An Educated Guest

Speaker 1:

You’re listening to An Educated Guest, a podcast that brings together great minds in higher ed to delve deeper into the innovations and trends guiding the future of education and careers. Hosted by the Executive Vice President and GM at Wiley, Todd Zipper.

Todd Zipper:

I am Todd Zipper, host of An Educated Guest. On today’s show, I speak with Josh Bersin, founder and CEO of the Josh Bersin Company. Josh is an industry analyst, researcher, educator, and technology analyst covering all aspects of corporate HR, training, talent management, recruiting, leadership, and workplace technology. Josh is the author of several books and the dean of the Bersin Academy. As dean, he guides the academy’s program offerings and shares relevant research and insights so HR and talent professionals stay current on the trends and practices necessary in the modern world of work. Josh is also a keynote speaker and a regular blogger, and is frequently featured in publications such as Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and The Wall Street Journal.

The key takeaways from art discussion today. First, why all businesses have a skills gap and how the evolution of business is making it worse. Second, why power skills are the most important and in-demand, yet hardest to teach. Third, why educators and business leaders should be thinking about developing capabilities, not just skills. Fourth, why apprenticeships and higher trained employee models create a golden circle of long-term value for employers and employees alike. Lastly, why higher education institutions must work closely with employers to stay relevant in this changing economy. Welcome, Josh, and thanks so much for joining me today on An Educated Guest.

Josh Bersin:

Thank you, Todd. I’m excited to be here.

Todd Zipper:

All right, so, would you mind starting to tell our audience about your background and what led you to where you are today?

Josh Bersin:

Well, it was a bunch of accidental experiences, but I spent 15 or 20 years in tech as sales, marketing, business development, and product engineering technical support, and was laid off from an online learning company in the year 2000 during the last big dot com problem, and realized that I always liked to write. At that point in time, nobody understood online learning, so I found myself a little gig work to write a research report on online learning. That went so well, I realized I had a new career as an analyst. I went from learning, to leadership development, to recruiting, to all these other areas of HR, and that’s what happened to me. It was a complete accident.

Todd Zipper:

I want to dig into your work with the Josh Bersin Company and the Academy, but let’s talk briefly about your latest book. It’s called Irresistible, I just finished with it, the Seven Secrets of the World’s Most Enduring Employee Focused Organizations. I know a lot of us need those secrets and need to implement them. What was the compelling need to write this book at this particular time?

Josh Bersin:

Well, it’s funny, the book came out now, but it was really a six or seven year journey to write the book. I tried to write the book many times, and of course I had different editors telling me to write it in different fashions. But, basically what I discovered when I was first studying employee engagement a long time ago was that employee engagement was much more complicated than a lot of the IO psychologists thought. There were issues of pay and management techniques and workload and wellbeing, and things that we now think are very obvious. When I went through lots and lots of data in Glassdoor to try to understand what was driving high performing companies relative to employee engagement, I discovered that there were all sorts of patterns that were related between the Glassdoor data and the financial and business data of these companies.

I dug into all of the ratings of these companies that I was analyzing, and in the appendix I go through all this analysis and how I did this, and I looked at them, and many of them I knew quite well because they knew their HR practices. I realized there were a lot of common threads that were management practices that were differentiating these companies, and that eventually turned into this book. Right in the middle of writing the book, I sold our original company to Deloitte and spent six and a half years at Deloitte consulting with companies on digital transformation and technology related changes in their business environment. I realized that these were not just management tips and management techniques, they were existential changes in the way organizations function in an economy that was changing. Of course, the pandemic accelerated many, many of these changes Dramatically. The book ended up coming out at a very good time, but it wasn’t exactly written for this time.

Todd Zipper:

Yeah, well, the timing is everything, and it’s certainly working out. There’s so many ways to make a business irresistible. But, let’s start by focusing on skills and the skills gap. We know companies are having a tough time attracting and retaining workers with the necessary skills. In fact, we just did a survey called Closing the Skills Gap, and in that, we surveyed 600 HR professionals. 69% of the companies feel that they have a skills gap, which is up from 2021, which was 55%. I’ve got two questions for you here. The first is, do you believe there’s a skills gap? Second, explain the three different types of skills in your vernacular, because I know that helps us to really start to understand what skills are.

Josh Bersin:

Well, first of all, I don’t know what the 31% of companies who don’t think they have a skills gap are doing, because everybody has a skills gap all the time, and that is the nature of business. But, it is getting worse for several reasons. First of all, the rate of change in the business environment is unprecedented. There was a study, a CEO survey that came out last week by PWC, two or 300 CEOs, and 40% of them said that they don’t believe their company as it exists will be in business in 10 years. That’s how much disruption’s going on.

This is automobile companies getting into electric cars. This is oil companies getting into chemicals and solar energy. This is pharmaceutical companies getting into mRNA. Every single industry, telco companies getting into 5G. I mean, everywhere you look, companies are getting into some adjacent business area or some new technology that they’ve never done before, and that is a skills problem. It is a fundamental challenge of running a company, is developing people, understanding the skills you’re missing, and building the best strategy for continuously developing those skills. Many, many of the seven secrets in the book are related to that fundamental problem.

As far as the types of skills, I really think they fall into three general categories. There’s technical skills, and we all have technical skills in all of our jobs, whether you’re an operator in a power plant or you’re driving a truck or you’re somebody like me who has to use various tools. There’s managerial, there’s professional skills about the industry you’re in, and those are somewhat less important as than they used to be because people are flipping between industries that are very high rate right now.

The third are the human skills, the power skills, the relationship skills, the leadership skills that are absolutely rated the most important in every single survey that ever comes out, because you can learn technical skills relatively easily. It takes a long time to get good at them. But, the human skills, you’re kind of born with some of them and they’re a little bit harder to learn. All three of these areas are essential to companies, and I don’t know who those 31% are that don’t have a skills gap, but I think they’re probably deluding themselves. They probably do too.

Todd Zipper:

Sure. I want to jump into the power skills a little bit. Help us understand what is a human skill, power skill. I’ve sometimes used the word soft skill. I mean, maybe you can get it all matched up for us here.

Josh Bersin:

Well, okay, so the original word soft skill was coined long before I got into this to compare it to a hard skill. The idea was, oh, math, science, engineering, those are hard. Leadership, management, collaboration, those are easy, so they’re soft. That was, in some sense, a bad characterization from the very beginning, but that’s where it started from. What I found in my own research and the clients that I talked to is that the soft skills, by far, were more important than the hard skills, as I said before.

One of the things that struck me, and the way I came up with this idea of the word power skills is, right before the pandemic, we were having a meeting at UC Berkeley near where I live, with a bunch of CHROs and several professors from Berkeley. One of the professors was the head of a psychology group called the Greater Good Science Center, and she discussed the drivers of happiness. Happiness is driven by things like forgiveness, care, communication, flexibility, a sense of awe. Things that are very human, things you think about as your mother or your caretaker. You don’t think about them in business at all. She gave us this presentation.

This was before the pandemic, and I went to all these CHROs. I stood up and I said, “Okay, I just want to ask you guys a question. How many of you have any of these words in your corporate competency models, your leadership models, or your corporate vision and mission?” Nobody raised their hands, nobody was interested in any of this soft, squishy, feely stuff. Then you fast forward four years to where we are now through the pandemic, and everyone is talking about flexibility and care and listening and forgiveness, because you can’t run your company without it.

What basically we’ve shown, and I think most people know this, is that these soft power skills are by far the most important skills of all. This is what creates followership. This is what creates a sense of trust. This is what creates a sense of loyalty and belonging in companies. Teaching somebody how to do something technical is great. You need that too, but those are trainable. Power skills are very big, and also because they’re so hard to develop, they get a lot of attention in the community.

Todd Zipper:

Absolutely. I think maybe we can jump into the, you just mentioned training. How can companies really think about developing these power skills, and not just assume you’re either born with empathy or you’re born with the collaboration, or you’re born with the ability to inspire others, and some of these other areas that you’re talking about here? What are the kinds of tools of the trade here to get these power skills into your company?

Josh Bersin:

Well, unlike technical skills, you can’t sort of train people to do these things. It’s a little more complicated. But, we just are finishing a big study on leadership, which we call Irresistible Leadership. It’s not published yet, but I’ll tell you a little bit of what’s in there. Among the very top findings and the most important practices, number one is to codify and describe the specific behaviors that characterize success in your company. What are the behaviors that make your company successful that you want to reinforce?

For example, when Microsoft went through their turnaround, when Satya Nadella joined, he was very vocal about this in his book, they wanted to implement a growth mindset because the prior management team did not have a growth mindset. It was a combative, competitive company, and it was, “I’m smarter than you, so you shut up and listen to me.” He said, “We’re going to be the opposite of that. Everybody’s going to listen and everybody’s going to grow.” That concept, that behavior was reinforced on walls, placards on the wall, on behaviors. People were calling each other out for not having growth mindset. They formally trained people on what this means. Look at Microsoft today. There are, I think, the largest or second largest market cap company by tech and tech for sure. If you don’t describe those things in a way people understand them behaviorally, you can go to a course at Harvard, you can go to a course at Wharton, you can take a course in collaboration, you don’t know what to do. That’s number one.

Number two is creating a leadership model of some kind that refers to these power skills that is relevant to your business. Why do we want leaders to behave this way? Why does it make a difference for our company, for our strategy, for our customers, for our stakeholders, for our supply chain, et cetera? Because in every industry, there are different management styles. Pick whatever industry you like, retail or oil and gas, or whatever it is. Some companies are very innovative and creative. Some companies are very customer service oriented and focused on the customer experience. Other companies are focused on market domination and monopoly practices.

Whatever that is, those strategies have to be embodied into a set of leadership behaviors, so leaders know what is valued and what is not. Then you can put together training and workshops and simulations and feedback and coaching and all sorts of things on top of that. But, just taking somebody and giving them a psychologist as a coach and saying, “Hey, why don’t you try to be a better leader?” I mean, they don’t know what to do because every company is different. Great leadership at Google is not the same as great leadership at Exxon.

Todd Zipper:

Well, that’s really helpful and it’s going to be a challenge for these companies to shift, but obviously the data is pretty conclusive here and hopefully we’re moving in the right direction. I want to zoom out a little bit and bounce back to just where we are in the job market today, because there’s some really conflicting pieces of data I’m trying to reconcile in my mind. We’re recording this early 2023 in February, got I think since 1969 in the US, the unemployment, the lowest it’s ever been.

On the same time, you’re getting a lot of headlines, maybe the media is stretching these headlines around layoffs at companies that people are familiar with. You also have a lot of CEOs talking about an impending recession and all these kinds of things. What should we be thinking about right now as it relates to these somewhat conflicting trends that things are getting worse, but we’re actually at historic unemployment low levels? Or, is the storm coming and we just don’t know it yet? How are you thinking about this?

Josh Bersin:

Okay, well, I just wrote a big article on this, and it’s very clear to me. It’s not as confusing as it seems if you know some of the data. We’re basically in a very, very significant war for talent and war for people, because even though there is an economic slowdown and a lot of companies overhired, they overhired because they overshot. We had 15 years of zero interest rates, too much money, too much capital, too much speculation. Most companies grew without really planning their growth. Just because there’s layoffs doesn’t mean the economy’s falling apart. The economy is not falling apart. People are buying things. Many companies are making reasonable profits, and they are looking for workers to fulfill demand. Particularly in frontline workers, nurses, retail workers, hospitality workers, transportation, there are not enough humans.

Now, the reason we have this terribly low unemployment rate is a fundamental change that is going to be with us for a long time. The birth rate is very low. There have been a lot of articles about this for many years. Every major economy, China, Germany, the UK, Japan, now the United States, Northern Europe is not replacing workers fast enough. The education system is beginning to worry if they’re going to have enough students to pay tuition. The average fertility rate is around, in the United States, it’s 1.7, the replacement is 2.1. We’re not having enough children. People are postponing getting married. The number of human beings is declining, and a lot of baby boomers my age are retiring.

Frankly, the pandemic also really alienated a lot of young workers who are a little bit more checked out than they would normally be. This idea of quiet quitting is actually true. They’re a little bit unhappy about the fact that inflation has maybe dashed their dreams of buying a house or doing what they wanted to do. We really have a massively stressed workforce that is not able to keep up with the demands of business. Now, for employers who I spend most of my time with, the solution is to retain people, take really good care of the people you have, train them, develop them, and redesign jobs as fast as you can with all of these wonderful tools we have to reduce the number of people needed to do the work you have. We look at it as, we call it the four Rs: recruit, retain, re-skill, redesign, all in one. Because you’re not going to be able to recruit your way out of these challenges. There just aren’t enough people.

Todd Zipper:

Absolutely. That is the truth. I want to think about another big trend that’s going on right now that is, especially in the education space, getting a ton of waves. I’m not sure the application of it all yet, which is around automation, AI, and Chat GPT. It’s a big headline right now that, once again, that you see this from time to time that everything’s going to get automated now. You’re going to go to college and you’re not going to show up and just kind of ask this technology to write your term paper for you, or you’re going to show up to work and ask your employer what to do, and then you’re going to ship out a bunch of work to some sort of bot that exists out there. How are you thinking about this trend? I know you’ve talked a lot about automation. People get scared about there’s going to be all sorts of job losses and it’s going to really disrupt the economy. What’s your latest thinking? Obviously, Chat GPT is just a gateway to talking about automation here.

Josh Bersin:

Well, let me answer two parts of that. One is, is automation eliminating jobs? The second is, what do we do about it? The answer is no, it’s never eliminated any jobs. We have too many jobs right now, and we certainly had an lot awful lot of technology during my life. I mean, I used to work before we had even voicemail. We had basically phones and little pink slips of paper where you wrote down messages. Every time a new piece of technology comes along, there are some jobs that become routine or eliminated, and those human beings take on higher level work. The work that went into maybe copywriting stupid things that weren’t really worth your time, now is done by a computer and you’re working on more advanced editing or more advanced creative work.

Now, I’m not in the education industry. I think there is a challenge for educators to make sure you know what it is you are teaching people. If all you’re asking them to do is write a paper and you don’t know why you’re asking them to write a paper and what they’re supposed to learn out of that, then if they put it into Chat GPT, you’re not really teaching them anything. That’s a challenge.

But, in the business community, what happens over and over again every time there’s a new automation wave, and this has gone on as long as I’ve been alive, is the companies have to look at this as a commodity and they have to build value on top of it. Because believe me, if you think you’re going to differentiate yourself with Chat GPT, no you’re not, because everybody else is going to use it too. What’s going to be different is how you use it and what you add on top of it and how you design solutions around it and how you apply it. Every piece of technology that felt like it was going to disrupt work, turned into a new fundamental base level.

Now, is this making work better or worse? Let me just give you one piece of information on that. I went through, I just had a big meeting in Europe on this. I looked at the economic data over the last 35 years since the early 1960s, and I looked at the inflation rate versus the average wage of all workers in the United States. That data’s available in the Federal Reserve. What you see is that, while inflation has gone up a certain amount over the last 35 years, wages have gone up on average 31% higher. What that tells me is that despite all of the automation and fear we’ve had about machines messing up our work, work has gotten better because the average worker is making 31% more above inflation than they were in the 1960s.

Now, that’s not a huge increase over a long period of time, but what it tells me is that this constant evolution of technology is making work better for humans, as well as making our economy grow at a faster rate and a more productive rate. I’m not worried about it at all. There’s going to be a year or two of jockeying around where different people figure out how to use this better than others. Just like digital and web and all the other things, there’ll be early adopters that’ll probably surpass their peers, so the challenge for business people is you got to learn how to use this stuff and take advantage of it, because if you wait, somebody’s going to come along and disrupt you. But, that’s the way business has always been. I think it’s been that way since I got out of college.

Todd Zipper:

I want to jump back to the skills gap, and really sometimes we talk about this is up-skilling and re-skilling, skilling in general. Employers spend a ton of money, whether it’s through tuition reimbursement, a $30 billion industry, just corporate training, hundreds of billions of dollar industry. Can you walk us through learning and development? I know this is, like you said, you got your start here to a certain degree. What were we doing 30 years ago, 20 years ago? What’s happening now? What do you see coming in the future? In particular, one thing that you’ve talked a lot about that I want to jump into is these capability academies, which is really getting my attention right now. I’d love for you to, I don’t know if that’s the right place to end in this continuum of L&D, but let you take us wherever you want to go.

Josh Bersin:

Okay. All right, I’ll give you a very short history lesson. For most of us that are my age, training used to be a classroom experience. You’d get in a plane, you’d go to a training class, you’d stay there for three days and you’d fly home. You might get a book to take with you. It worked pretty well because you had a lot of hands-on experience, you met a lot of people, and you took your reference materials back and you did remember a fair amount of it. Then along came the internet around the early 2000s, and we stuck all that stuff online and we built all these online courses, and we were amazed at how cheap it was to train people. But, we realized it didn’t quite work as well as we wanted because there wasn’t a lot of interactivity, there weren’t exercises, you couldn’t meet other people. There wasn’t an easy way to ask questions.

We went through this 10 years of building a more blended, multimodal experience to online learning. Whereas today, a good 30 or 40% of the training that people go through is done online with a whole variety of complimentary experiences. But, then something else happened. Apple obsoleted Flash, YouTube came along, Twitter came along, and all of a sudden everybody posted content everywhere. We had video courses on YouTube, and we had video courses on TikTok, and everything became an opportunity to learn. These systems became very complex. The learning systems that we bought in the early 2000s, they were called Learning Management Systems, just couldn’t keep up.

About five or six years ago, we would go to companies and they were, let’s say, “Well, I got so much stuff around here, I don’t know who can find anything. I mean, it’s just videos and articles and documents.” Well, that is getting fixed with a new wave of technology, which is the skills based learning experience platforms and other systems that index content, identify the skills or topics, and help you find stuff. Now we’re in this world where you can go into a job in a company and you can log into LinkedIn Learning or Udemy or any of these libraries, and including the ones you guys sell, and click around and within about a minute, you can find exactly what you want to learn and you can watch it or you can listen to it or you can participate in it.

We’ve got this massive availability, democratization of learning that’s taking place. It’s really marvelous. However, it’s got a problem. I need to know what to learn. I need to know why I need to learn this, and what value is it going to be to me in my job if I learn it and nobody knows that I’ve learned it? Because meanwhile, the company, as we talked about a couple minutes ago, is moving into this new business area, and they really want me to learn this stuff over here that I don’t know anything about. This perceived solution of democratizing learning was not working for people.

What I discovered as I went out and met with a lot of companies is what really smart companies were doing is they were saying, “Let’s have a more strategic conversation about the business capabilities we need to build to grow and adapt, and then let’s get all the learning aligned to that. Let’s look at it not just as courses. Let’s look at his courses, mentors, developmental assignments, job rotations, real work that can teach people how to do this.” I decided to call that a capability academy.

The reason I called it that was because we were building one of these for HR, and I realized, nobody wants another 500 courses. They want to go to a place to learn that might have courses, it might have experts, it might have videos, it might have articles, it might have people to talk to. The only analogy I could think of at the time was like a police academy, or something like that. This is beginning to become a very, very common paradigm for bringing all these elements of content and experience together using the skills engines that are now available in corporations. That’s what it’s all about.

We have capability academies that are focused on safety at Sem-X, capabilities academies that are focused on marketing at Kraft Heinz, capability academy for 5G at Erickson, capability academy for AI-based chips at Intel, mRNA at Moderna. I mean, once you understand the idea here, this can be a really business transformation solution. That’s really what L&D’s been trying to do for all the years I’ve been affiliated with it.

Todd Zipper:

Just to clarify a little bit, are these folks like a police academy, to go back to that, is there a role at the end of the rainbow here of the capability academy? Is there a certification? Is there something, a credential? How are you thinking about that?

Josh Bersin:

No, there is. No, this is part of the new thinking is, if we believe safety, for example, in the case of Sem-X, is an existential issue for our company, and everybody in the company needs to be trained on safety, we’re going to certify that you understand our safety rules. Now, that may not apply to every domain of every capability academy, but yes, credential, certification, and then moving people into new roles that use these skills is part of this capability academy. If you go to a, I’ve never been to a police academy, but I assume what happens is when you go, you come back, you’re certified on this new choke hold or this new gun or this new, whatever policemen are trained to do. We have to do that, because the rate of change in companies is so high. If you just throw a bunch of training out there and say, “Hey, we’d like everybody to learn about this,” they may or may not be able to know even know how to do that.

The other thing about a capability academy that’s very different is there’s a business sponsor. There’s a business leader who’s watching over this, who’s setting the agenda with L&D’s help and making sure that it’s moving the needle in the right direction and that there’s a problem that’s being solved, and it isn’t just a bunch of training and then we’re asking ourselves at the end of the training, what was the ROI of that? It’s really focused on a problem, on solving a problem. Most companies can identify what those problems are once you just ask the questions this way.

Todd Zipper:

Something that comes to mind when I’m trying to bring all this together, we’ve been talking about competencies a lot in education in L&D, competency based education, a big trend in higher ed. I know you’ve spoken about it as an old idea, or maybe, help me sort of connect the dots between skills, capabilities, how should we be thinking about that?

Josh Bersin:

Competencies, yeah. Okay, let me give you guys just a two minute lecture that might help clear this up. The word competency in HR goes back a long, long time to a part of a job description. Where competencies were used when I was involved with them was, you basically had a book of competencies. You would buy a book, you guys probably sell books like this, and you would read through the competencies, and as a management team you would sit down and say, “Okay, we want our salespeople to have these eight competencies.” You would attach it to the job description, stick it in the HR management system, and now you would select people, develop people, assess people and promote people based on these competencies.

It was a big mess. There were hundreds and hundreds of competencies sprinkled around in HR. They were sort of used and sort of not used. They would fall out of date. People hated to maintain them. It was hard to align content towards the competency. There was no real science to why this competency was associated with this job. I mean, it was good guessing and good observation, but it was a very static thing. If you fast forward now 20, 25 years, 30 years later, now we have this idea of skills. A skill is actually a very poorly defined word. Microsoft Excel is a skill. Creating a pivot table is a skill. Artificial intelligence is a skill. Every algorithm of artificial intelligence is a skill. Salesforce.com is a skill. Everything that’s written down on a resume as a requirement for this job is a skill, every word. A skill is essentially a word or a small number of words.

What’s been happening in the skills world is we have software tools that scan job descriptions, resumes, and content and identify these skills. You can go out when you’re recruiting somebody, and you can, let’s suppose you have a job and certain skills are needed. You can actually look into their resume and get AI based search and determine with a pretty good level of accuracy whether this person has some amount of the skills you need. You can use skills for recruiting, you can use skills for internal placement of people, you can use it for pay, and you can use it obviously for learning and development.

That paradigm is so different from competencies, because the skill libraries are always changing, every day. I have a relationship with a company called Light Cast that creates an ongoing skills academy or skills taxonomy, and they sell data. Every day, they have thousands of new skills that are discovered in jobs around the United States. We’re moving to, at least in the corporate world, I don’t know about the education world, but in the corporate world, we’re moving to this infrastructure where companies are going to know pretty well what skills they have in different parts of the company, what skills are trending in the outside market, and what skills they need.

The competency modeling that’s been around forever will probably be used mostly in compliance and regulatory jobs, in very formally defined jobs. If you’re a nurse and you’re not trained and certified on giving injections or anesthesia, it doesn’t matter what your skills profile looks like, you either know how to do it or you don’t know how to do it. That’s a very formally defined competency. But, more and more companies are really segmenting that for this more compliance and regulatory oriented world. Then for a white collar and soft skills related jobs, really using this new approach, which is skills-based hiring, skills-based development, skills-based mobility, and even skills-based pay.

Todd Zipper:

Excellent. I want to jump to an important topic around sourcing of talent, training of talent, apprenticeships. But before we get there, and as related to it, is this idea you’ve talked a lot about which is learning in the flow of work. I’d like you to really expand on that. What is it? Is this something that, obviously, it’s something that’s always existed. Is this something that companies are more formally focused on to increase the skills that are in the company?

Josh Bersin:

It was an idea that came to me, and I wasn’t the only one that had thought of it, around maybe eight or seven or eight years ago when we were first decomposing training content into small pieces and creating little mini videos and mini articles. We didn’t have podcasts yet. There was all this training content sprinkled all over a company’s systems, and we were trying to figure out how to use it. What research and learning shows is that there’s a flow to learning. During the early parts of a new topic when you’re starting a new job, for example, you have a very steep learning curve. You need very formal education to get yourself up that learning curve. You need a course, you need a mentor, a boss or somebody to show you how to do your job.

Then as you become more and more fluent and how to do the job, you look for smaller and smaller increments of learning to compliment and supplement and improve what you’re getting good at. Then as you reach another level and you get promoted, you need more formal training. We have this jumping back and forth between what would we would call macro learning and we used to call micro learning. What I used to talk about with many companies was, don’t just throw it all out there and expect the employee to know what to do when, put it into the flow of work. Organize it so that they get the right type of content at the right point in time.

Now, this was long before we had Slack, Microsoft Teams, these tools we have now. Now we have these really intelligent workplace tools that can do this, and they can sense based on the tenure or the job you’re in or the activity that you’re going through when there’s something you probably should read or visit or look at or learn in a particular job. The whole idea of learning in the flow of work is stop throwing content at people, and make it relevant to the stage they are in their job or their role or their activities or their assignment. I mean, it isn’t really a gigantic idea, but it certainly was a big change at the time. Now it’s just becoming a common way to design what we call experiential learning, or a great learning experience.

Todd Zipper:

I want to talk about apprenticeships, because it’s a topic that seems to get universal appeal. You got both sides of the aisle present. The last three presidents have advocated for it in different ways, and yet, at least in this country in the US, it doesn’t get a ton of adoption outside of a few different careers. What is your thoughts on this way to increase talent pools? We talked about, we’ve got obviously a sourcing problem throughout the economy. What are you thinking about apprenticeships today?

Josh Bersin:

Well, my world is taking care of corporations, I’m not trying to take care of the whole society. But I’ll tell you what it means relative to corporations, it has a big, big, big role. There’s this innovation that we call a career pathway. We got this out of the healthcare research we were doing. The idea of a career pathway is, we have a shortage of 2.1 million nurses in the United States. Becoming a nurse takes years. It’s not a month of training, it’s a year or two of education, training, apprenticeship, what’s called preceptor training where you’re actually observed by somebody and you have to prove that you know how to do something. These hospitals cannot find enough people. There aren’t enough nurses graduating from nursing school.

What they discovered is, we can take much lower level workers who are doing ambulatory work or administrative work, or maybe they’re doing cleaning work in the hospitals, and in a period of two years, we can turn them into nurses. Most of them would love to do that if they have the right attitude. But, it’s going to take time. It’s going to take education, it’s going to take training, and it’s going to take apprenticeship. Inside of a company, every time you have a talent gap, which by the way happens all the time in just about every company I’ve ever visited, apprenticeship is one of the modes of getting people into that level of capability and skills that is very, very powerful. It’s not only good for the participant who is the apprentice, but the person who is helping that person is also learning a lot and becoming better valued to the company. It creates a golden circle of value from the experts who are creating apprenticeships and the employees that are participating in apprenticeships.

There’s an added value to this, too. The number one reason people leave companies is because they don’t think they’re going anywhere. If you’re paying somebody $15 an hour and they’re pushing around people in wheelchairs, and maybe they’re being very nice, but they don’t feel like they have a future, if somebody comes along and offers them $18 an hour or $20 an hour to drive a truck, they’re gone. They’re going to leave. But, if you can give them a path to progress and help you fill this talent shortage you have in the nursing population, they’re going to stay. There’s all sorts of really positive applications of apprenticeship inside of corporations. As far as the rest of the society, I think it’s more of a business model problem for the education industry that somebody has to figure out how to make money at this. But, it’s a pretty well proven approach, and if we don’t do it at a society level, I think corporations are just going to do it themselves.

Todd Zipper:

That’s interesting. I want to jump into that, because we discovered a model that feels a little bit like an apprenticeship model several years back, specifically around software developers. There’s such a supply/demand and balance, and certainly was coming out of Covid. We discovered this model that now we call it, a few of us in the industry, higher-train-deploy, where mostly global corporations that have big needs around tech talent, big needs around diversity specifically, not just window dressing, big things that they’re serious about, big needs around weeding off of contractors and outsourcing.

This is a really interesting model that we discovered, because it sort of eliminates a lot of the friction for the employer they get to try before they buy. They’re working with essentially Wiley, because we’re in this business now as an education company, but we’re forced into a staffing sort of model, where we are taking the friction away for the employers. How do you get a job-ready talent that is going to come in and add value? Well, it’s working with the employer, understanding their needs, the locations, the skillsets, and then training for that. There’s the bootcamp sort of aspect, which is an industry that’s evolved over the last 10 years. Between me and you, I don’t think it’s been the direct to consumer bootcamp model around tech has been that successful, so it hasn’t scaled.

From the learner perspective, they’re graduating college or recently graduated, or what have you, and they’re trying to find a job and a career. For them, you’re not going to charge them yet another cost to get another degree or another certificate or another something, so they become an employee, effectively. I’m wondering, one is, have you heard of this model? Do you think it can scale beyond what to me is sort of a small sector? It’s emerging technology talent, which is for us it’s big, but it’s not a big market in general.

Josh Bersin:

I think, well Todd, first of all, I want to applaud you guys for doing it because I think it’s a huge market and very, very badly needed. I think the general education industry has left out this final point of educating people, which is getting a job. They sold them a degree or they sold them a certificate or they sold them a bootcamp, and then they left it up to the student to figure out what to do with it. That has worn awfully thin on people. On the other side, the employers want to spend more money to bring talent into their company, even if it’s an early level. I completely agree with what you’re doing. I saw this in healthcare years ago, where large healthcare networks would partner with community colleges and they would design the curriculum for and with the community college. They would say, “Look, if you train a thousand people on this, we’ll hire them all. We guarantee we will hire them.” I think whatever you guys are doing, I hope it’s magnificently successful because it is absolutely the right way to go.

Todd Zipper:

Yeah, I mean, so far so good. I’m not sure how applicable it is outside of these acute shortages that you’re talking about here. But, we’ve got plenty to work on.

Josh Bersin:

Yeah, right. Once there’s enough people who know these skills, that model isn’t as necessary. But, I think it’s a great, especially with the talent shortage that we have, we’re going to have to pull people into these new domains faster than the normal educational experience, and this is the way to do it.

Todd Zipper:

Yeah, and I was talking to a president of a large healthcare training company basically, and we were talking a lot about medical assistants, medical coders, billers. I mean, there’s just an insatiable appetite for those kinds of individuals, yet there’s so much friction there. I’m like, “Well, you should bring the higher-train-deploy model to that because you’ll attract people to get trained for free,” actually, you pay them to get trained if they can get through it all.

But, this is a great segue to higher ed, which is very close to my heart, and you’ve already kind of been tapping into it. I know you’re a big proponent of a liberal arts education, but as you think about how higher education interacts with corporations, I mean, the way you started off the L&D experience, going to Wharton or one of these places, you get a $30,000 certificate in something. I mean, higher ed’s been working extremely closely in many different ways with employers for a long time. But, there does seem to be some pretty large gaps in the adaptation, for example, all these alternative credentials and short courses that are now evolving. Some of it’s coming through higher ed, but they’re sort of reactive to it. How are you thinking about higher ed’s role in solving these capability academies and some of these other needs skill shortages?

Josh Bersin:

Well, I mean, higher education serves many roles in society; research, general education, preparing people for work. I mean, a lot of really essential things that have nothing to do with an individual employer. But, I’m on the board of the UC Berkeley Executive Ed program for the Haas Business School, so I’m involved directly with them, and they partner directly with corporations all the time. All of the curriculum and certificates and various big programs they put together are designed to meet the needs of corporations. That’s what more higher education institutions need to do. They still have to do basic research. They still have to do basic education, but the closer they can get to their corporate partners, the better their students are going to be prepared, and basically the better, I think, their brand will be over the long run. That tends to be sort of episodic depending on the city and depending on the institution, depending on who the employers are that are close by or seem to be in the same domain.

I think the other interesting thing, Todd, you may know more about this than me, but I think the research is showing that the number of students is going to decline. This is a little bit of a survival tactic for the higher education industry as a whole, is to become a little more aligned to the corporate or employer population that they serve than just doing basic general education. I think the other thing that this does is it makes sure that the topics and the courses and the certificates and programs that are developed in higher ed are always relevant to what’s going on in the business community for those people that want to go into business. I think it’s becoming probably a bigger, bigger topic every year, and it probably will continue to be as the labor market continues to become more competitive.

Todd Zipper:

Yeah, there’s a deal that was done many years ago between Starbucks and Arizona State University that, it was not a little sea change for higher ed, it was a big sea change. I think they lowered their price point by 40-something percent at ASU. Obviously ASU has been so market driven over many years around designing mostly online in the online education world, and so that was a pretty momentous moment. You have now, I don’t know how many, 10,000 or more colleagues from Starbucks that have gone through this program, gotten a degree, and hopefully retained and are better equipped to do their jobs. I haven’t seen that similar thing catch fire, whether it’s on the employer side or the university side, because it takes a lot to change the cost model that dramatically, for example, or other changes that had to operate something at scale.

Josh Bersin:

Well, one of the ones that we’re very involved in, there’s a company called Guild Education. If you’re familiar with them, I’m sure you guys know them. They have very carefully architected specific solutions for corporations, one company at a time, that allow them to leverage and negotiate with educational institutions to build these career pathways. There’s intermediaries like Guild now that are building these bridges that are good for both sides. They’re good for the education institutions and they’re good for the employers. I think for Starbucks to do it, I’m sure it was a giant project for Starbucks. They probably put a lot of time and energy into it. It wasn’t about making coffee. It was about something they weren’t really experts at, so now there are experts that can help companies do this. I just have to believe the way the labor market’s going, there just has to be more of this. It is just going to continue.

Todd Zipper:

Don’t you think, though, that at some point it does need to come back to some measurable outcomes? Where I’m going with this, we’ve been a little bit associated with the Amazon Career Choice program. They’re a bit of a unicorn when it comes to investing in their employees, and who knows if that’s changing now because of some of the layoffs. But, they very famously have talked about out boarding or whatever the term is, like, “Hey, become a nurse. Well pay you to do that.” That doesn’t really, in the long run, the super long run, maybe there’s an indirect way to talk about how that recruits frontline people. But, I guess at some point you’re going to invest a lot in an employee.

Josh Bersin:

That particular program, which I know a lot about, I don’t know if it is doing exactly what they said it was going to do. I think the more pragmatic programs, where one company or one industry is working on very specific roles for that company, work extremely well. I mean, I talked to a company the other day, I won’t mention the company name, who spent $50 million on one of these career pathway programs. I asked the CHRO, “How did you convince your CFO that it was worth $50 million to do this?” She said, “Once we went through the three to five year challenges of hiring, retention, training, and difficulty developing these roles, it paid for itself.” Companies can throw money at this if it’s focused on the needs that they have. I think it’s a huge trend, and I think it will continue.

Todd Zipper:

Yeah, it’s really important that the CFOs are included in this, right? Because a lot of the investment in education is going to be looked at as a cost in the short term. Right?

Josh Bersin:

Well, and the other thing this does is it takes tuition reimbursement, which is basically a benefit that nobody measures at all, and it turns it into something that’s very pragmatic and easy to understand, that seems to have a very high value. There’s a lot of this money’s already being spent, it just isn’t being targeted towards these strategic problems. I do think it’s going to become bigger and bigger.

Todd Zipper:

You mentioned career pathways. I’d love to just make sure I fully grasp that. I mean, I was reading about Walmart, which I think you mentioned, I think that’s one of the customers of Guild. They talked about needing pharmacy technicians. is that an example of because they’re building their benefits and the healthcare side of the house, is that an example of, “Hey, we need to create a pathway for pharm techs?”

Josh Bersin:

Yeah, I could show you one, exactly. The reason we call it a pathway instead of a path is, it isn’t from engineer to senior engineer to director of engineering. It’s to move from point A to point B, and point A might be over on this part of the company doing this kind of stuff, and point B is in a totally different role in different job family. Usually a career pathway requires education, not just training, and maybe certification and then apprenticeship and other things. It’s a more complex job path, but the ROI is very high.

Todd Zipper:

That’s what it seems like. Josh, we’ve covered a lot of ground here. We’re going to wrap up. Is there anything, one or two points you want our listeners to walk away understanding from our conversation today?

Josh Bersin:

Well, just getting back to the book for one minute. I mean, fundamental to all of these wonderful topics, Todd, is the belief system that the people are the most important asset you have in your company. Because, every one of these things we talked about looks like an expense if you don’t think about that. I would remind the people listening to this podcast is, before you rush around and try to get somebody to do all the stuff we’re talking about, you have to have a fundamental conversation about, do you agree with me that investing in our people is one of the most important assets we have to grow our business? If they don’t agree with you, send them a copy of my book and let them read it, and maybe it’ll convince them.

Todd Zipper:

I love it. All right, so I ask this of all of my guests. Part of what we love about education is that we all have learning champions. Who has been a learning champion for you, and how has that person helped you in your life?

Josh Bersin:

That’s a good question. I mean, I admire many, many of the clients I meet. I think the guy that I’m learning from the most at the moment is somebody you don’t know. He’s the COO of our company, his name is Bill Pellster. He was the guy who acquired our company at Deloitte. He now works for me, and he’s a very seasoned business person. He has the wonderful ability to give me very specific feedback that I need to hear. Not everybody does that, and I appreciate that from him. Right now, I would say he’s my guy.

Todd Zipper:

I love it. That’s courageous and that’s definitely a champion of learning for you. Well, Josh, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Until next time, this has been An Educated Guest.

Speaker 1:

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