’d love to. 

Malika: 

But that idea of like, “Well, if I’m going to have to wait three, four, five months if not a year to fill it, a position that I really need, and I’ve got people internally that are not only capable but interested in advancing, why am I not also providing that pathway for them to be able to move forward and move up?” 

Cat: 

Exactly. Yeah. 

Malika: 

I want to press you on one thing that you shared in the prep call, which is this idea that jobs are changing, and they’re not necessarily a function of, “This is my list of responsibilities.” But you talked about the stackability, so I’d love to give you a platform to just get into that a little bit. 

Cat: 

Oh, yeah. Okay. So this is another one of the ideas that we’ve been marinating on over here. But when we think about the learning space, we talk a lot about the stackability of credentials and how you can stack up credentials over time and put them together in a way, and it increases your value in the labor market and, ultimately, ideally, it increases your optionality around mobility, right. Well, I think what we’re seeing here within roles at employers is that with the rise of artificial intelligence, if you look at a role as a set of tasks, right, things that need to get done, some of those tasks are now able to be done by AI and more and more over time will be, right. 

Malika: 

Right. 

Cat: 

So it kind of shakes the foundation of what a role is. So I think where we’re heading is a future where actually jobs are kind of more of a stackable set of tasks, right. And people leaders are going to need to start to think about, “How do we want to arrange our stacks? Do we want to take what used to be one job and turn that into two different types of jobs, right?” So how do you play with that stackability? And we don’t have one of our policy colleagues on the line here, but I think further down the line, what we’re really going to need to be thinking about societally is what is a quality job. When we’re talking about quality job within the constructs of what we’ve known as a job over time. 

As jobs change, what is a quality job going to look like when we see the fuller changes coming about because of artificial intelligence? And what is the role of government in supporting? It’s not all on employers to solve for quality jobs. And we at JFF say that all the time, right. It’s about education providers helping people prepare pipelines for quality jobs. It’s about community-based organizations supporting people into getting into quality jobs. It’s about policymakers, very importantly, setting up the constructs to support people in quality jobs and what kinds of supports are going to be needed when the very concept of a job changes. 

Malika: 

Right. It’s that responsive policy and systems change. And I think it’s so challenging to do that when you have no real ability to predict the future with any sense of certain accuracy, right. But I think- 

Cat: 

I know. It’s tricky. 

Malika: 

It is. And I think it’s also about providing this idea of a safety net that not only catches you but launches you back up. Someone at the JFF Horizons conference shared that, Chike Aguh. That sticks with me still months later from that conference. So I really appreciated that. 

Cat: 

And let me just say Meena brought out a point earlier about sort of the slowness of systems and responding to the times, but this is a call to action for policymakers, right. Not known as being the fastest actors at all times, but in the United States, we’ve got a presidential election coming up. I think this is the time to be elevating these types of conversations. We need to move with some urgency here. 

Malika: 

Right. 

Cat: 

Skills is a very… in the U.S., what we call purple as it’s a bipartisan issue. It’s got bipartisan support. So how can we think about our workforce resiliency and agility and the policy role in all of this? 

Malika: 

I think it sounds like you’re finding examples of that purpleness across not only the federal conversation but also in state governments, with multiple states also announcing they’re going to take off the requirement for degrees in their own public sector hiring. 

But I think one of the things that’s come up in the last few months, at least in my reading, has been we do want to put skills first, but it doesn’t mean skills only. So, Meena, I want to bring you back into the conversation to talk a little bit about that. What are we trying to accomplish with the skills and approach, not just making it skills only? 

Meena: 

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s a really astute call out. And the reason for that is skills are a very easy thing to latch onto. You latch onto, “We’re going to be a skills-first organization. We’re going to build our education around skills. We’re going to hire based off skills, and that’s going to, quote-unquote, solve everything.” But it won’t. And I think sort of calling that out and naming that is really important because that’s where we start to open the door for skills and. There’s two things with that. One is skills as sort of naming it as not the end all be all. It is a way that we can get a lot done. 

It is a way that we can drive progress, assuming we build around it a whole bunch of other things. And what that also means is it also doesn’t replace our existing institutions and systems. It’s not skills versus degrees, which is a really common conversation. They’re seen as threats to one another, and they’re not. What we’re really talking about here is what does it look like for skills to actually be elevated as the language of conversation. “I have a degree, but what I’m going to talk to you about are the skills I gained through that degree, right.” So that’s one part of the skills and versus the skills only piece that’s purely centerd on skills. 

The other part of it, though, is there are a lot of people, when we look at who is currently barred and barriered from our systems, there are people who, even with the best degrees, even with the best tools, even with the best endorsements, still cannot break into certain employment pathways. They cannot get into certain jobs. And these are the biases and the systemic issues we face in just the way that our world works, particularly in this country, but also more broadly. 

And what we’re starting to look at then is that just by saying we’re moving to skills doesn’t actually solve that problem. It doesn’t solve who has access. It doesn’t solve the reality that when you look at the most senior leadership positions, who is more likely to be promoted and who isn’t, which roles are filled by which populations of individuals, what demographics. That doesn’t just fix itself because we switched to skills. 

Malika: 

Right. 

Meena: 

And that’s a silver bullet statement, though, that we hear a lot. “If we just built more credentials for those skills, if we just created more incremental pathways, if we just focused on these skills altogether, everything’s going to be more equitable. Everyone’s going to have access to everything. It’s going to be equal access. Everyone’s going to have advancement opportunities, and they’re going to make the wage that they need to.” 

But we already know that to not be true. We already know that there are gender wage gaps for people in the same roles. That doesn’t get solved because we move to skills. And so skills and is recognizing, I think, Cat to what you were talking about with the policy changes and other things like that, that have to happen around this movement. And perhaps what we really want to say is that the skills disruption in this movement is an opportunity to make a whole bunch of other systemic changes. 

Malika: 

Yeah. Cat, any comments on that? 

Cat: 

Well, I mean, I think specifically with an employer lens, a skills-based approach is a technical fix. 

Malika: 

Mm-hmm. 

Cat: 

But what we need is an adaptive fix. A technical solve is part of it, but a skills-first approach does not solve for bias, which exists in all humans, right. So you need to layer into a skills approach, anti-bias training, right, and for hiring managers and understanding like, “Look, you’ve used all of your skills-based tools, and now you have a hiring decision on your hands, what pushes you over the line?” 

And there are trainings that people can take to sort of try to internalize all of this. It also is about making sure that we’re… Again, back to quality jobs, right. But it doesn’t matter how much skilling you offer somebody if they can’t get to work because they have to stay home and take care of their family. 

Malika: 

Right. 

Cat: 

Or if they don’t have a transportation option, right. So skilling is not a panacea, as Meena and I like to shout along the halls here at JFF. It’s one part of a much bigger equation. 

Malika: 

Right. Just as the removal of degree requirements is only one of many talent practices that needs to shift, such as prior learning and assessment or work-based learning and apprenticeships and all of the various things. 

Meena: 

Just to underscore the bias piece, though. I mean, that’s one of the challenges. We’ve already seen it too with knowing that that skills is becoming the language that a lot of these processes are technical systems are working on, including our artificial intelligence systems. We already see biases within that because it’s a human designed system. 

Malika: 

Mm-hmm. 

Meena: 

Moving to skills is not an easy fix, but it’s easier as a mechanism than perhaps trying to overhaul our entire processes. And what we have to do is be very cautious about letting this sort of easy, quote-unquote, easy fix of skills be misconstrued as the solution because artificial intelligence systems are human-built and they have the same biases that we all have in our processes. And perhaps even worse. 

Malika: 

I think distilling it down goes back to what you brought up at the very beginning, Meena, which is quality jobs really goes beyond just pay and benefits. It’s about enabling advancement. And advancement also supports efforts on another thing that businesses struggle with so frequently, which is about retention. 

Cat: 

It’s funny because I feel like it was only about two years ago when people talked about skills. Literally the only thing they talked about was skills-based hiring. So I think we’ve come a long way in that now people recognize there are other aspects of the skills conversation. So that’s good. The field is maturing quickly, which is great to see. I think on the internal mobility piece, what is exciting that I’m seeing is companies that are leading in this space are moving to the language of skills. They are speaking the language of skills and talent management through their technology and their HRIS. 

So that is how they organize and sort of manage their people. Those who are at more of the cutting edge are putting in place an internal talent marketplace. I love that the leading HRIS providers are doing this. This is where you can make opportunities transparent within the organization, where people can go and add their skills. “This is what I’m interested in.” Meanwhile, on the backside, you’ve got an algorithm connecting you to open jobs that are posted openly for people. So it removes that barrier in the past of the only person who can help you move up is your manager, right, which is a deeply flawed model. I mean, managers matter, for sure. 

They still absolutely matter. But we want to remove as much of this barrier to create greater equity and opportunity and make a more transparent marketplace where supply and demand can meet each other, right. So I think that that is some really promising work. I think also the idea that we’re seeing the blur between workforce planning that companies are saying, “Where are we going as a business?” They’re thinking about talent acquisition, but more in this sort of talent curation, right. The entire, “How do we curate our talent across their experience with us from pre-hire to hire to moving internally?” And internal mobility doesn’t just anymore mean upward mobility. It might mean lateral mobility into a different… whole different pathway that provides you with, frankly, maybe greater upward mobility over the course of your career. So we’re seeing a lot of different ways to be thinking about all of this work. And what this ends up doing for companies is, again, more levers that they can pull when they’re looking for talent. 

I was listening to Cisco present just the other day, and they were saying something like they’re asking for 20 to 25 days where their recruiters are only allowed to recruit internally, and then they move it to an external recruitment. And I think it was 45% of their recent hires in the last year, because they made a big push to internal mobility, 45% were internal moves. Actually, it’s super impressive. But it is a cultural shift. It requires training. It requires turning on and training people in your… the new system that you’re using. 

Malika: 

So we’ve established that a skills and approach can be a really effective one, both in an ethical sense. And I think if that’s not enough, the economical one as well. Cat, you’ve spoken a little bit about why it’s challenging for companies to shift their mindsets from traditional ways of thinking and doing. 

But I want to ask the little question about one of the challenges with enabling some of this work is just the time and the money. So what would you say to people who are trying to get started on this and facing those as some of their primary barriers? I can give you a minute to ponder if you like, and then either one of you feel free to jump in. 

Cat: 

I would say there are two things, right. So I’d say there’s what you can do, and then there’s the inspiration you can take from what is happening around you. And this is specifically for an audience of talent managers, talent leaders within employers for what I’m going to share here. So I think within what you can do, literally every single person has a role to play in enabling a skills-first future. You do not need to be the CEO. You do not need to be the CHRO. You need to be somebody who caress about it, right, is interested, and curious and wants to make the case, the case-making tools are there. You could go on a personal campaign to do this work if you wanted, because truly curriculum exists to do this work. The tools exist to do this work. There are best practices out there. 

There are groups and consortiums that are trying to do this, like Jobs for the Future, who you can be in touch with, who can support you. And everybody can do something. I mean, Meena and I at Jobs for the Future, we’ve shifted to a skills-first talent management approach, and with all of the… both the benefits of that and the challenging parts of that. So I truly empathize with people when they say, “This is hard change management.” I’m like, “Yeah, I get it. We are hiring managers. We go through this. We have to do our anti-bias training. We have to look at things from a skills-based standpoint. Our systems are enabled to focus on all of this.” So just saying, “We feel for you. We’re there too. Everybody has a role to play in this.” If you want to get into what some of the broader tactics are, if you’re deciding on the behalf of your business, happy to get into some of those. 

But just on a purely personal level, everybody can play a role in this. So that’s one thing. Number two is that I observe in employers more broadly that we are in a moment of genuine re-imagination around the talent function. The systems of old, the way that we’ve worked before, everything from the job description to the resume, things that have been considered a given over time are being reconsidered. “Do we really need resumes? Do we really need job descriptions?” You’re hearing this from people who’ve made this their bread and butter for their entire career. They’re questioning their utility, their relevancy. As soon as you create a job description, it’s at a date. Like, “Resumes, are they really all that helpful? 

Is our culture the culture that we need any more? Is our leadership, the leadership that’s going to get us to where we need to be? Does our board represent who we should be as a business?” Everybody is rethinking and, from a talent perspective, what we need to be successful. And if you’re not rethinking it, you’re probably in some kind of business trouble down the line because we need to be radically reinventing right now. So I’m hearing from talent leaders a sense of, “What worked yesterday, the playbooks we built yesterday don’t serve us anymore. We need to build new playbooks.” 

Malika: 

That’s great. Meena, any last comment from you? 

Meena: 

I will sort of yank on my former higher-ed days thread here. One of the things we used to think about a lot was retaining our students. Everyone still thinks about it. Actually, I shouldn’t say we used to think a lot about, but it’s retention, right. It’s how do we keep our students from leaving the institution? And a lot of the qualities actually resonate in this conversation too, because if we think about students at university, they’re adults. They’re the same population we are talking to right now when we talk about moving towards skills-based approaches both on the acquisition side as well as the actual talent themselves. 

And when we think about the fact that our labor workforce is shrinking. That is matter of fact. We have fewer people getting ready to enter the workforce every single day while our actual job need continues to grow because we have folks who are retiring at large volumes. And so retention, as Cat mentioned before, is just immensely important. And the things that helped with retention were person-centered practices. It was looking at what an individual brought in rather than seeing them as a number. It was one-on-one conversations. It was using opportunities to engage to not be these formal and artificial structures. 

And the transition that I’m bringing to this actual process is in the way that we actually go about hiring and why skills is so important because skills lets us shift to a potential orientation. What does someone bring to the table, and what does the potential that they have and offer? And the minute you do that, it shifts how you talk to them. It shifts what you’re working with them and how you coach them. It increases the overall likelihood. I mean, this has not yet been proven, but I’m going to say, one-to-one, we know this works in higher education. 

We know it does. This is why so many institutions make so many of the changes that they make to be student-centered. It’s why student activities exist and all of that. And so here, it’s what do we do when we move to this potential-oriented approach? By shifting the skills, by thinking about how it is, we’re engaging, Cat as you said, the culture piece, right. We’re really starting to think about what that individual brings to a table, how they work within the organization. 

How the organization benefits from their presence. You’re more likely to increase that retention over time. And it’s this one shift. It’s a big shift, but it’s one shift. That means, “I’m not just moving you through a process via filters. I’m moving you through a process because I see an opportunity to do something really good with you at the level of an individual contributor all the way up through an org-wide organizational function.” And that, to me, is when we talk about time and investment, this is where you get your sort of unofficial ROI, if you will. 

Malika: 

Yeah, that’s a wonderful place to end. Thank you so much both for taking the time. If anyone wants to find you and get in touch with JFF, where can they do so? 

Cat: 

They can just go to jff.org, and Meena and I are listed there on the website, and we’d love to find you there. You can also find us on LinkedIn, and we’re excited to continue the conversation for anyone who wants to. 

Malika: 

Wonderful. Thank you both so much. 

Cat: 

Thank you. 

Meena: 

Thank you. 

Outro: 

Thanks for listening to The SkillsWave Podcast. Check out skillswave.com, Spotify and Apple Podcasts for links to the resources we discussed in this episode, related content, additional episodes and more. 

Thanks for joining us.