Rearchitecting Talent: Cisco’s Shift to Skills-First Enablement in the Age of AI | Marci Paino

In this episode of the SkillsWave Podcast, we sit down with Marci Paino, Chief Learning Officer at Cisco. A leading voice in workforce transformation and skills-first strategy, Marci shares a front-line perspective on how organizations—and their people—can thrive in a world defined by rapid change. Drawing from her work driving forward skills-first enablement in a large, global enterprise, Marci explores the shift from role-based models to dynamic, AI-powered skills development. She offers a candid, practical look at how businesses can build a more agile workforce, empower employees with meaningful learning opportunities, and foster a culture where adaptability becomes a core capability. 

Whether you're rethinking your approach to L&D, grappling with emerging skills needs, or just trying to keep pace with the future of work, this conversation offers insight, inspiration, and a clear call to action for forward-looking leaders. 

Chapters

• 1:26 Why Cisco moved from roles to skills
• 4:21 Building Cisco’s skills intelligence platform
• 8:11 The impact of AI on learning and skilling
• 9:40 Collaborating across the industry to advance AI skills
• 14:53 Advice to CLOs and leaders starting out

Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to The SkillsWave Podcast, where we explore the challenges and innovations in corporate learning.

SkillsWave is redefining workforce transformation with its free AI-powered upskilling and education benefits platform.

Nick:

Welcome to The SkillsWave Podcast where we're exploring the strategies shaping the future of work. I'm Nick Oddson, president of SkillsWave. And today we're diving into one of the most critical shifts happening in talent development, the move from role-based models to skills-based enablement, all powered and informed by AI. 

Joining us today, we have the amazing Marci Paino, Chief Learning Officer at Cisco. Marci is a trailblazer in the workforce transformation. And in this episode, she'll give us some behind the scenes looks at how Cisco is re-architecting talent strategy to keep pace with rapid change from skills mapping to scalable learning journeys. She shares how her team is building a more agile, empowered workforce, one skill at a time. Marci, welcome. We're so happy to have you on The SkillsWave Podcast.

Marci:

Thanks for having me. 

Nick:

Excellent. So, yeah, this is fantastic. Your role at Cisco, CLO, and really focused on talent management strategies. Amazing. That's a huge responsibility and an incredible journey, I assume, for you. That's wonderful. So let's get started with a few questions, if you don't mind. Let's talk a little bit of what sparked Cisco shift from role-based to skills-based talent enablement. What was the main driver behind that? 

Marci: 

Yeah. So Cisco is on a bit of a culture transformation journey where we really are looking at, with the onset of AI and the speed that technology is changing, the way that we lead and learn and work in the workforce, really looking at, how do we prepare our workforce to be more agile, to be more adaptable, to be more open to learning from experimentation and kind of failing fast to learn faster. And at the core, in the center of all of that is how we enable people to, work and lead differently with learning at the center of it. 

And so as we studied sort of the job architectures and the job roles and really looked at workflows and tasks and linking those to skills, what we saw was a lot of skill adjacencies across the board. And so our strategy to shift to skill based allows us to create learning at scale and at speed to market, so that we can skill at the speed of innovation. And so essentially, we're able to get more predictive insights around how are skills changing and adapting with the onset of new technology like AI. And then we're able to create learning programming that is tethered to that skilling and then able to offer up a much more personalized and contextualized experience for our employees, who might have a varying level or a varying spectrum of aspiration in what they're... 

Nick: 

Right 

Marci: 

...looking to do with their career. Right. And so every individual is unique in the skill sets that they have and that they want to develop. And so by aligning our learning strategy to skills as opposed to roles, we're able to really give that hyper-personalized experience to our employees. 

Nick:

Yeah that's fantastic. That whole personalized angle is so critical to have people feel like that it's learning for them. So that's a brilliant, brilliant piece. And as you, again, sounds like Cisco leading the charge on, learning as a strategy and upskilling as a strategy for their business is not just an afterthought. It's not. I love working with and talking to companies that really believe learning skills and development and that understanding, that individualized, journey is critical to their business. So that's fantastic. 

So like when this new approach, obviously clearly aligns to your broader business priorities and sets you up to be future-ready, how do you see that sort of evolving from where you are now to the next stage where you're fully immersed in that it's part of your business, it’s part of your strategy, how you run everything? How do you see that evolving and progressing?

Marci: 

Yeah. So one key thing that we're doing that is, I think, pretty differentiated and at the forefront of our field is building a skills intelligence platform. And so we're implementing this in partnership with a vendor that really allows us to look at the labor market trends in addition to other key external data points like patents filed, other skills taxonomies from like WEF and O*NET, etc. We pull it all into this quantum model and join in our own Cisco data. So we're able to pull in not only our job data, but also our databases that we maintain around our innovation and the product innovation that we're driving in the industry. And all of this data together creates a fit for purpose model for Cisco that allows us to see what are the strategic capabilities that we need to be developing within our workforce so we can see what's needed at scale.

But in addition to that, we can also look at where are there skills trends, right. So what are we seeing as increasing in relevance and decreasing in relevance? Where are there adjacencies across the workforce and how might we get very targeted and surgical about upskilling and reskilling key groups within our organization so that they are future-ready so that they're prepared for the roles of tomorrow that have not yet been defined? So we're really able to see kind of across the board and say, all right, this role may be changing with AI, but we can see that this group of individuals has a skill set that is needed in this new role that's formulating and starting to evolve with the market. And what we're seeing from the labor market trends is that the skills are actually, the skilling trends are ahead of the job... 

Nick:

Oh 

Marci: 

...descriptions being updated…

Nick: 

Oh. Yeah.

Marci:

...because obviously, if you think about like job architectures and the amount of work that goes into that, essentially we're seeing the skills come out before the job descriptions get updated, and so we actually are able to get much more predictive and proactive about the skilling needs of our workforce. And then we can match that with the right learning programming. 

Nick: 

That's fascinating. You can sort of see that sort of change happen before it's really identified in the industry. That's a, the magic recipe there. That's fantastic. 

Well and I guess the other thing you talked about is sort of the core business strategy is like, ultimately you need to. And Cisco's a fantastic example of this, they've evolved many times over in what they do. And I've been in the industry for like three decades now and seen, you know, from they were always really keen on learning things from the original Cisco certified engineer courses you could do all the way through to some of the new virtual networking things that have evolved in the last decade.

Right. You've always been good about being adaptable and where you can take somebody or a group of engineering people or whatever role and then evolve them. That's a huge win for you because you get the tenure with Cisco, the understanding of what you do, and then you, but you get to also bring them in the future. And I'm sure that helps with retention. And they love it because it helps them develop in their career. So that's amazing. That's amazing. 

Now, you had talked AI and how AI is critical to this sort of transformation, and how it evolves. So talk a little bit more about the AI elements that you're really seeing, you're analyzing, and how that maps to what you're identifying as critical skills or closing, and helps you identify gaps and skills based to close. And you said you sourced it externally. You're doing this for Cisco, inherently. But the methodology might be more applicable more broadly than just Cisco, I would think. 

Marci:

Yup. Yeah. So AI, the onset of AI has really, really allowed us to revolutionize learning. And so I think that, like, we've been talking about skills for, I don't know, the last decade. Right. And I don't think any company has really been able to crack the code on it. And I think with the onset of AI, we finally are at a point where we can actually get skills intelligence that allows us to adapt and adopt our workforce strategies in a really strategic and business centric way.

To your point, that model that Cisco has had around matching the learning with the innovation and making sure that the learning is kind of published at the same time that our technology is being published is at the center of our business model. And looking at how do you take that model and scale it across the organization?

So take it beyond just our products and think about how do we, how does learning have a seat at the table with the business as they're rolling out their larger roadmaps? And so that is center, centric to kind of our learning strategy of the future. I think in addition to that, AI is allowing us, from a learning perspective, produce learning at a quicker speed so that we can get learning content out there more quickly.

Also, you know, we talked a little bit about being able to kind of study the skilling trends of the marketplace and be able to be much more targeted about how we're pushing things out there and then delivering the personalized experience. The other thing that we are leading Cisco as a company is an externally-facing AI ICT-enabled consortium, which is a group of tech leaders in the industry. And so we're joined by nine other companies with the likes of Intel, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and we are essentially sharing our best practices and our methodologies for upskilling and reskilling our workforces. And then sharing those best practices with the marketplace so that we can help kind of the broader economy around us be able to adapt and adopt AI in their own workforces.

And so we published our first report last July, and we studied the top 47 in-demand ICT job roles. And we really studied those job descriptions and breaking them down into workflows to say, how are the tasks being automated or augmented with AI, and what does that mean from a skills perspective? And what we saw was that 92 or a little over the 92% of those jobs are going to be highly impacted or moderately impacted with the onset of AI. And what we saw was that there's new AI skills coming into the scene, coming into the fold, and also the lifespan of those skills is shrinking. Right. 

Nick:

Absolutely. 

Marci:

And so we talk a lot about like the technical skills, the lifespan of them is shrinking, whereas the more durable kind of human skills, the soft skills that make us uniquely human, are increasing in relevance. And the shelf life of those skills is actually much longer. And so we are looking at kind of like, how do we adjust our strategy so that we can develop those durable skills and disposable skills at the same time, across our workforce? 

Nick:

Wow. 

Marci: 

And then the consortium also, basically, created a catalog of learning recommendations across all of our companies, so things that we publish externally to help the marketplace around us be able to upskill and reskill in the skills of the future. And so that was all published last July, and now we're working on the next phase of work where we're actually expanding that catalog from, you know, roughly 80 recommendations, learning recommendations, to... 

Nick:

Yup. 

Marci: 

...almost 200. And it's all in a, it will all be in a searchable catalog so that people can say, “hey, I'm in this job role, I need to develop the skill set.” And then you can kind of pinpoint and target and find the learning that's available within the marketplace across our companies. So that's sort of a big, you know, our external influence and impact in the workforce is also something that we are really prioritizing and investing time in as a company.

Nick:

That's fantastic. Well, that speaks to Cisco's values as an organization, right. That no one is successful in isolation, so you work in a broader ecosystem. How do we do it? And what are the common things you see amongst those consortium partners? Yeah, that's very, very forward-thinking and altruistic, which is great because frankly, it's a problem for the planet. Like we're going to be... 

Marci:

That’s right. 

Nick:

...suffering these challenges. Your highlight on the diminishing timeline for which skills are relevant I get. I've never seen anything like it in like the history of IT, right. It's just so, so rapidly evolving on both ends about what is expected of you as the job and how much AI is commoditizing some core skills. So yeah. No, that's incredible. And, so I look forward to spending more time looking at some of the findings from that consortium, that's great work. And thankfully, you're making it available to the public. 

You sort of answered this largely just now, right. What are the practical elements of how you share that skills intelligence being used to develop and guide work at scale. Ultimately, that consortium is one of the vehicles you're using to do that, to try and make sure that you have that broader impact. Also. I guess that would help Cicso in, you know, not just upskilling but with talent recruitment and finding new people coming into the workforce. They're going to be potentially better aligned to what you need out of the gate, and you can identify what are those gaps are and rapidly scale them up. So that sounds like it's a pretty excellent strategy for bridging that skills analysis into a practical impact to scaling up everything you're trying to do. 

Marci:

Yeah. 

Nick:

Cool. Excellent. So when you know, when you're thinking about other people in the industry like CLOs, HR leaders, business leaders that are doing things like, other than obviously following the work that you're doing at Cisco, what are the kinds of things that we can prepare for that help us make our workforce future ready? Right. It's obviously what we're at SkillsWave trying to do is, again, trying to close that gap, trying to help support employers upskilling their people. But what are the kinds of things you're seeing that, you know, an average organizations should be thinking about and doing to really try and improve that, that maybe don't have the resources that Cisco does right this minute? 

Marci:

Yeah. I think a big part of, what we've been talking about is really understanding sort of the maturity curve around AI adoption within your workforce and then being able to target your strategies based off of kind of where you are. Interestingly enough, as we were really studying kind of from an external perspective with the consortium, but then also looking internally, we saw the focus go from really needing to get the highly technical AI skills up and running… 

Nick:

Right.

Marci:

 ...and there was a lot of focus on that, right. And we have really robust certification programs around that. And then what we were finding was that the rest of the employee base that is non-technical in their roles was sort of left behind in sort of how do we get them to understand the everyday use cases of AI? And interestingly enough, the consortium research packs this up and shows that the skilling needs are increasing from an AI perspective for the non-technical roles, and they're sort of plateauing from a technical perspective. And so, it's an interesting dynamic that's happening. And so what we've done is we've created an internal AI for Everyone formal learning program. It's self-directed, digital, and it's really highly experiential, and it helps employees kind of move up the maturity curve.

And so we basically are like, “hey, just start by engaging with it and understand just some like practical use cases of how you might use it in your everyday work and then work your way up to the point where you are able to embed AI into your workflows so you can analyze your own workflows” and you can say, “hey, I can actually use AI here to take the administrative burden off of, you know, these rote tasks, and I can spend my time and energy on problem solving, creative thinking,” those more deeply human skills that we talked about. And so the program, the learning experience basically takes you through that journey and gives you practical experiences that you can put into practice immediately. So it's sort of like, here you go. Here's a prompt. Go test it out. And it teaches our employee base our strategy from an AI perspective, but also what tools are available to them.
 

So obviously Cisco has our own AI tools that we want folks to be able to adopt and use within their workflow. And so we teach them. And we also have a prompt library that is available that you can look at for your job role and skills that you're looking, you know, to automate or augment with AI. Right. And so the courseware basically is very fit for purpose for Cisco because we're teaching our employee base about us and how we are going to embrace and adopt it. 

And so as you think about, you know, the advice to like HR and business leaders would be, you know, really look at what is your strategy and make sure you're anchoring your learning programming to that strategy. And so a lot of what we've done, you know, I think there's been a lot of focus in the learning industry over the last 5 to 10 years around curation. Everything exists off the shelf. Just grab it, curate it, put it into a pathway and publish it. But what we're seeing, or what I'm seeing within the Cisco context, is that the need for the more customized experiences is actually increasing, with what we're doing. And so, really kind of anchoring to strategy is critical and core to success in our space. So that would be kind of my big... 

Nick:

Your big pitch. Yeah. Yeah. Advice. 

Marci:

My big pitch. Yeah. 

Nick:

Great. And it ties back to something you said earlier. Like it does tie back to, like, the personalization aspect of it. You're right. I think we've all potentially aggressively overcorrected as all our tech people need to know AI and all that. And you're right. And largely ignored, to a degree, the rest of the company that is still absolutely essential to make the business succeed. And so enabling that, in a different way is super, super important.

The other thing you said was brilliant, just like it's, this stage we're all developing the learning, adapting this learning. Like, just having, like, a prompt library is a brilliant strategy, right? I'm just like here's some problems I solved with this. It might not fit you, but go explore it, see how it applies to you is a really, really, really beautiful idea. So I think that's that's genius. Wonderful. 

So, you know, try to summarize this whole talk down to like, what's the one piece of advice you would leave to a company starting this journey? That you might have just summarized it, right, like that would be your critical bit, but what would you if you were talking to yourself a number of years ago, what would you make sure that you anchored on? 

Marci:

Definitely. I mean, definitely anchoring to the business strategy I think is really important. I think there's also using data to help really empower your decision making and how you prioritize your investments and your time and your energy, I think is also really important. And as I mentioned, I think that we're at this inflection point from a learning industry perspective as being able to use AI to solve for a lot of the problems that we've been trying to solve for, for the last decade. 

Nick:

Right. 

Marci:

So it's that full spectrum of being able to analyze the insights, but then also being able to use AI to create learning experiences that are much more practical in real-world scenario based, but be able to do it at a faster pace that can keep up with the demands of the marketplace and then deliver it in a super-personalized and contextualized way on the other side of the spectrum. And so, I think as we think about, you know, the opportunity that we have is really looking at how do we use AI to optimize what we're doing from a learning perspective and really cut out the noise for people so that they can spend the time and energy on the right skill building... 

Nick:

Right, right 

Marci:

...for them, but for the company, too. Yeah. And so we talk a little bit about that, like symbiotic relationship of like it's not just growth for personal and professional growth, but it's growth for the company right. And really making sure that we're showcasing how we're developing and investing in the future readiness of our workforce so that it's good for them and for the company.

And then to your point, absolutely, our value system at Cisco is what, you know, what is good for the world around us. And so we really look at kind of that pull-through in that kind of spectrum of how skilling is at the center of what we're doing across the world. 

Nick: 

Wow. So like, you like emphasize that sort of balance, right, so that companies and employees need to work together and that ultimately they benefit both. Like there's some beautiful stuff in this conversation that really speaks to the hard work. I also believe. So I'm really thrilled to have spent time with you today and talking to us. 

So I, I just want to say thank you for sharing your insights and that experience that you have, you know, leading your Cisco shift to skills-based enablement. That sounds like an amazing journey, which you are, like, very, very far along. That's incredible. And, you know, as we heard, like, we think about how we develop the talent isn't just really about just staying competitive or making sure we have the right fit, a person for a job is really how you enable and build that workforce to be really ready for what's next. So the insights you gave today are wonderful. So I'm thankful. 

For those people who found this conversation today with Marci helpful, Be sure to subscribe and share with your network. If you're looking to bring more agility, intelligence, and impact to your own learning strategy, visit us at SkillsWave.com. Look up what Marci was talking about with the Cisco consortium. And then we can change the world.

Thank you. Marci,

Marci:

Thanks for having me.

Outro:

Thanks for listening to The SkillsWave Podcast. If you're looking to streamline how employees discover, request and register for high impact upskilling while making education benefits easier to manage, visit SkillsWave.com to see how the free-to-use platform works.