Close the Skill Gaps: Upskilling Your Workforce With Dr. Michelle Weise

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Speaker B: hello, everyone, and welcome to HR Break Room, Paycom's podcast dedicated to having quick conversations on the hot topics in HR. I'm your host, Ariana Stark. In a May 2024 Paycom survey of 2,200 full time US employees, 61% agreed that they will need to learn new skills within the next year to stay current in their role or advance to a new position. But as new generations of employees continue to enter the workforce, closing these gaps and aligning your workforce toward long term goals can seem tough, but it's not impossible, especially with the right strategy for upskilling and reskilling employees. In today's episode, Dr. Michelle Weiss will help us understand how both work and why they represent true investments in your organization's future. Michelle wrote an award winning book, 2021's Long Life Preparing for Jobs that Don't Even Exist yet, and is the co host of a separate podcast, A Life Worth Working. She has also served in numerous executive leadership roles throughout her career, including as the chief impact officer for the Kern Family Foundation. With that, let's jump into the HR Break room. But Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker C: I'm so glad to be here.

Speaker B: Well, I'm so excited to get started on this topic, so, um, let's just go ahead and dive right in.

Speaker C: Sure.

Speaker B: All right, so will you start by telling us about what sparked your interest in employee development?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think, uh, like many people, I was maybe misled early on in my career to think that, you know, you choose one path and you kind of just stay on that for a long journey, and that's how you sustain your career and that's how you build a family and earn the wages you need to have a good life and then you rest. Right. So learn, earn, retire. And I think what I just, on my own, in my own idiosyncratic pathways, learned that there's a lot more pivots than we had ever anticipated. And so I was curious to learn how, how hard it is to actually make transitions. And as I did more and more research, especially on, um, the future of work and just our current workforce state, it was fascinating because even our older generations, like our early baby boomers, were experiencing 12 job changes by the time they retired. And when we think about how hard it is to navigate just a single job transition, how are we Going to do this more and more over our careers, um, especially as we see young people staying in jobs for very short periods of time. So my interest was, how do we make this easier and more seamless because it's so inordinately difficult to navigate on our own.

Speaker B: Right? Absolutely. So in your book, you discuss the various jobs that employees will likely have, um, in their lifetime. Um, can you tell us a little bit about how your previous roles have shaped your perspective on the future of work and the need for that continuous learning?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I actually started off my career as an English professor and then pivoted out of there and ended up kind of immersing, uh, myself in ed tech and workforce tech innovations, uh, and got the real privilege of getting to work with Clayton Christensen, who is the godfather of the theories of disruption. And at the time, and this is really around the Great Recession, a lot of people were really thinking about, how do we. We're seeing all this, this kind of gap in which the education and workforce infrastructures are not cohesive and connecting learners from education into work very easily. And so the question became, as we think about the future, how will young people make, um, it into the workforce and have successful careers? And so that was really where a lot of my research began, and it was really in helping institutions of higher ed think about how they think about workforce needs more deliberately. There was a real reticence on the part of most academic institutions to align their curriculum to the workforce. And then, so that's where I started to get more and more connected into the employment side of things as well. And where the gaps were, where was the significant disconnect between employers and the instructors who were cultivating those learners for that workforce? And it's in this gap that I've been studying for pretty much the rest of my career, uh, around how do we actually help these very different stakeholders as well as the job seekers? So you have this kind of triangulated relationship. How do we help them get to sharing the same language so that maybe these transitions might become a little bit more seamless? So, um, we just speak very different languages when we talk about what's happening in higher education or a career in technical education, and then what the employer is saying that they want and what they are really seeing, uh, in practice? And so how do we kind of start to bridge that gap? Um, has been sort of, um, the crux of all of this research and work.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for explaining that. It really sounds like you all just flipped it on its head. It kind of Was, um, opposite. And you flipped it so that it's like, what is the end goal?

Speaker C: Yeah, one of the most helpful things, I think, when we were seeing so much unemployment and also young people unable to make it into a good first job, especially in that Great Recession, so there were all these competing narratives about what you need to be successful. And at the time back then, it was, you need to have and engineering and STEM skills to be successful. And we don't have enough of those folks for the future. Um, but I was realizing that our discussions about the future of work and what the workforce needs, um, was just not aligning with, uh, and not spurring any change. And part of the challenge I saw was there was this sort of analysis paralysis where all these different kinds of projections about the future of work came out of, we're all gonna be automated out of our jobs. And in 2013, this Oxford program really stunned everyone and said probably 47% of the US jobs are at risk of obsolescence. And that freaked everyone out. And so all these different kinds of institutes and global, um, consulting firms started to try to say, well, is it 40% or is it maybe 32%? And how many millions of jobs are we talking about? And when we talk about automation, are we talking about the full job or just a task one within that job? So everyone was so focused on counting numbers and saying, x million of jobs will become obsolete. And I found this fascinating because this doesn't help you design anything for the future because it's so paralyzing. Those numbers are so huge. So what in the world are we supposed to do? How do you actually then begin to bridge that gap? There was nothing happening. Meanwhile, you're going to conferences and everyone's talking about being a lifelong learner, and, and everyone's nodding along. Yes, we all have to be lifelong learners. But my question was, well, where is the infrastructure and, um, the architecture and the systems to actually help us gain those lifelong learning skills along the way? Right. And so for me, I was trying to figure out, how do we help people really think about how they move toward action instead of just identifying the it or the what or the jobs? And so the focus then became on the people. And one of the things that was so helpful for me was just to shift my mindset and a mental model around that automation and number of jobs to actually thinking about us, like us as humans. And so starting around, I would say, maybe 10 years ago, there were these inklings that maybe humans would begin to start to live longer lives. And so even the authors of the 100 Year Life started telling us that since 1840, we actually have data that everyone has been actually tacking on an extra three months of life expectancy. And then there were these crazy experts on aging and longevity and futurists who were saying, nope, the first people to live to be 150 years old have already been born. And I think that just seemed so unfathomable to me. But it was really helpful because just the idea of a longer work life helps you understand that the way we have modeled our systems to sort of front load all of our education in the first 20 to 22 years and then just kind of let you go and figure it out for yourself, you realize how deeply inadequate our systems are. And then that helps us kind of begin to say, okay, now let me see who's falling through the cracks of this system. Let me design toward the pain points of those folks, and now we can start moving. So that was what was really exciting. Rather than focusing on the IT to move towards the WHO and really thinking about how do we enable those more seamless on and off ramps in and out of learning and work for those people? Because if we can figure that out, then all of us will be in better shape.

Speaker B: You know, as someone who has worked with, uh, numerous organizations, as you have, uh, and leaders, um, in the education and workforce, um, development space, what are the biggest challenges in addressing employees skill gaps?

Speaker C: Yeah, this is a great question, and I think it's really quite simple. It's a very complex and simple answer, which is we really struggle to articulate skills like our skills in general. So what I mean by that is take your really large employers as an example, maybe a company that has over 10,000 or over 100,000 employees. When the folks in the C suite are thinking about their strategic goals for the future and they think about who can we mold into these emergent roles, they're actually rarely thinking about who do we take right now and skill them up into those jobs of the future. Because we don't actually have a great sense of what our own people can do. So we have job titles, we have resumes. But the challenge is those words are just a slight glimpse of what it is that we have to offer and bring to bear. We also just as employees really struggle to articulate our own skills and especially our hidden credentials, we tend to rely on these formal proxies of learning. I have this degree, I have this advanced degree, I have this certification. We forget about all these hidden skills that have accumulated over time through both Our life experiences and our work experiences that are not credentials, that are not captured formally. We have a really hard time of understanding all of these things that make us a pretty unique person. The way that I've described it in past research is we each have a skill shape. So your skill shape, Arianna, looks very different from my skill shape because we've worked to emphasize different parts, parts of who we are and what we can do. Right. The challenge is that every job out there in the labor market also has a skill shape, which employers are really struggling to articulate because they don't look at the labor market analytics data to understand what that skill shape actually looks like. The other challenge is every job is hyperlocal, and so it changes the skill shape of that particular role. So you could have a role like an engineering production technologist, and even if you were looking at Los Angeles to San Francisco, that skill shape would look vastly different. And then you take it to Wichita, and then you look at it in Connecticut, that same exact role is going to look totally different. And so the challenge is we don't have a great way of, first of all, just articulating the skill shape of the job. We struggle as humans to articulate our own skill shape. Then we have no way of actually connecting the two. If my skill shape doesn't quite look like what all the jobs in my region look like, I don't know how to skill up. I don't know how to fill those skills gaps. That's where the struggle remains. It's both a linguistic challenge because we're all speaking different languages. It's also just, uh, an analytics challenge where we struggle to actually articulate the needs of the labor market and what it is that people can do. And then we also have a challenge of sort of knitting those pieces together to say, oh, did you know you're 60% of the way there towards this job? How illuminating would that be? Right? And then I can say, oh, I need to build these competencies, these skills, these, um, strengths, and then I might have a shot at making it into these roles. And so that's really the fundamental challenge, I think, that we, we struggle with is we don't know how to articulate our skills, both as employees and as employers, kind of articulating the skills of the job.

Speaker B: Now, looking ahead, um, to the next five to ten years, uh, what do you think will be the most critical skills workers will need to thrive in, you know, the evolving job market?

Speaker C: Yeah, this is the question I get all the time. You know, people think because I wrote a book on preparing for jobs that don't exist yet, that I can name those jobs that don't exist yet, but I don't have a crystal ball. Right? But we can see these emerging skill sets that are increasingly in demand in the workforce. And so I think the best way to think about this is a mix of both human and technical skills. As I was mentioning before, when there was this narrative that we didn't have enough STEM workers for the workforce, there was this idea that we all needed these hard technical skills that we all needed to be able to code. Right? But it's not either or, it's both. And we need these generalist broad based intellectual dexterity skills alongside these sharp technical or uh, vertical expertise. Right? You can't just kind of live in one or the other. We've seen how friction occurs when standing. Say you have a super technical person who does not speak the language of the business side of the house. Right? You need both. And so a great way to think about it is a version of the T shaped learner. If you think about sort of that broad based human skill on that horizontal ah side and the technical expertise kind of going down, that's a really helpful model for us to consider. But what I would recommend for all of us to kind of have as a mental image is stretch that that horizontal piece very, very long because we're going to live longer lives, which means our uh, work is probably going to expand just because it has been for those who are 55 and older already. Then along the way we're going to have to become more jagged in these edges. So that vertical expertise, it's not just one and done. I have learned cybersecurity now I am good for the rest of my life. We see what generative artificial intelligence is doing, how powerful it is. We are all going to have to get smarter and smarter, even at different depths along the way. Sometimes we're going to need serious depth in that vertical expertise every once in a while. I just need to know enough about cloud computing to make my way forward. It's going to have this, think about it as almost teeth along that broad horizontal piece of. We both have to be constantly strengthening our human skills. Um, having that emotional intelligence, that ability to systems think, that judgment and the deployment of that ethical judgment, having integrity, self awareness, all those things require practice over a lifetime also not one and done. And then along the way you need to really have the vertical and technical expertise to know when you use those human skills to intervene in whatever situation you are In So it's really kind of imagined as almost m. Emotional intelligence and artificial intelligence or communications and programming and front end web development. Right. You have, um, ethics and logic. So it's both. And we are going to have to deploy these and know how to kind of bring all these skills to bear, especially in this really interesting AI moment. Yeah.

Speaker B: Wow, that's, that's really amazing to hear about. And just how you explain it. I think it makes sense. There's just so many things that you don't learn. Like you were saying earlier in school or from a book, um, the emotional intelligence or conflict resolution, things like that.

Speaker C: How to read a room, how to observe and see the dynamics of a team.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. So now I want to shift, um, the conversation to employee retention, um, since it is so closely related to this topic. How can organizations identify the potential for development in the workforce they already have?

Speaker C: Yeah, this is where I think AI can be so powerful and helpful as we move forward. Um, even just a few years ago, I was seeing all these different kinds of innovations burgeon in the market that were helping both employees and employers begin to surface some of those names of the skills that we were talking about and naming the competencies. And a great example of this is one of the entrepreneurs that I was, um, meeting with had gone into a Fortune 500 company who had articulated their strategic goals for the next five years and realized that their people weren't the right people to fill those jobs. So what they did was they laid off thousands of workers. But this particular AI platform company went in and said, can we look at the profiles of these folks that you laid off? And what they were able to do with this technology was to say, oh, you may have made a big mistake because you didn't realize what talent gold you were sitting on and that a lot of these employees, a good percentage of them, were maybe 80% of the way there towards filling those skills, those jobs of the future. Right. Again, because we have no visibility into this, into the sort of precious skill shapes that we all bring to the table. It was really interesting to see this. The problem was at the time, most of those opportunities to begin to get more articulate about what we bring to the table in terms of skills and competencies. It was all kind of locked away behind black boxes. Not everyone could access this kind of stuff. What's interesting is to see that now we have the opportunity to make it more accessible to more people and to help more people articulate what it is that they, you know, how far they are in terms of moving towards this next role that maybe they never even imagined for themselves. And so that's really, really exciting. And at the same time, the other piece of it is when you think about how hard it has been to find the right kind of programming to skill that person up. Say you did actually have a way of knowing what the skill gap was for your people or your person. It was still really hard to figure out, okay, what's the learning experience that I pick to be able to fill that gap. And now again, with all of the incredible content that is out there and also within organizations, there are ways to pull in that so, um, quickly now and make more dynamically evolving content and curriculum for our people to skill up. And that has never been an option. When we think about how hard it is to mitigate a workforce shortage with maybe a community college or a private, uh, venture backed coding bootcamp or whatever it was, it always took a fair amount of time. Then sometimes when you built it already, the job had changed and so that learning pathway didn't fit. So that's where I think AI is going to be so exciting to deploy in this particular context. To think about not only sort of surfacing those skill gaps, but then also figuring out how we deploy that content and curriculum more quickly and rapidly and also in a more engaging way to our people.

Speaker B: Absolutely. It's just meeting them where they're at and having kind of more efficiency. You don't have to go to a classroom. You mentioned you, uh, did some training on your phone. And here at Paycom we have Paycom learning. And I'm able to do my trainings on my phone and learn those skills or those new things that I, um, need to know for uh, my job. So, and even just for compliance and all of that. I think that has totally changed the game. Just the technology like you mentioned, and it'll continue to change just um, as we, as we continue to make things more and more accessible. I think, um, it's amazing we have that at our fingertips now.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's so important that you said meeting people where they are because there's nothing more demotivating than knowing you have a skills gap, but then trying to go into a learning experience that assumes you are this kind of learner who is super novice, doesn't know anything. Right. But to have a learning experience that can acknowledge those hidden credentials, your past work experience, what you bring to the table, and give you precisely what you need to move forward, maybe you don't need all 11 competencies in this learning experience. Maybe you just need one or four. Right. And so to be able to sort of, um, accelerate through that is incredibly confidence building and motivating.

Speaker B: Absolutely. It's almost like tailored to what you need. That is amazing. Very cool. Well, um, what are some of the different types of employee development programs that maybe organizations can create to help? Um, just really encourage that.

Speaker C: Yes. I think the most critical piece to consider is just this precious resource of time. I think we have made a real, um, series of just disinvestments in our employee training over time. And so even when you look at the data since this has been occurring since 1979. So Peter Capelli over at the Wharton School has been analyzing how much we actually invest in our own people. And it used to be that we would actually invest about two and a half weeks worth of training into our new people. Then BY Even just 1995, that had dwindled down to less than 11 hours per year. And that 11 hours had nothing to do with skills for the future. It was all about more of the risk aversion, risk mitigation compliance training. Right. And so, uh, it wasn't about, oh, we're seeing these new jobs emerge. Let's start to build your skills toward that so that you can upskill towards that role. And then we, you know, when I wrote the book back in 2021, we could see that already 44% of employers offered zero upskilling opportunities for their employer or for their employees. And so the question is sort of actually less about money because I think we've thought about, well, let's solve this through tuition reimbursement programs. Um, but it's really a different kind of reimagination of on the job learning. So it has to be integrated into the flow of work. As painful as it might seem from a company's perspective to say we're going to carve out an hour a day or an hour a week to invest in our people so they can begin to practice these skills. Skills, it is going to ultimately pay back in, you know, in, in this really long term way where the employee feels seen and valued and they're going to actually feel loyal to the company. We have this myth in our heads that if we invest in our people, they're going to go away and work for our competitor. But there's actually no data to support that. It's just something that has had this kind of longstanding grip on our imagination. But if we begin to think about investing and having that long view on all of our employees and seeing them as that kind of talent goal that we want to keep close to us. I think what we're going to see is a different version of the gold watch generation where we had our grandparents who would stay in one company for 40 years and they would get a gold watch at the end of their service. Right. That seems unfathomable right now, but I think if we actually take the time to really invest in the flow of work without forcing our learners on top of everything they are doing in their working lives and in their family lives and saying, yeah, go upskill yourself outside of work and come back to us later. If we invest in them and carve out time in the flow of work, in the workday, on the job, I think we're going to see kind of a next evolution of companies building that kind of 40 year career for their folks because people want an employer that really sees them and values them. So I think that's what's really exciting is the concept of time is our most precious resource, is the thing that feels the hardest to give up, but it's actually going to be the most powerful lever for change within the organization.

Speaker B: Absolutely. I think that's so valuable, um, what you said, just because having that time invested into your employees that have that historical knowledge that have, you know, spent the time there to really understand your company and your goal and the values and um, they're going to be able to take it to the next level and grow as a company. If you are pouring into these people, um, just to ensure that that growth continues to happen, I think that's such a valuable, um. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: I think that the company, you know, especially for some of your audience members who maybe find themselves in a situation where it feels hard to make that argument, it's important to begin to measure that churn and measure the cost of that churn, because I think that's the hard part for a lot of folks to see is that we don't do a great job of measuring how much goes into onboarding a new employee, another new employee, because there isn't that retention piece built in. Um, and I think what we've also made a mistake of doing is in a lot of organizations, we tend to separate our employee development and uh, our tuition reimbursement plans in a separate part far away from sort of our traditional P and L. And I think that's where if we get to be a little bit more precise with how much this truly costs, it becomes clear that the investment in our own people is just a much surer path and also keeps that institutional memory and knowledge where it belongs, which is within the organization

Speaker B: instead of that one and done training. Uh, how would you say that organizations can really practically tie learning into their culture?

Speaker C: I like to think just to. Obviously, one and done. I think we both know not the way forward.

Speaker B: No.

Speaker C: Especially with human skills. Right. Which I think we've all worked in teams in companies where we see real differentiation in people's grasp of human skills and their sophistication of it. And I think we think because we're humans that we have innately human skills. We do. We do have some of them. But we also require deep practice to get better at those skills. Think of empathy and emotional intelligence and that social awareness. I think we've all worked with folks who lack some of those skills or that ability to communicate well or accept and receive feedback. So I think if we think about that deep practice that is required especially for these human skills, it's really important to think of it more like a spiral staircase. So even if we have become proficient in this particular skill, as we move forward in our careers, we have to think about kind of reaffirming and coming back to that same skill and deepening it, because we can always get more sophisticated in all of these skill sets that we bring to the table. So I think that's kind of a helpful visual for us to imagine for ourselves rather than kind of like a linear pathway forward and up. Right. We tend to sort of think, I'm just going to kind of move in this, in this northerly direction, and that's the way my path has to be. But I think with these increasing number of shifts that even may look like lateral moves to us, what we can think of it as is this kind of spiral staircase where we're deepening and, uh, getting way more skilled, um, in this way over time.

Speaker B: Wow. Well, Michelle, thank you so much. This has been such an insightful conversation and really appreciate you coming on the podcast. Um, is there anything else that you wanted to share before we wrap up?

Speaker C: One thought as we were talking about one of our earlier conversations about having that long view in our employees is I think it's really important for any company and organization and HR leader to consider that because data is so abundant and everybody's information is mostly there on LinkedIn, I think what we have to remember is that young people and people who are making transitions mid career are looking at companies through the lens of the people they are promoting. And so when a company holds onto an employee for a long period of time, you can actually see that in the data. And so you can see which companies are actually really kind of putting, really talking or walking the walk. Instead of just talking the talk about humans being their most valuable assets. Right. They're actually seeing that particular person as someone to invest in. So it's just important to understand that because that visibility is out there. A lot of people who could be prospective, wonderful candidates for your workforce are able to tell whether you really mean it when you think about seeing those people, meeting them where they are, giving them what they need in order to move forward.

Speaker B: Wow. Well, thank you again so much for joining us today. Really enjoyed our conversation.

Speaker C: Oh, ah, thanks so much.

Speaker B: Thank you. And thank you listeners, um, for tuning into the podcast today. Don't forget, for every business of every size and industry, paycom's truly single HR and payroll software makes it easy to upskill and reskill all of your employees. It starts with our fully mobile learning management system, Paycom Learning. With it, you can easily create, implement and deliver up to and reskilling opportunities for your workforce, no matter where they are. Our available content collections also offer general and industry specific courses on safety, compliance, soft skills and more. If you need help managing and ensuring the effectiveness of your upskilling and reskilling program, our performance management uh, tool makes it easy to conduct two way conversations, increase visibility and keep your people accountable as you track their development. That is all we have for today, but we hope you'll return to the HR Break Room very soon.

Speaker A: Be sure to follow and subscribe to HR Breakroom on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. For more episodes, visit hrbreakroom.com or follow us on social media. Thanks for tuning in to this episode and we can't wait for you to join us again inside the HR Break Room.