Navigating the Shift: How Organizations Are Building Skills-Based Workforces

Speaker A: Welcome to the People and Performance Podcast, A UH show providing insights into the strategic competencies, behaviors and results needed to increase the performance of employees. From attraction and recruitment through onboarding and measuring, all the way to succession planning, each episode takes a dive into workforce planning steps needed to guarantee long term success in a rapidly changing world of work. Hosted by Chris Bjorling and Bill Banham. Um, each interview features guest industry experts and leaders from such brands as NASA, Wave A, hq, Protective Life, Securitas, Harvard Business Publishing and Colliers International.

Speaker B: Hey, this is Bill Banham, show co host and editor over at the HR Gazette. This season of the People and Performance Podcast features conversations that Chris Bjorn, president at Fidello and co host of the show, had at, uh, this year's ATD Conference and Expo. Guests include speakers, attendees and vendors, and the conversations are focused on ways to build high performance within organizations and to improve professional development efforts. Chris and I hope that you enjoy this episode and if you do, please check out Fidello.com and remember to like, comment and subscribe to the podcast.

Speaker C: Welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your conference to meet with me and to, you know, do something for our listening audience here. Can you introduce yourself to our listeners?

Speaker D: Sure. So I'm Charlotte Evans. I'm the director of Global Customer Advocacy for Coursera for Business. I've been with Coursera for about six years now. It's gone by in a blink. Uh, but before that I spent about five years working at two different universities in Asia doing student services. So big pivot to move into ed tech. But I really loved it.

Speaker C: Wow. In Asia? What took you to Asia to do that?

Speaker D: I was a journalism and East Asian studies double major in college. I thought I wanted to be a TV reporter speaking in Mandarin. Obviously that didn't happen. Um, but I went to NYU for undergrad and they opened up a campus at NYU Shanghai and were looking for writing fellows. And so I moved over there thinking it was going to be for 10 months and ended up staying in Asia for five years. Um, but really loved it and got to practice my Mandarin and um, slowly pivoted into higher ed through that work.

Speaker C: Excellent. So you are fluent in Mandarin?

Speaker D: Used to be. Don't have as many opportunities to practice as much anymore. But, um, I love chances to whip it out, so it's fun.

Speaker C: Well, excellent. We love that. All right, so let me ask the question. Since you presented already, you presented on Sunday and we're here on Tuesday, what was is the one insight or aha moment that you wanted or you Hope that your attendees got from your presentation.

Speaker D: So I've been on a bit of a world tour the last couple weeks which has been really fun, talking to a lot of our customers at Coursera. And this conversation around skills based organizations has been coming up a lot. And you know, the dialogue around this is not new. This has been something that the research has had for a couple years now. But interestingly, for a lot of the largest companies that we're working with, they're just starting in this process right now, 2025. And so there's this PwC five step framework that will show a lot of folks five being the most mature. They have a full tech stack, they have the whole role to skill mapping and everything. Um, and a lot of organizations look at me and go, we are not there. We're more like step two or three. We just need to start somewhere.

Speaker C: We don't even have job descriptions.

Speaker D: Yeah, right. And these are some of the largest companies that, you know, the brands that you would recognize. And so, um, there's this real movement I think that's starting to happen away from the more spaghetti on the wall learning approach to more of an intentional, prescriptive skills based approach to learning. And companies are kind of in the mud trying to figure it out right now. And so it's a bit of group therapy, I think that's happening where everyone's like, oh, I'm not alone in trying to figure this out. There's a lot of other people that are trying navigate it too. Let's have an open conversation. How are you piloting? Where are you starting? What are you learning from the analytics? What's not working, what's overwhelming your learners? Um, and that's been a really interesting moment to see that it's happening. Whether I'm in Abu Dhabi or Arkansas or here at atd. It's, it's a conversation that's really prescient right now.

Speaker C: In your experience, what's the most overlooked lever for improving people's performance today in the workplace?

Speaker D: So we were working with this organization in France and what they started to realize through the skills based organization approach was that rather than kind of having people in these silos that they could have a bit more of a gig economy within their company. And so if they had an understanding of, hey, we have this data scientist, but they actually have a really strong understanding of financial acumen and accounting and so they'd be a great person to work on this accounting dashboard that we have. Um, you can start to move out of those silos and Start to leverage your people in really dynamic ways. Um, but what we've noticed is kind of a break for a lot of companies is only using self assessment or manager assessment. Um, and so I was working with a credit services company in Atlanta and they came to us and said, um, our managers think their python skills are here. The people say their python skills are much higher. There's this big delta. What's really happening here? Where do they actually fall in the skill set? If we're wanting to take this python skilling to the next level and influence this strategy that the data and technical teams have, we can't be operating when we don't really know the objective place that people are at. So I think there's been this healthy movement toward more objective skill measurement as a way to really understand where can you get that leverage and lift from your people by knowing truly where they are at and not have it be so role specific.

Speaker C: What types of trends are you seeing in the intersection of leadership development and organizational culture? So hit me that one with your skills based approach here.

Speaker D: I'm going to take a slight pivot.

Speaker C: Oh, pivot.

Speaker D: Then I guess this is skills related. But one thing I've really loved in the conversations I've had with um, some of our organizations over the last six months or so is there's been this real emphasis on hands on learning and initially we kind of heard this in relation to technical teams.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker D: A lot of folks, I think when they think about Coursera, they think about the robust tech or data content that we have. Um, and it was a little easier to program something for like a jupyter notebook or a code block that's a bit more suited for getting that feedback for hands on learning. Easier to build the tech stack around that. But where we were hearing a lot of push from our customers was we need this kind of psychologically safe environment for our leaders to practice. Maybe we can take our C suite folks and put them in a two week boot camp. Um, invest that cost. It has a price tag often with it. Um, but we can't take our middle tier managers and disrupt the workforce by putting them all in a two week boot camp. We also don't have the funds to do that. How can we give people a space to practice and create this kind of robust organizational culture that has good feedback, um, productive organizational development and this kind of structure of growth m without necessarily giving them the skills by saying okay, go and do this two week boot camp. Um, and so what we've invested in is this tool called dialog um, where it's still powered off of all the goodness of the courses on the platform, but the faculty member can create a set of milestones that you'd work through and then you're able to demonstrate your proficiency. And it's all powered by a large language model. And then on top of it is the context of the course. And so if you kind of give a half baked answer, the dialogue will say, like, that's a great start, but keep going, stupid, stupid. Um, and I'll kind of keep nudging you through the milestones. And so we've seen a big growth from, uh, University of London just launched five really robust leadership development dialogues in their existing courses. We had O.P. jindal do a similar course. And this is something that our customers are really flocking to. The next level of IT dialogue is really peppy right now. It's like, yeah, that's great. And we all know that's definitely how every manager conversation goes. Right. Always peppy. Right. It's not actually how the workforce is operating. Right. And so you need these different Personas. Right. And so the next level of where we're going is this role play where it'd be able to kind of, uh, imitate the experience that you might have in a tough negotiation or a sales call or a manager to employee conversation. And how do you, again, go back to this kind of padded playground where you can try and fail and maybe not mess up in a boot camp in front of your peers, but do it in a bit more of a safe, closed environment and then go out into the workforce. So I think it's really cool that the technology in Genai has unlocked that ability for us.

Speaker C: All right, what role do you think the L and D leaders need to play? Sorry, let me start that one again. Bill, he's gonna edit this. What role do you think the L and D leaders need to play in the evolving business landscape of 2025? And beyond.

Speaker D: And beyond.

Speaker C: Yeah, and beyond.

Speaker D: We're already halfway through this year, which I can't believe.

Speaker C: Um, even though it's May, we're not half.

Speaker D: I know, I know. Well, I'm, you know, just looking ahead. I'm on this travel schedule right now.

Speaker C: I'm already through June.

Speaker D: Yeah. Um, I think an interesting pivot is happening a little bit with L and D leaders needing to be more closely in partnership with functional leaders. Um, I talk a lot when I'm on the road about the need to be able to align learning and development with business outcomes. And a lot of leaders in the L and D space sometimes struggle if they don't actually know what their chief technology officer, chief marketing officer, chief chief product officers being measured on. And how can we then um, connect the learning to that experience and make sure that those business metrics are being positively impacted. And so I've really been pushing a lot of the customers in the L and D space that I work with to say go and talk to those functional leaders, understand their use cases and make sure that we're able to show a uh, correlation between specific skills development that we're putting forward and, and making sure that it's tying to the functional use case. And I think in particular right now with what's happening with Genai, roles are being redefined so quickly. Right? Some roles are being completely removed and automated. Other people are having to fundamentally reskill. And so a program you might have built for a team last year may be completely irrelevant now. Right. They might have a new tech stack that they're working with or new business priorities from the CPU CEO. And if L and D is removed from those functional use cases then um, the programs aren't going to be dynamic and you might start to see attrition in what you're noticing for people pursuing those programs because they don't see how it helps them succeed in their day to day. But if you do lean into that and get that functional buy in at the executive level, I think the messaging around the time investment also becomes really clear. A ah, CPO or CTO might say yes, it's worthwhile for you to spend a couple hours in your week to take that course on agentic AI because we are moving in that direction. We had um, a company, Dow Chemical in Michigan, um, and they came to us last year. So 2024, I know this question's about 2025.

Speaker C: It's okay, like you, it's half over that one. We'll go with it.

Speaker D: But um, they came to us and they said we, we're really focusing on generative AI upskilling. Their CIO had IT as a top priority and they said we want to get 80% of our IT workforce skilled in Gen AI in a quarter. And my jaw kind of dropped to the floor when I heard this stat. I was like that's really ambitious. Um, and they ended up building out a learning path with a badging system we had. It was about six to eight hours and they got 84% of their IT workforce up to guild in the quarter and 200 badge completers. And I think a lot of it happened because the CIO finished the badge, posted it on LinkedIn, and so there were kind of no excuses about social media. Shame. I know, but it's a big motivator, right? People love that social recognition. And I think that connection to the fact that the CIO was championing it, even though the kind of infrastructure was built by central L and D really had that kind of dynamic powerhouse and effect.

Speaker C: So, well, the leadership was there to lead it 100%. Didn't sit on the refrigerator under a magnet. It was in front of everybody's face. I love it.

Speaker D: 100%.

Speaker C: I love that. So excellent. So, next question for you here. If you could challenge organizations to adopt one, just one bold, and I'll take two or three. But just one new practice for talent development, what would it be and why?

Speaker D: This is not a super innovative one. But I think oftentimes I will get brought into conversations with companies that are panicking to figure out an ROI strategy after the fact. They're like, oh, I was told by my CEO or a leader that I have to justify my learning expense, and I don't really know why I bought this thing. But now I have to go and scrummage through my data to try and figure out a story. Um, and that often becomes tough. Right? We can start to find some data points, but it feels a little inauthentic. And so in conversations we have with our customers, we're immediately out the gate asking them, what is ROI look like for you right at the start? How do we measure impact and know what we're trying to move the needle on? And we have a few kind of benchmarks and parameters that we can work with folks on. We did a recent study with Forrester about roi, and they're looking at things like productivity metrics, which, again, I think very closely ties to those functional use cases. What savings might you have for an L and D team if you're not having to build courses from scratch and so on? So you can look at some of those metrics. But I was working with a, uh, food retailer that was realizing they needed to increase their digital sales, and they realized the biggest gap they had was cloud proficiency. So we mapped to eight different cloud roles, looked at kind of the, uh, skills that those roles needed to have actively promoted that. And then at the end of the year, we said, okay, did those skills go up? And let's look at your P and L. Did the digital sales go up? They're a public company. It's not causation. Right. There's so many other things that have to happen for digital sales at a company to happen. That's not learning. But there was a correlation, for sure. And because we had that intentionality right at the start of this is what we're trying to change. That ROI story was really true. Right. And authentic, and everyone was able to champion it. So I push a lot of folks to, um, step away from just the need to be like the order takers and deliver on a solution of a learning program, but really take those couple moments to ask the business why and make sure that that's really crystallized and clear before you jump into, here's a course, here's a program, here's a learning path. So. And it'll help so much more with the momentum, um, if you understand that right from the start.

Speaker C: I love that. Yeah, ROI is huge. And a lot of times our L and D folks don't realize that, like you say, till after the fact. And, you know, I think from a partnership standpoint, when they address that at the front, like you're saying here, I think in this example, then they not only can find that out better, but they also look smarter.

Speaker D: Yeah, it's a win win.

Speaker C: It's a win win. I love that. Well, this has been great. We just take a few minutes of your time here and this and that. I appreciate the lessons. You're just beaming with enthusiasm for your work. I love that. Now, normally I would ask you to say something Mandarin, but the last question I have for you, tell everybody how they can get in touch with you or follow your organization better.

Speaker D: Yeah. So I would encourage you to search for Coursera for business. I'm sure we can give you the direct link. I don't have it memorized, but, um, the Coursera for Business site is the best way to start figuring out if you're looking for an enterprise solution. I'm happy to chat with folks who find me on LinkedIn as well.

Speaker C: Excellent. Well, I do appreciate your time, and this has been more than fun. I love these stories. This is my passion. So this is, uh, excellent. So thank you so much.

Speaker D: Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the People and Performance podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we hope you'll listen to more and tell your friends about us.