Kineo Conversations: Developing the skills we need for the future

hello everyone and welcome uh to this week's kinio conversation my name is andy costello and i'm head of customer solutions here at quineo thank you for joining us today for the latest in our quineo conversations webinar series um as i hope you know for each event we feature a different subject matter expert or experts to join the kenyo team and explore a key topic of interest today we're focusing on the topic of skills re-skilling and upskilling a topic that has risen to the top of the agenda for many organizations over the last year as we all look forward to a rapidly changing world of work and of learning i'm joined today by a panel who have in-depth experience knowledge and know-how in this area so i shall let them introduce themselves to you now kirsty first of all please introduce yourself hello andy good afternoon everybody uh yes kirsty donnelly i'm the ceo of city and thank you kirsty next up don i'm don taylor i'm the chairman of the learning technologies conference among other things that's probably why i'm here today thank you don and finally emily hello i'm emily uh one of canoes learning consultants based in our brighton office in the uk well you know when i'm when i'm not working from home anyway thank you um a prestigious panel indeed look before we get into the chat as a reminder for those watching please do add your questions into the q a tool uh as we we've reserved the last 15 minutes or so at the end of the session for your questions we'd love you to join the conversation so let us know any questions that you have and my colleague alex will be keeping an eye on things as we come to the q a at the end we've also got the chat function open today as well so do feel free to add your comments as we go and just make sure of course that you select panelists and attendees if you'd like everyone to see your comment so without further ado let's get into the conversation shall we don hello i'm going to come to you first of all now earlier this year you published your global sentiment survey looking at the impact of covid now the results showed that reskilling up skinning went straight to the number one spot what do you think that says about nd over the last 18 months i've been musing about this uh andy for the past six months because i a lot of people said hang on that's just our job reskilling and upskilling people so cheesily and as if i'm a a rather sea rate politician i'm going to have this one over to the audience and just ask them uh i'll put the put it in chat what why do you think that reskilling and upskilling are hot so please if you've got an opinion on this and your opinion may be it's nonsense because that's our job in learning and development and there's no reason why it should be any hotter this year than any other year if you if you've got an opinion on that please drop it into the chat let us know about it and we'll reflect on it but and it's come back with with my view on this initially i was very concerned i thought we'd all just jumped on board this effectively neologism this new term that had been invented recently in upskilling which i say is just our job if having a look at it underneath the bonnet and really thinking about it i've come to the conclusion that the reason why those two terms are so popular and why we've sort of latched on to them is they they are a convenient bucket to throw things into that are happening at the moment in learning development in very different areas so we've got multinational bodies and we've got governments with recently upskilling campaigns we've got companies doing it and we've got even uh individual departments wanting to do it so it it covers an awful lot of ground even though those things may be slightly different one way in which you look you can look at reskinning upskilling is it could be specific and it could be general specific stuff is an organization saying we need more data scientists it could be very general ah we just need everything to be able to work online so that's two very different sort of jobs you're trying to verify tasks you're taking on from a learning point of view it can be tactical right we're going to get this done now we need cyber security people immediately or it could be quite strategic like unilever's doing we need to train everybody by 2025 for a new future of work and because it covers so many spaces and yet we use the same things for it same words for it i think that's why it's proven to be so popular and it's not just my survey either linkedin uh learning cervix this year 59 of lmd people said it was the most important thing on their agenda uh you need both parts says dennis i'm just looking at the look at the chat here stuart says the skills of the past will not be sufficient to build the future i think kirsten will have a few things to say about that stream technology remote working trad education is obsolete miriam says by the time you get to apply and camille good to see cami here lately i'd say it's due to the this is the new one on me the turnover tsunami yeah there's an awful lot of that going on but here's the thing cammie these terms i've i looked at google trends these terms have been super hot and picking up since about eight pro no since about june of 2019 so they've been um they've been bubbling under for quite a long time but you're quite right lately that's the thing that's driving it i'm going to speak about this all day long as you can see and if i'm going to show you now clearly well there was an article in the la times i believe which is called the uh the the summer of quitting which everybody was expecting to see uh sweep from the the from across the atlantic over here i don't think we've seen it just yet but clearly that's one of the reasons why this is top of the agenda and it's quite a way on top of your league list above the second place i think it's thirteen percent um which is the highest number for a top uh ranked option on that list for five years wow and across all demographics so wherever you work and across five of the six regions in the world so historically demographically geographically it is everywhere everyone's backing it great thank you don kirsty i'm going to come to you next now city and gills have also published the first skills index in collaboration with mz that we know very very well what were some of the findings that stood out for you and how does it kind of correlate with what we've what we found in in don's survey yeah well i sort of relate to a lot of what um uh don's just been saying i mean i think for me uh retraining re-skilling i mean for me the common the common word is it's about skills actually and and and you know that's a word that's been around for a long long time it it pre-covered we were talking about the problems that we were facing um around the sort of all the macro trends around ai aging population um just changing uh workforces and of course then we saw uh the impact of covid and the pivot that we that we've made and so we did the skills index really because there's a lot of as don things suggested there's a lot of heat and noise around this topic but when it comes to it productivity um is really most impacted by talent and talent is most impacted by the skills the training that people have and all the evidence points the fact that just not not enough of that is going on quite simply employers generally for all the good that lots of them do do there is just not enough systematic investment in in in skills um and in retraining and re-skilling and we see evidence of that time and time again um i'm not putting all this at the the foot of employees either way by the way because of course on the other side of the coin is the um supply side how good is the supply side of being able to predict the futurology of where do these retraining reskilling needs need to most take place and so in what we tried to do with the skills index report and then it is a first for us and we now having produced the one we produced a couple months ago we are going to do it annually because i think the whole power in this is being able to see year on year what are the changing trends because we've tended to prepare in the past i think as a society educationally even in employers for things that are going to last 5 10 15 20 years whereas what we're seeing now are things that are in the moment three months a year and so how do we start to equip ourselves so so one of the things that came out the skills index report that i thought was absolutely fascinating and relates to some of the conversation we're having here you know we looked at the the the top technical skills top 10 technical skills employers were looking for the top 10 common skills and then the top 10 emerging skills and this was across 2000 employers and all of them to leicester a greater degree all talked to a covid pandemic i.e all the skills in there were being influenced by what was happening right here right now you know whether it was um video conferencing skills career skills basic life support uh having a good driving record whether it was nursing mental health and and so i suppose what that did was was sort of reinforced this point that skills are very much in the moment so you know whilst they'll always exist and we'll always need to keep re-skilling and retraining in terms of thinking about the five-decade career we need to be constantly keeping our hand on the pulse of what is changing in the moment and then what are the most effective ways and cost effective ways of course for employers to be able to keep a pace with that uh in terms of um how can learning be delivered that actually gets those skills right where they're needed when they're needed so so there's lots of things that come out the skills index report and i'm sure as we go through the conversation i'll talk some more but i think a lot of it does just does ladder back to some of the things that don was saying at the beginning i know one of the things that stood out is the mismatch between the skills that people need and the skills they're able to to recruit on and and and what do you think that the driving focus is on on this well i think what we what we've definitely found through the research i think we found it more broadly i mean you look at the amount of people who have literally you know been in good jobs for sustained periods of time whether they've just seen that industry decimated you know take a look at travel look at retail i've seen catering you know with that we could literally keep reeling off some of the and even at a sub-occupational level and yet think about all of those transferable skills and think about all of that learning that existed has existed with those individuals so i think one of the things that we are we've we've seen very much a trend and looking at to to do more about is how do we help people take those common skills if we can just call them that for now and and and those transferable skills that they may have got from that particular industry and help them skills bridge help them create a skills bridge between where they were to where they may want to go but it does come back to what i was saying a moment ago really amd is that has to be delivered not through some long and you might be surprised for me to hear this as the ceo of the largest sort of vocational awarding body you know it's not all about qualification it's not all about a big long program it's about a short sharp skills intervention that can be verified credentialed recognized and give somebody the confidence as well as the employer the confidence that they are getting somebody who who can do the job at hand so i think that transferability that fusion skill whatever language you want to apply to it i think that's certainly been a common theme as we've come through this year um as well as then some very specific technical skills and emerging skills i was mentioning before where people are having to to take on board much greater understanding of operating in a hybrid workplace and zoom skills video etc so these skills um and i'll open this back out to the to the panel these skills that you're talking about here the short sharp sort of delivery of skills the soft skills or for one of a better phrase um and and the topics you've you've talked about they're fairly you'd think obvious and straightforward and potentially quite easy to develop in-house so should that be a priority for employers and for workplace training it's something that they should absolutely be taking on and delivering as a you know without question he wants to take that digital where could digital fitness yeah i'll chip in there uh i mean i think i think this is where digital can really really help um you know because actually those skills are that you know we're dealing with kind of open-ended things aren't we you know they're not um uh so you know they can be complex and the benefit of digital is that it can allow you you know let's think about things like interactive branching scenarios and so on um but also you know blended learning so um you know you can just cover a single concept at one time but then you can repeat that later at you know a later date so you're not bombarding people um but also i think what's really key is that you're you're allowing people to practice these skills in a in a safe environment aren't you and i think there are two elements there really there's there's obviously the fact that you know some people are just naturally less inclined to want to do that kind of thing in a face-to-face setting but also you know a lot of the workforce have felt the brunt of the last 18 months and their their confidence is lacking their confidence in their kind of career skill set but maybe even just their social skills and so you know being able to do that in in the safe environment that digital allows i think is important and i think also when you know i'm referring to digital but actually it's it's much broader than that it's it's learning technologies you know it's there are so there are so many ways in which we can support people um you know with capability academies coaching mentorship uh virtual workshops you know face-to-face face-to-face workshops everything comes into that blend um so we we just have so many options in which we can tackle that i think i think pick on a really good point though because i think you know what we're talking about there is it's no longer digital and blended solutions for those who are you know slightly more inclined to learn that way or think that way we're having to now adopt it as a behavioral mindset how do you impart your knowledge how do you impart empathy how do you look at ways to create engagement and behaviors because a lot what we're talking about here when it comes to skills as well as some of you saying before and you know softer skills it's about cultures about behavior it's about mindset and if you can get that right and then use emerging learning technologies to try and create that and network that then you can start to layer and build on to that then some of the more specific more technical skills that might be then required to do a very specific technical job but i think what i was really struck with when we did the skills index research you mentioned before was that 30 percent of people we spoke to so as well as speaking to these 2000 employers we also spoke to well over a thousand employees so it's pretty decent sample size and over 30 percent have have not received any training in the last five years and then when you when you got to people over the age of 55 that jumped to 45 so i think that's quite shocking when we think about the skills gaps that we keep hearing about and we know that are impacting our productivity and yet you overlay those sorts of statistics i mean it might be something don i'm sure you can comment on you know you started what what is what is going wrong there were why is it that learning technology or employers investment in it why why are we not being able to get them to see the the correlation between addressing that and their productivity because i think that's pretty woeful that those those statistics really they are just to add a positive note to that i was really overjoyed really to hear that um some recent uh training we delivered to a loneliness charity in in brighton was actually received by volunteers aged between 14 and 80 which i felt really spoke to the sort of unbiased nature the the potential unbiased nature of digital learning you know in terms of its ease of access assuming you've got you know access to the internet of course which you know there's still a divide there but um you know there is untapped potential and i think that's the the really great thing about digital learning that you don't have to wait for a senior executive in a room to say yes you're allowed to go on this training course it's there you know you can grab it you can use it you can you know develop your career skills and your personal skills in in any which way that you like you mentioned the the divide there um and you know this is a bit of an imbalance but people by and large have access to it so if we need to shift to a skills-based view of the workforce rather than jobs roles qualifications and if we want to um respond to the changing the skills requirements that are changing rapidly and support employees with the bite size learning what needs to change in business how do businesses need to change do you think don i'm going to bring you back i think above all there needs to be change in the mindset of the um of everybody in the business but particularly the senior executives who and it's almost inevitable because this is how we've organized people and learning for since time immemorial but people are organized into jobs uh they are they are people are convenient receptacles of skills that make things happen in an organization and the jobs are the things into which we put those receptacles that's how the people who are running organizations see it the truth about employment and the way jobs can be done the tasks can be done efficiently in the future is much more around finding loose teams that come together to tackle particular tasks that are broken up and come together in new ways to do similar things but possibly in different ways in different parts of the organization and one person could have a different role a very different role of leading one team being a junior member of another and that won't be determined or it shouldn't necessarily be determined by hierarchy now the ability of organizations to understand this and to take it seriously is really is really quite challenging because all of the hierarchical setup that we have around organizing people is based on um essentially a factory system of an industrial system of working that's more or less been the same since about the beginning part of the 19th century with what and bolton setting up their initial factories and that was it's been consolidating various ways since then um and if if if you are asking people to change that it's not a simple matter of saying we'll choose the blue one rather than the red one you're trying to get people to ungo an entire lifetime of assumptions about how all things are organized so that's what needs to be done uh in order to shift how we organize work and how we organize how we think about people's skills in relation to them in relation to work um we need to shift the mindset of the people who are employing those people and setting the systems up but it's a huge task i'm not qualified to say how we go about shifting those people's mindset i'm sure kirsten has some brilliant ideas nicely done because you're not you're nodding away there please come in i was certainly not in the way what don was saying i'm not sure about the brilliant ideas i was struck by philip was done with speaking but i see somebody's mentioned it in the chat as well i mean there is that sort of notion of um you know needing to unlearn to relearn there is something here about picking back some of our um you know just some of our wholly ingrained disciplines in in the construct of of workplaces hierarchies and even the education system i think the one reason i was nodding so much to what thomas said about that whole industrialization of a model and it starts in education right i mean it was i was saying before the call but next week is a levels weeks what the majority of those young people who are going to be anxiously waiting will slightly differently actually waiting this next week because it's a slightly different exam system at the moment of course but you know what are they waiting to do while they're waiting to know that probably still even today despite everything we're talking about still choose university but not necessarily because they see it as the absolute value for money or the way that they really will get to where they want to get to but because they're frightened about the other alternatives or they're not sure about the other alternatives to know that there will be an opportunity for them in something as great as an apprenticeship or even a job where they know an employer is going to give them that support as well as that network and access to training so there is something about us undoing some of the systems that we've got so used to that i think don was talking to just then and if i may i think that i talked earlier about how reskinning upskilling is like a handy big bucket into which lots of different people are throwing their ideas but i think what's driving that whatever the ideas are whether it's a government saying we need to reskill like in singapore we need to give a have a huge initiative across our entire working population or is a gov an employer saying they need to do something the drivers are all the same because it's driven by the changing nature of work so it is something that's reasonably new and that changing nature of work needs to be accompanied by a changing nature of both education and also workplace learning unfortunately education for lots of reasons is a very difficult thing to change and so is workplace learning because of people's concepts and if you wanted to try to have a system whereby you were going to persuade an entire population about something you would do it as we do it at the moment with education which is you'd make everybody regardless of their gender race background class go through exactly the same process from the us seven to eighteen and so people come out of that thinking well that's that's how we learn and we are vessels to be filled up better or worse and more or less efficiently with information and of course it's not it's one way of learning it's not the only way of learning and it unfortunately casts a shadow over our whole thinking about how people can learn in the workplace and also how our skills can be used in the workplace and so we end up with an unwritten assumption assumption across everybody which is that yeah well that's the way it is of course it's the way there's nobody questions actually it is possible to learn things in different ways so emily you were saying look we can have this stuff available people can go and they can learn stuff for themselves of course they can but it's always and we know this is the case a limited number of people who actually are autodidact willing and enthusiastic about learning for themselves most people don't necessarily have to be pushed but they have to be at least guided because that's how everything has been set up and it's how the whole system is and what's expected of people so mindset doesn't just apply to the executives in the organization actually we did change everybody's minds about how we learned and that's a cultural piece isn't it which is a huge take on how do we go about building or working towards a mature culture come on and mention singapore i mean one of the one of the findings funny enough um in the report the skills index report that we we we started off talking about and it you know it may sound a little grandiose so forgive me but it it it is about literally a a cultural revolution in creating a new approach to lifelong learning that recognizes a five-decade career really easy to say to don's point how do we make that happen because it's a it's a cultural systematic change because it's about governments or governments if you're looking at it from a global point of view but let's just stay in the uk for now so it'd be about the uk government and then employers coming together and then the role of the individual the employee themselves it is almost a tripod agreement that would have almost has to take place between what the government's willing to do to enable that kind of lifelong culture to to look at the the rolling off the handoff points between statutory education as don was just describing into them that lifelong learning career what's the role of the government to incentivize that to continue beyond statutory education what's the role of the employer in and continue to invest in that and what's the role of the individual actually in their responsibility in engaging in it and even potentially even potentially investing in their lifelong learning entitlement so uh i think it's that kind of cultural revolution as well as at the system level and when i say the system level i'm talking about the macro system level that we need to put right and singapore a really interesting example because of course they are doing exactly that they are talking about a lifelong learning culture where they are funding all sorts of learning learning that isn't even economically what they need right now in the country but they recognize by doing that they will switch people's minds and brains hearts and minds onto learning and then de facto that will become the way people will think and then they will start to do more and more that invests in the kind of skills that are needed to continue to make singapore even more productive so yeah i just think it's an interesting model don and i'm glad you mentioned it because it's something that i've certainly looked at around this whole cultural point really it's interesting you've got a question if a comment came up donald i've seen you you've replied to miriam about moocs and in the question chat as well which kind of links into it it's what's the panel's view on the growth of mass online mass offline learning in china and then china's subsequent crackdown on these platforms so a bit of a hot one but it kind of talks into the mass online the moocs that you you flagged there well they haven't cracked down on the learning what they've cracked down was people making a profit out of it so i think that's that's the the key thing that they for whatever reason there can be lots of reasons around this but it could be the chinese government would say that they want to continue with social estate where uh there is no differentiation in terms of opportunity by in terms of how much money you've got that would be the line they would take um there is no doubt there is a tremendous amount of fascinating and sometimes quite scary work around learning and and education coming out of china i think also with the singapore experiment it's very important to note that singapore is a unique example of a democratic autocratic country that's basically a city-state where it is possible to get things done quite quickly what a in quite a well-defined way probably wouldn't apply elsewhere um miriam is saying that mooks are ex by the way andy look what i love is i haven't provided any answers here whatsoever to be throwing questions back at you but the audience uh and this is why i love these things the audience is providing all the answers miriam's and and tammy are saying that moocs are exploding uh in the us and i i'd like to to just discuss for a second whose responsibility is it to do this i think i've been i've been having lots of conversations around this recently with startups in the us there is still a tradition that it is the individual's responsibility to skill themselves i think in the uk and europe it's much more seen as being the role of the state and government um i i don't know what everybody else on the panel thinks about that but it may be that's one of the reasons driving the adoption books in the us i mean i i i'd agree really don i think um i think that's kind of what i was getting at a moment ago about this cultural revolution needed over here because i think i forgotten statistic but i think at post tertiary level in the us can we may have it if she's online but um it's a it's a very big percentage like in the 90s of people who then post tertiary they see it individuals see it as their responsibility to invest in their continuing professional development when we did a similar survey in in this uk as part of the skills index i think something like six percent so six percent of people will be willing right now to invest in their own learning and development so a big gap there and i think that does go back to something you and i've just been discussing on this panel really about how people have been fed a particular system for so long um and we've had a lot of government intervention in skills and education and there is a question which is where should government intervention stop and actually let the market and the forces and the consumer and the employer sort of take over so which i think is very much much more the uh american model so i think i think i think you're absolutely right i think there's a long way for us to go before we can before individuals will will really see the value in investing those pounds that they need to in their own continued professional development but i do think moocs or you know those shorter bite size license to practice we would call them competency-based learning i think if we can show the value between doing that and the leveling up or the the extra money you may earn or the opportunities it may open i think we'll start to close that gap here i think people are starting to get hungrier for that now actually because they know it's their only way out of the the sort of employment low skill low pay trap that they might find themselves in i wanted to bring emily in here as well because there's sort of tricks to the not tricks of the trade but others sort of incentives and rewards for that self-determined approach so building the culture is one thing but also wanting to lead your own learning experience and drive your own learning and and recognizing not just the the organization recognizing the value in you but finding your own values so we've got things across the group like digital credentials that that can open up pathways and things um emily what's your sort of take on that and other ways that we can bringing it down a bit that we can digitally support and drive that that's self-determined and i will get to that but just firstly to speak to don's point which i entirely agree with you know that some people are going to be much more self-led and self-directed than others but i do think you know as we've been talking about the kind of need may impact that you know and drive people to to to do more to develop themselves and i also think the shift to the skills um you know if we're looking at uh you know the skills we need as opposed to the the job descriptions that we need that's going to help employees as well if i'm honest you know they job descriptions still often include this really vague kind of really list of competencies that you know i for one find very hard to grasp and measure myself against um you know a skill on the other hand is something that i think you kind of either have and you haven't and it's easier to know um you know what you're sort of working towards achieving um i've never really known anyone refer to a competency after an interview or you know part of their induction i think they're much more interested in whether they're performing well and how they're comparing with their peers and you know i think skills that's the language we use to talk about our own growth so i don't think it just helps employers to to look at a you know a skills-based view of the workforce so i think it helps employees too um and i think it creates a fairer playing system as well because you know occupations may become obsolete but skills can be transferable and i think you're absolutely right to mention credentialing because i think that can really help down help you know break down into a very modular sort of view as to how you might progress throughout your career you know we're doing great things with sitting girls on the on the credentialing and you know in terms of doing that but also organizations can be doing that in terms of competency and skills uh based matrices to really give people a development path that they can work towards and i just think it's so much more tangible to think of it in terms of skills you know we may job descriptions may not exist in the future but skills will and it may be that i'm assessed you know if i apply for a job i'm assessed on my various skill sets that you know could you know in the old days could have been drawn from various job descriptions and i think there's a yeah huge amount of potential there that will help enable you know and empower learners to the language thing as well i mean yeah yeah kirsty you've got to get the point in there and it's just let's just scroll up my page ban the job description bring in behavioral skills credentials that we can measure do you want to expand on that a little bit just come off mute that yeah well well just really just that really i think i think um you know emily's just really articulated brilliantly which is there are so many different depths and levels and variety of skills and behaviors that people will collect and clades through the multiplicity of experiences that we're now going to have as dancers in this changing face of a workplace now i mean you know let's just none of us know what it's going to be like to work over the next 12 18 24 months in what is going to be a new hybrid workplace what just think about the skills that that's going to take and the behaviors and the so how do we measure those how do we find frameworks that allow people to to have those recognized and and and and verified as a credential even so that you can take that on to your next employer or your next project or your next assignment or you know we're doing you've already said a lot of great things about what we're doing but we're already trying to walk the talk inside across sitting heels as the whole organization and and and look at leadership frameworks and and take all of that so that we can really understand a more agile way to deploy our skill sets across specific projects irrespective of the product brand that you might feel most aligned to where do we most want to collate these teams that mean we can more agile agilely move them across the organization in a way that they get some real benefit from and acquire some new skills and new learnings but the organization ultimately is going to get the benefit from rather than being stuck with these very static hierarchical functional structures i think they're just a thing of the past we just need to move away from them quite frankly don you asked for it and they've responded we're getting some fantastic engagement from from the states and the support programs that seem to be in place but you've made a comment there that i wanted you just to broaden about the the the question you asked on linkedin um who's responsible for learning i was amazed by this i asked of these four groups the individual employer the government and the educational system who's responsible for learning and i thought there'd be a fairly even split but 88 of people said it was the individual now uh i was expecting to be able to first i was expecting about 100 people to reply i was rather surprised nearly one half thousand um but i looked at the people who had responded that it was the individual and if there wasn't a clear pattern sorry that it was the uh anything other than the individual there wasn't a clear pattern there was i was hoping my my prejudices would be confirmed as we always are when we do these things and that people would from france would also it was the state people from england would also happen to the uh employer and from the americas they don't say it was the um the individual but it was it was actually not like that everyone was pumping in but i think this is something to do it's a self-selecting group unfortunately that i follow on linkedin so i'm afraid although i was fascinated by the results of this i'm not sure we can take it very seriously because i'm afraid that it's a it shows probably what the learning and development profession people associated with it feel rather than what the general population feels yeah the reality i think that's right because if you if you put that against what i was saying for and obviously everybody's research will come at a different angle depending on the questions asked but you take that six percent uh you know who answered who said that they would only pay i mean that's pretty stark in a working age population of a couple of thousand people so but i looked recently at how the training levy works in france the the um and and how it works it is an immensely complicated system for ensuring that the money taken off employers and it's a certain percentage to play role for a certain number of uh certain size organization then gets put back in in return for training that is done against recognized roster of things that are okay and actually until quite recently that had to be face-to-face training which meant that there was a lot of classroom training which meant that about 40 percent of that levy was spent on language training because it was the one thing it was very easy to do and quite quite well done in the classroom now that's a ridiculous unintended consequence that you put in place a levy system with a good intent and you find it's entirely skewed on the biggest majority of it skewed towards language learning nothing against language learning but it's not where the greatest gap of skills probably is so there's a lot to be said for giving people the choice with their money and looking to follow it that even that isn't without its problems because to you'll remember the um individual learning accounts from the early 2000s and how it was absolutely riven unfortunately with unscrupulous providers who actually took the whole system for a ride you know absolutely don and that's why i was referring before that you know there's you know the need for a lifelong learning culture and there's no doubt i mean without getting into lots of government policy but quite recently for those of you who had an interest in it the skills bill was published it was quite clearly written in there this is the government skills bill setting out what they expect to hear sorry c and in terms of policy around skills and one of things they want to do is reintroduce they're not calling an individual learning account for all the reasons you've just mentioned and i do remember very well uh that system and actually what's a shame about that conceptually it was absolutely right it was so close it was it was just poorly poorly thought through and actually you know greatest respect or not respect to government sometimes the worst thing you do as a government is let them design a piece of policy um but actually i think we will start to see something around a lifelong learning environment and if that entitlement can start to be absolutely linked to some choices you're saying don and people can start to see that by them investing as well whether it's time or even some of their own money it is going to lead to a better outcome then i think we'll start to see a kickstart happening in in terms of changing people's mindset around what the responsibility they need to take for their own learning and development and and just to sort of speak to that point i think that again is where digital learning can come into its own because you are providing potentially the convenience you know you if you're if you're having to pay for learning you you're never well if you're having to pay for anything you're never going to pay for something that's inconvenient so the learning has to be convenient to you and the great thing about digital is that obviously you can do it at home you know within your working patterns your family life working life whatever and still earn at the same time um exactly it was interesting don you said that up until recently face-to-face training was such a big deal in france i wonder what was what what happened that may have been put a bit of a stop to i can't imagine yeah no exactly because i was curious about because we hear a lot as well these days about how um you know employees are staying with the organizations that invest in them and their development you know i think the statistics are something you know i think they're quite staggering it's 94 of people will stay within an organization if they feel invested in so that's slightly at odds isn't it with this notion that as an individual you're responsible for your own development so i you know i was curious you know what you thought really i think people want to be want the investment yeah and it may be that the most efficient way of doing in terms of the market is that individuals decide where it goes but you're absolutely right of course i think there was a recent report from mercer that said that um or no linkedin learning where people are being invested in they will stay for five point four years versus two point nine years when they're not invested in with mercer it was 81 of people i feel they are thriving at work versus 12 percent feel they're not thriving and the the thriving means that they are being um they are they feel they're being invested in so people who feel they are thriving are and there are other stats in that report much more likely to stay so invest in people they stay down that shouldn't be why you invest in people because if you invest people just reduce turnover there are lots of other ways of doing it you give them more leave you can give them more money or whatever but if you do invest in them you get the added bonus of course that they actually do their jobs better as well so there's there's plenty of evidence as you say emily that if we do invest in people yeah they're gonna stay you just need all employers who are big enough to grasp the nettle and accept that people will be happy to stay and they will leave yeah they will leave eventually but you know what it's partly part of the geek could be sometimes that's right is isn't it sorry kirsty i was just going to say this that there's the adage isn't there that you know one of the big concerns about people investing in people is what if we spend all this money investing people and they leave and the the response is what if we don't and they stay um you know it's it's big precisely but bringing it back to the to our industry as well i think that's really really important and the the personalization of that the individual value that you can give through a digital response personalizing the learning the credentialing etc is a really really simple way of doing it probably much harder than than a traditional sort of face-to-face classroom-based approach for obvious reasons but i just we've got a few minutes before q a um and i just wanted to ask that to the panel as well as learning technologies and the tools progress data analytics how do we think this is helping organizations map as well as manage skills who wants to take that one how long have you got because that that is a two-week answer definitely and everyone talks about it i'm hearing a lot at the moment about people um getting an implication of what skills are so looking through data sets and understanding what skills are by the phrases that people use the thing they've done and so on i am frankly skeptical i'm i'm happy to be proved wrong but i'm skeptical that any artificial intelligence algorithm at the moment can look at somebody's activity and decide what skills they've got i just think it is too complicated and i think you end up sorry that's so that's one thing second thing is you can have a sort of folksonomy approach to skills where you say well okay folks what do you think what skills do you think you've got what skills do you think this content applies to it you do that and you end up with a folksonomy where every skill has 20 different phraseologies around it and 100 different definitions and then you're trying to compare apples with oranges when you're trying to use those skills say ah well bob is doing this job but would like to do that job and therefore we should apply we should give them the opportunity to do this training which is the point or have these learning interventions and if you've got a rigorous approach to that you can supply some really good learning interventions but if it's a bit loose and fluffy everyone's chipped their five pennies worth into what the skill definition is it's too loose it's too vague and you could end up providing bob with a hundred opportunities for learning none of which really quite does the job so coming back to the point i think andy that if we are and there is so much discussion around us and then quite rightly because it's another bit if we want to really shift from using certifications that we took two years ten years ago as a rough proxy for people's ability into some view of actually what skills have they really got if we want to do that those skills have to be really well defined and they have to be not justified but also maintained by somebody i would i would say an external body rather than the organization itself in such a way that they are constantly up to date and valuable that's not a trivial task and it's that absence of a valid valued and valuable alternative to out-of-date certifications from a long time ago it's that absence of that that alternative which means that the degree that you got 10 years ago still becomes something which people use because there isn't any alternative way of doing it at the moment but i think we're shifting it by the way i have a degree in politics philosophy and economics strangely all of those things have helped me in my job but i'm neither a politician's philosopher interesting no i can talk about that one time emily you very politely got your hand up and then last word to kirsty um but everybody first a minute please yeah no i i just couldn't agree more and that was absolutely my first reaction as well you know i could i could reel off and uh you know a list of things uh you know ways in which data can help you you know analyze your you know the effectiveness of your learning and and give you insights about your learners and so on i think can be valuable but i think at the moment we're jumping on the data bandwagon and i think we're kind of forgetting actually that there's a lot of grunt work involved in mapping and managing skills that is that's kind of outside of the technologies and the tools and you know there are tools that can help you but actually uh if you were to come up with a skills matrix for your organization for example you wouldn't want to just grab a generic one online you would you know to drive performance you would really need to make it specific to your business and directly tie you know your strategy to to you know your technical your software emerging skills all of those things every kind of job function and every level of the business and you know as don says that's that's really no small task and i think also you know you would sorry nearly a minute no you're killed you would you would you know i'm sorry you would write that in a universal language as well i mean my dream is that actually you would identify a series of skills for your entire organization and then you would map those at levels throughout the organization and that would really give someone a kind of progression um pathway to to work through let's do it but you know to to aid that internal mobility um yeah but it but it you know that skills matrix has to be dynamic and you know you need to refresh it constantly as it's living living of course so it's a big role and i don't think we should get sidetracked by data so much that we forget actually you know we're talking about the skills we need for the future and that is a human one for me first and foremost and data and technology can support that but it's a human task fantastic thank you wise words brilliant kirsty last thoughts before we go to q a goodness i don't i think it's all been said i mean i think probably i i think all i would say is probably what emily and i just touched on it's exactly why we we did the skills index this year because um we want to start to get to that kind of granular um look at what is starting to happen i'm probably a bit more optimistic that i think we can start to use data and ai in some more sophisticated sophisticated ways we where we can sort of start to get from these very macro headings down to something that is actually more meaningful to the human to the individual that goes okay i can identify with that and i can start to plot and see how i can take the skills i've got now and get these new skills and add them on but but but i don't i don't think it'll be easy and uh yeah skills tax companies is it is exactly um the way we need to go i think language as emily's just touched on and if i i seem to recall one of the recommendations of the four we made um in the um skills index report was uh was to yes think about data as an enabling part of that and those taxonomies uh but we do need a universal language for skills and that sounds like a that's a big thing to try and achieve but we we probably do now whether it's universal or whether you bring it down and you have your own universal language inside your own organization but they probably all still ladders back to something that you can relate to and you can take with you so even if you move organization and the language is slightly changed or the meaning slightly change you're able to relate those you're unable to relate those skills you learn there into whatever your new role will be but it's a big job that lies ahead of us there's no doubt about it but i think it's surprised it's worth going for because i think it's a thing that will actually help close the gap on what is actually this tension between hiring someone and the skills they've got and how to close that kind of hiring and skills gap that i think is is what we're faced with today really fantastic thank you it's almost as if 47 or 8 minutes isn't enough to answer that question but that's that's brilliant thank you yeah exactly um but let's see if others are forthcoming alex would you be able to join us please and bring in some some of the q a that we've we've received and let's see how we do in the next some ten minutes or so yeah great great chat thank you andy uh so one of the questions that's coming here uh from miriam is what do the panelists think about the role of lxps so learning experience platforms and driving the focus on skills in organizations oh panel i'm going to let don start with that one i had a feeling you were going to do that of course as you know the chairman of the learning technologies conference the last 21 years you'd expect to be talking about lxp i'm i am utterly neutral on the idea of technologies one thing i'll say is this for 21 years i've sat on the stage listening to speakers promising that something is the answer and it never is so the only thing i can say is not that lxps are bad but they are not the solution the solution is never technology the solution is always how people use that technology and how they get behaviors to change in an organization that's exactly why i asked on to answer that and it was almost like we'd scripted it because that would be exactly and having gone to a number of those over the years and and goodness i mean there are so many on the don conversations that you could just replay year after year and so many sectors and you know if i just come back to say the further education sector so the supply side how much money was spent on the equivalent of what an lxp would have been the language back then was you know simply um i don't think he was letting him think it was just trying to remember what the language was it how how unsophisticated it was but it was something around learning management content and how many colleges went out and spent lots and lots of money buying their own individual one and then wondered why nothing happened to it in the corner because all of a sudden to don's point nobody thought about the pedagogical interaction between that with the learning with the content so i mean i'm possibly in a bit being able to unkind to make my point but i think don's made it really really well it's not about it i just i just realized that i i i wrote this book no this is a plug look at this it's not a plug it's not a plug but i want to point out that in the in the index interestingly in the index of this the index entry which has the most number of references next to it is nothing to do with technology it is to do with listening so that's the that's that's how you make sure your technology is implemented correctly uh actually quick plug if you're in china you can now buy the book in chinese that just arrived today on my desk there we are fantastic that that deserves a kudos to you for that i think just to your point don if i may you're right i mean i i've got a view on it we we will have as learning technologists just quickly lxps you can go to learning technologies for example uh see five or six different presentations of the various industry organizations later xps and none of them will be the same or remotely do the same kind of things you've got uh microsoft now launching with viva the exp and um totally of course they've got their talent experience platform so there's a lot of still mishmach of stuff going on emily did you want to come in there from a digital perspective with uh with our well it's about digital it's more about you know the the the one positive thing that i'm saying is that finally i feel and you know we're on a journey we're not there yet but there's more integration between you know conversations between talent acquisition you know hr business learning and development that's that's what's going to make the change you know integrated kind of talent development ecosystem that to me is way more important than lxps or whatever technology you're using you know and that is how we're going to drive you know forward those skills that that we need for it's the listening that will drive the technology and then it comes back to the listening absolutely and the talking everyone talking together and unfortunately in learning event we're very good at sitting in a corner and producing something beautiful whether it's a course or a system or whatever and expecting that to solve a problem but the truth about work is it's much messier than that and it requires that listening to those conversations together and try just get bits of the organization stitched together to solve some problems and one system will never solve at all but initiatives in each place will so i think you're absolutely spot on that might i mean what i would also add though if if we do all accept as i think we do that the one thing that has happened through covert is the pivot to more digital blended and not just for those few who or many of you who would automatically let you know naturally fall into learning that way we've got to make it really really accessible and easy i mean even in this country alone we still have digital poverty we still have uh you know situations where this would be enough in a conversation to people who are working so what are we going to do to make it as the enabler to it as easy as possible if we really are going to be successful in trying to create um getting getting the right skills of people in the right blended way that creates a continuing continuous you know learning development culture we've still got to tackle that one we still have digital poverty that's very pointedly put um alex next question please yeah next one's coming from stuart thank you stu and this is relating to you know how you create and maintain that skills framework within an organization so stuart asks what's the panel's view on uh people without the skills of the individual employees actually creating a maintaining skills framework so you know if you've got a department owning that but they might not actually have the skills that they're sort of trying to map no one's got every skill right go for it i've designed and implemented a couple of skills frameworks and you can't have the skills what you do need if you're going to develop and maintain a skills framework is a combination of diplomatic skills and political skills to corral together the experts in each group and then the you need somebody could be the same person with the writing or the the the praising skills to boil down those things into observable behaviors which can then be described in the skills framework those those are the skills which are important now if you try to get somebody sitting in a room by themselves conjuring up a framework that describes things they don't know about and then forced it on the organization it is guaranteed to fail if you pull people together be nice to them but but but hard at the same time and pull them all of their great thinking into a hundred words to define things and then go out and use it there's a chance it may succeed not least because those people have their input into it and they have to then back it so there's quite a lot of work to be done there but there is a huge difference between expertise of the subject and expertise and beyond to deliver a framework well fantastic thank you don time for one more alex coming on there i want to give a shout out quickly to anna pickles because we haven't mentioned and she said investing in people could also just be giving people time to learn i think it's a really good point that it takes time as well as money and i think something we just don't give enough um emphasis to is that people need to have the time and that means managers have to be bought into it managers aren't managers decide how people use their time managers need to know it's okay to use their time to learn sorry emily go for it i was just going to do another you know plug for kenny i'm actually in the um learning maturity report but that we absolutely kind of addressed that point you know so we see sort of the maturity of learning culture as a continuum that you're working along um and there are kind of four stages that you know that we identify an organization can be at any one time um from a young sort of learning culture which places really little emphasis on upskilling workers all the way through to the the most mature learning cultures where employers are actively encouraged to engage with professional development yes but also self-development you know because we recognize that that can also bring a lot to the to the table um so and that is really factored into sort of part of just their daily routine of life so you know we know that everyone's not there yet it's a journey but um i i totally agree with the point you're making anna i think that's our next webinar is about our learning maturity report which i shall plug julie shortly but you're right it's about finding time and it's all very good to say learning led learning is something we should take responsibility for it but not necessarily if we're carving it out of our own time yeah i think um any last thoughts from the panel i shall sort of sum up with our closing comments but any any last words you know great conversation going very quickly but no i think there's been some fantastic points and some really good um interaction as well i thought say one thing right now um i'm putting together the program for learning technologies for next year for february and i am aware that the program will be very different not just because it'll be a hybrid event but also because the content will inevitably be different in a way it hasn't been in 21 years in 21 years honestly a lot of the content hasn't really shifted it's going to because there are new questions which we need to answer our new challenges which we're rising to i think this is a really exciting time to be in learning and development helping adults fulfill their potential whether they're coming into the workforce whether they're over 50 and continuing to work as they will do full-time or part-time into the future we've got a great responsibility and a great opportunity to help them grasp on you can use it to try and come with that global taxonomy we're talking about yeah i'll fix that in i'll go find a 15-minute slot to do all we need in the global taxonomy there we go if anyone can don come on fantastic look great discussion everybody thank you so much um for joining us and for everybody in attendance

2021-08-10 00:24

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