Transcend the contest for talent and develop tech and data skills from within

Kylie: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to today's webinar. Transcend the contest for talent and develop tech and data skills from within. Brought to you by Coursera and HRD. My name is Kylie Spear and I am delighted to be your host over the next hour that we have together. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Our intention for today's webinar is for it to be as informative and interactive as possible so you, our audience, can take away as much benefit as possible from your participation today. So just a couple of housekeeping items to begin with. You will notice there are three polls incorporated into today's presentation as well as a Q&A session at the very end. I'd like to encourage you to please participate in these polls and to submit as many questions or comments as you'd like via the Q&A or chat functions. Your questions can be anonymous, or if you'd like a shout out, feel free to include your name and organization too. And lastly, just a reminder that today's webinar is being recorded and it will be emailed to you all after its conclusion. The PwC global CEO survey highlighted that 78% of Australian CEOs believe the availability of key skills is a top three threat to growth. But only 23% of Australians say that upskilling is happening within their workplace. For most organisations trying to attract and retain skilled employees, the great reshuffle is turning into the great reskilling. So in today's webinar we will be discussing the following topics. Firstly, how organisations can develop their employees skill proficiency in both technology and human skills. Secondly, how role based skilling can help enterprises train leaders at scale and drive organisation wide transformation. And thirdly, how the business leaders ensure they continue to attract and retain top talent with outcome driven learning programs. Taking the helm of today's webinar our three absolute experts in their fields Sue Turk is a regional director across Australia and New Zealand for Coursera, leading a team that is committed to providing equal access to the world's best education through drives of sales, go to market strategy and development of Coursera enterprise business in APAC. She works with customers to understand whether an organisation has the right people, skills and culture to implement that strategy and the role technology plays in educating and reconnecting people to purpose. Siva Kulasingam is the digital learning manager, culture and capability people and culture at Coles Group. Siva has worked at Coles for five years and is responsible for managing the Enterprise Learning System Panel of External Learning Partners and 120,000 employee learning profiles. Siva is a senior learning and development professional with over 20 years experience across various industries, including retail, education, banking, financial services and defence. Siva is a progressive digital learning leader, innovator and highly regarded for his thought leadership and for pushing the boundaries within the learning technology industry. And Diane Zhang is the learning experience leader at PwC Australia. Diane's role at PwC focuses on the overall learning experience empowered by the human centred learning ecosystem and services to help people grow and solve the world's important problems. Prior to joining PwC, Diane had held various HR and L&D roles in GE for over 15 years. Diane is an advocate of learning, transformation and new ways of working and is known for thinking broadly across an organization continuously driving excellence by connecting people with technology and for effective leadership and learning. Diane is also actively engaged to align opportunities for development into a learning strategy that drives business outcomes. Welcome to you, Sue, Siva and Diane, and thank you all for being here today. 

Sue: [00:04:11] Thanks for having us. 

Siva: [00:04:11] Thank you Kylie. 

Diane: [00:04:12] Thank you, Kylie. Pleasure to be here. 

Kylie: [00:04:14] It's great to have you. And we will now begin today's presentation. Sue if you are ready, I will hand it over to you. 

Sue: [00:04:22] Thank you so much, Kylie. Thank you for that introduction. A shout out to my fellow panelists and the audience today. Welcome. And hopefully you'll take away some golden nuggets. But let's get some context together and share some more data points on what's really impacting our work forces. Firstly, and in no particular order, you heard Kylie talk about some of these things. We've all directly seen the impact. The decline in skilled migrants on the availability of talent everywhere has been in in the post-COVID environment. Around 110,000 people were entering Australia through the skilled stream of the migration program. This number has fallen by about 30% in 2021 and I haven't seen 2022 number, but I suspect the same trend to be continuing. As Kylie touched on, the PwC Global CEO survey highlighted that 78% of Australian CEOs believe that the availability of key skills were, is one of the top three threats to achieving growth. And it's also interesting to read in that report that only 23% of Australians say that upskilling is actually happening in their workforce. And I personally, from being from the industry, I find that a challenge to even comprehend. The impact of all of this means that the current talent doesn't have the required skills for growth, let alone the needs for the future. And then, of course, you talked about the great reshuffle and the great something else. And there's, of course, the Great Upskill and it's the Great Upskill is that movement of organisations across the APAC region that are really dedicated to working well, I guess walking the walk and upskilling their team members. And this is pretty much happening because training opportunities are more valued by employees and is a key to staff retention and increasingly becoming core to organizational EVP. So that's that came out of a HubSpot report. Welcome for everybody to check it out. We've seen all of this type of information reported in the media, reported in various types of research, and all of it is really saying that training and development opportunities and not necessarily pay is the key to staff retention and attraction. From the World Economic Forum, we're seeing the rise in the demand and the emergence of opportunities requiring digital skills. And we have a commitment from our own government to create 1.2 million jobs by 2030 and create a thriving tech force, not only in technology itself, but also in non-traditional tech industries. I was reading recently that one in 16 people in Australia are working in a tech related role. So that's a lot and I can only see that going to continue. Also according to the Digital Skills Organization, we're going to need to employ about 650,000 upwards of that in tech workers to actually achieve the goal of the 1.2 million jobs by the end of the decade. And so for us, what it means is as a market that we're going to have to increase. About 186,000 people in tech above and beyond what we're doing as a business and business as usual approach in our businesses. As the economy becomes increasingly digital. Missing out on this opportunity would really leave ANZ behind and and its people behind. So that's why it's so important to really consider upskilling and career pathways. We hear this language now thrown about a lot. And more importantly, the creation of awareness about the types of roles, how to get into them and how to really develop within them. At Coursera. We recently released our 2022 Global Skills Report, using the data from over 100 million learners in more than 100 countries. And we were able to show regional and country specific skill proficiencies in three of the most needed areas, and that was business technology and data science. And in Australia, our 1.1 million learners on the platform, we're definitely focusing on digital skills and the results indicate that we've got the proficiencies to really back it up. So we found that skills proficiency had increased last year with our employees scoring 70% proficiency level in data science and 62% in technology, which is really amazing. And our experience has seen workforce leaders are continuing to prioritize those domains as we are speaking to them in market. All of this of course, backed by the Government's commitment to spend 100 million in training the workforce in these particular areas. But from a broader economic perspective, Australia is driving skills to ensure that we're really ahead of the game and that we're more of a talent destination and not just a talent source. And I think many of many of us on the call today will will recall historically we've struggled to keep our talented workers at home and, you know, were subject to talent drain to other English speaking countries. So hopefully this is going to really shift the game on on all of that. And then while digital skills dominate amongst Australian learners, an opportunity definitely exists to develop human and business skills. I mean tech and data are crucial for in-demand jobs yet so a collaboration, so is communication and critical thinking, especially in the world of remote work. So learners really do have to invest both in that human human skills development and that's been coined a lot of different things along with digital skills to really thrive in in the knowledge. I call it the knowledge economy. Meanwhile, even even as the need for talent and skills continue to increase with the rate of technological technological change. Say that word so many times now I'm tripping over it. The pandemic forced the acceleration of transformations and the way that people work and continue to collaborate. Through all of this, we've seen and we've been hearing consistently from learners that they've found themselves at this intersection with two fundamental challenges. Firstly, there's the lack of time for learning. That's hit new levels, and there's a 30% increase of burnout amongst workers. There's things like screen fatigue that skyrocketed. And at the same time, attrition is on the rise, with 41% of white collar workers actually saying they are somewhat very likely to leave their jobs in the next 3 to 6 months, which presents a challenge. We know that learning and development plays a big role in retention. In fact, employees that rate their talent programs as good are two times more likely to stay with an organization than those people who rate it as fair or poor. So I guess my question to our audience today is, is how is your organization feeling about these trends and how have you been responding? Responding, I'd love to go back into the chat and see sort of people's thoughts around these topical things that are coming up. This so-called war for talent that was coined by McKinsey in in 1997 is really taking on a new meaning post-covid and the competition to find and retain talent has only increased as workers have moved to that virtual and hybrid configuration and really are held tenuously together by remote collaboration and the importance of remote leadership. The accelerated rate of digital transformation means we've got to have the right skills that are essential for both individual and business success. What we're also seeing is that employees want to both demonstrate and be recognized for skill development. 

Sue: [00:12:52] So when we ran a survey on our own admins and learners in 2020, we found that over 70% of learning and development administrators and 80% of learners surveyed indicated they preferred an offering or earning a credential based on the skills they learnt versus hours or completions. And I believe that remains truer today. Like time is poor and if people are going to commit their time to, to learning and developing skills and deepening their skills, they do want to be recognized for it and they want that social recognition as well. That's coming up as really more important. And we as businesses, you know, we look at these inputs and we end up, you know, technologically advancing more for an organization like ours. We were looking at this, this data and the fact that we were curating more than 150 corporations a month to support our customers. It created an impetus for us to now productize content curation, and I'm sure that lots of organizations are learning from their experiences and therefore developing products to support that and hence greater technological change actually taking place. One one things that we're focused on as a business is the need to understand the business impetus for learning within our within the market. We know that great talent delivers outsized effect on business performance, and ensuring that employees have the right skills to align with business goals is the top priority for learning leaders today, especially in a world where eight and ten companies are driving their own digital transformation. Yet most companies are failing to drive tangible business outcomes from their learning initiatives. And that's another question I posed to our attendees today, our audience. Why do you think that that is the case? Because over the last decade, the number of learning options on the market has increased. We've got low priced content libraries, we've got edutainment, we've got microlearning. And this content has made it so much easier to deliver learning and logically it should provide employees with the skills they need. And despite people saying that they don't have enough time to learn, learning activity is is actually up and the average number of learning hours per employee has been doubling. So I think more than doubling actually I recall between 2017 and 2020 it increased to 102 hours and I can only imagine that that's continuing to grow today. And with this increased accessibility and quantity of learning, the skills gap has only widened, with only 16% of employees with the skills for their current role, let alone their future role. So how do you align jobs to skills to content when you're not necessarily a domain expert yourself? And I'm not a domain expert myself like I support and I enable our customers to achieve those outcomes. But that doesn't position employees to be successful, particularly as their jobs evolve and the underlying skill requirements continue to change in their roles. There are a few companies that absolutely have defined the skills required for specific roles, and now the challenge is actually to align the right type of content to help develop that capability. The learning team often isn't the one with the domain expertise, and the functional business leaders tend to have a limited time to help support building learning programs and evaluating the content and creating the learning paths. And what often happens then is that the business leader doesn't see value in the central learning offering, and they tend to shift budget away to more hiring or investments or one off learning type initiatives. And so it's really important to lean on that L&D team, you know, as they gather sort of the intel and develop the programs to enable the identification of capability matrixes and career path things and really getting that input from other stakeholders across the business. But until we're able to do that, the skills gap will remain and the accelerating technological change is only going to keep getting it, having it grow. Investing in the right tech solutions and platforms will absolutely enable that these must be able to align to business outcomes that we're trying to achieve. So today I'm looking forward to hearing from some of our customers on how they've been navigating this journey. So thank you very much. And Kylie, I'll hand over back to you. 

Kylie: [00:17:52] Thank you so much, Sue, for such a thought provoking presentation. There are clearly a number of pressing challenges and also opportunities for today's organizations. Okay we'll now launch our first poll for today, which our attendees should all see. Yes, on their screen. Okay. The poll question is, what is your number one learning challenge? And it's a single choice. A, buy and slash investment from stakeholders. B, skills required, keep changing. C, Learning culture missing in the organization. D, Delivering business impact slash outcomes or other. So we'll give it just a few more seconds for our attendees to select their answer. Okay. 

Sue: [00:18:42] It's really hard to choose one of those, you know, because often it's a few. 

Kylie: [00:18:50] Your number one learning challenge. Okay, we'll take it down and we will look at the results. Well, there we go. So learning culture missing in the organization came in at number one with 35% of our attendees today. That's their number one learning challenge, closely followed by delivering business impact slash outcomes. So Sue, Diane and Siva, does this resonate with your own experience? What do you think about these results? 

Diane: [00:19:28] I'll fully confess that my vote will also go to the learning culture. But these are all good, good choices, though. I feel like we are grappling with all of them while we're building a meaningful learning solution in our team. 

Siva: [00:19:44] Yeah, I'm pretty similar as well. I definitely want a learning culture and I think it's worth while kind of breaking that down, right? Like what do we mean by learning culture? And I think in the context of I guess in most businesses, it's actually the time and space for the learning to occur. And I think that's what we're probably missing. And maybe the second part to it will be like the leadership support and endorsement for learning to occur. I'm curious to know what others think about how they define learning culture, but I think that's quite, quite a broad topic. But for me, those are probably the two main sticking points that gets in the way and makes us feel that we don't have that learning culture. 

Kylie: [00:20:24] And more specifically for you, Diane, how have you approached the Learning and Skill Development challenge within PwC? 

Diane: [00:20:32] Yeah, actually I feel the last couple of years probably being challenged to all of us, right? More or less. And a lot of us feel overworked, overwhelmed, but we also want to feel valued by an organization that invests in us. So for learning and development, in my view, it actually prevents presents both challenges and opportunities to engage our learners at PwC. We are an organization all about our people because it is our people providing great solutions, solve important problems for our clients and our community. So how do we continuously build and enhance our capabilities to create, innovate and collaborate is really at the core. So what I have seen and together worked with my team is first of all, really to understand the business, what is the organization headed towards and what are the key capabilities? Do we need to get there? And we support the business transformation, whether it's agile, digital or cultural. And then from the strategy perspective, we endorse a full spectrum of skills. Like Sue was mentioning early on, not just digital, but also human skills, leadership, business skills to support personal transformation and create a culture of learning, which is what comes up from the poll, and that can really scale and deliver effectively for everyone. And then in practice in my team, we try to instill the continuous learning into the end to end employee experience, from onboarding to engagement, from goal setting to performance review and internal mobility, of course. And recently I'll give you a couple of examples. Recently we launched the PwC Academy internally, really as a one stop shop to offer a doorway for all of our people to easily navigate and access the learning offering that is suitable to them and then being able to connect to their career development. And this is not just a place to bring a whole lot of content offering together, synthesize them, but also to democratize learning within the firm by presenting like a multilayered learning approach around formal learning, workplace learning, micro credentialing, mentoring and coaching. The other example I would actually like to share here is the onboarding experience that we are revamping for the new starters. I think in research, I saw it the other day, shows that almost like two thirds of our leaders are concerned about their new studies are not getting enough support due to the hybrid or remote way of working. And what we're trying to do is really to engage the team leaders together with leveraging the latest technology to make the experience more personal and contextual, reinvent the communication approach to make it contemporary and help build the connection even before the new starters start the role. And then from the learning side, we provide visibility of their learning pathway. So our new start is aware of what to expect to learn at what point of time from day one and really being able to track the progress as well. So we are on that important journey of attracting, developing and retaining our talents. And to me it's not a binary journey, meaning if you do A then you'll get B, we're definitely in a time of flux and and transition. So that would be my response to your question, Kylie. 

Kylie: [00:24:05] Okay. That's an awesome response. Thank you so much, Diane. And for you, Siva, what are the current learning and development programs that you run at Coles and how do you measure the outcomes? 

Siva: [00:24:17] Great question, Kylie. Well, we effectively manage the entire suite of enterprise wide learning, right. And that ranges from your induction to your compliance, your safety sales leadership, you name it, being XX listed. We are never short of assigning mandatory learning in terms of making sure that we meet all of our regulatory requirements. But that's probably part of the challenge as well. We're really good at pushing the learning and in terms of measurements and most of it is linked to core business metrics around service safety incidents, ensuring that they are job ready when they start their induction journey. But we also support transformation projects, whether it's a process, system improvement or new ways of doing things. So we kind of run the lot. Typically what is expected is we aim towards supporting the business and organisational outcomes. But for me what really success is actually changing the way in which we offer and approach learning as well. And so what I mean by that is the fact that now we can actually provide team members with choice and give them the ability to drive and have access to courses and stay up to date with industry trends. So when we did our partnership with Coursera and we kind of rolled it out for our head office, what we saw was a significant change in our engagement survey when we asked our team members if they are given the opportunity to develop skills and interests, do they have that? And initially we saw a poor result and then eventually we saw an increase. So certainly changing the way in which we approach giving our team members choice to actually explore and having access to content to be able to stay up to speed with what the industry trends are. I think for me that's really vital. 

Kylie: [00:26:15] Thank you, Siva. It sounds very empowering, which I'm sure your employees appreciate. Okay. We will now launch our second poll for today, which you should all see appearing on your screens. In just a few seconds. Here we go. Poll number two. The question is, the most important skills to develop within my organization are A, software development, B, data and analytics, C, cloud computing, D leadership and communication. And then E is other. And if you have an other and you would like to supply your other within the comments section, please do so. We'll give you just a few more seconds to make your selection. Okay. And then we will take down the poll question and put up the results. Here come. Drum roll. Wow. There you go. And that's a sure winner, leader and communication at 86%. And then data and analytics are at 9%, software and development at five and nothing for cloud computing. So Sue, Diane and Siva, what are your thoughts? 

Sue: [00:27:37] Incredible. I mean, wow. You know, when I see things like this, I go back to when the pandemic started and we all went on. We all went online and, you know, the things that we thought we were good at, you know, who taught us how to lead remotely? I don't know how you do it face to face. And, you know, got maximum impact when I was around people, you know, how do you have the same impact when you're sort of remote? And definitely leadership has continued to be one of those things that we need everybody to be leaders really in in their chosen fields. And for us as a business, you know, we've almost created a guild to support that you know whether they're entry level, you know, mid management or even senior exec. So, you know, the demand for that definitely resonates and absolutely. Absolutely saying that in terms of what we do. 

Kylie: [00:28:36] Diane, I have a specific question for you. What are the key areas that PwC is exploring when curating the pathways for upskilling and new skills? 

Diane: [00:28:45] Well, Keir is actually talking about Keir this could it be a broad question again, considering all the work that we have done to build a wide range of pathways for our workforce, really to serve the business purpose and help individuals to succeed. But really, if I could draw down to what myself and my team have worked on and we have observed, there are a few things I think I can I can highlight and share with this group. The first piece is really about identifying the key business capabilities and the skills, which is really as a baseline to build corresponding learning offerings. And this is very much for us to take a holistic view of what's available at what's missing, instead of just trying to continuously act at new things on top of what we already offered. And then the third piece is more around making the employee development opportunities equitable and transparent. By transparent I really mean like three aspects. One is around development opportunity. Two is around the decisions of who's getting those opportunity, and the three is around who is actually participating. So having those transparency in the place, we see that the research showing that majority of almost like 80% or now testing the numbers, 81% of the high performing organizations from those high performing organizations are really feeling that the learning opportunities are more transparent compared to those from the other organizations. And then again, if I could use the Academy as an example, one of the initiatives that we did it was partnering with Coursera to launch the micro credential offerings to all of our employees and really kind of like a civil was making the employees sitting in the driver's seat and being able to select the offering that's really based on their roles, their skill demands. But at the same time, we also provide them guidances to help them navigate where to start from. And in another another example, another piece of work that is happening right now is actually this year across PwC, we launched a signature program called Outside Program that really kind of targeting all senior consultant managers make it available to all of them, help them to be more curious and learn to learn and being able to connect to themselves, the future and the community. And then another important piece I want to I want to point out here is the team leader's role, because we talk a lot about the new way of working, which is which has a big focus on the team dynamics. And we can't just assume the team leaders will just get all the critical skills from the job that they're doing. So what we're doing is we have a dedicated team leader program really trying to help them to play a role as coach and mentor, to optimize the team performance and really build it well being pathway and then being able to lead with ambiguity, which we think is really going to be an important piece to, to build the pathway together with their team members. So that will be yeah, that's that's my thoughts around the pathway building. Yeah. 

Kylie: [00:32:05] Right. Thank you, Diane. And Siva, for you. What are the key areas that Coles is exploring when curating the pathways for upskilling and new skills? 

Siva: [00:32:15] Well, it ranges for the various functions that we have in our head office. Right. So from a finance or marketing, even in our own people, in culture to technology, they are they have very targeted focus areas in which they want to develop in some functions. For example, the aspiring to be better in terms of what they do, which is a great thing. And in some cases it's about actually getting the basics right, getting some level, laying the right foundations, getting consistency in their performance. For example, if they're bringing in talent and they've got kind of internal talent, how do you sort of get everyone working together, leveraging, I guess, the skills and experience that they have, either business knowledge or from other industries? And I guess ultimately they're really trying to lift the performance in all of their professions, really. Which kind of leads me to my next point about the role of the internal land function is really critical in terms of establishing the needs and getting the business also to think about what are the focus areas and how they can go about achieving it. A lot of times they want maximum performance immediately, but it's actually going to take time and effort in terms of getting there. And we talk about the skill as well. It's not an overnight solution. There's no silver bullet, but it's actually getting them to recognize and articulate the problem. Be real about where they are. Be real about where they are in terms of their maturity and actually trying to line up the solution to hit those goals. Now there's an element of test and learn that I think we have to be open to and and actually do any course correction quickly if we find that something isn't working. And I think from there, it makes it easy for us to to to work out what talent and what skills we need to develop internally, what we need to develop ourselves internally versus where we need a partnership and actually bring in that those skills or the IP into the organization. And then also there's also the question around accreditation. Is it really important thing, how do we push for it and how do we ensure that there is some value coming out of the effort that team members are putting in and they're walking away feeling that the sense of achievement, their progress and it helps with that whole talent and pipeline management and retention. 

Kylie: [00:34:29] Of course. Thank you, Siva. Sue, I have a question for you. How is Australia positioned against the rest of the world when it comes to developing skills for the future of work? 

Sue: [00:34:38] Yeah, I have to say, I mean, I presented some of that earlier and we are leading the way in a lot of areas and of course coming from a global organization where I can see sort of what's happening in in different markets, I truly believe that we are really well positioned and the opportunity for us to be a powerhouse in this space absolutely does exist. And it just goes like these forums, for instance, are so powerful because everybody's got the same challenges. But it's when we talk about them and actually share our experiences that we learn and we can tweak and re-engineer. I think one of the questions that was coming to my mind while you're both talking is what is the cost of actually not doing what you're doing today? Like if you did not do all the work that you are doing, both of you. And for a lot of our listeners out there, it's like if we didn't do what we were doing, what would be the impact on the businesses that we're working for today, like when you stop to think about it truly. So the cost of inaction is one like something to, you know, like to think. 

Siva: [00:35:54] Yeah. Yeah, that's that's a great question. Right. And I think sitting in the sort of that kind of central learning function, you see the different parts of the business, you know, with best intentions, wanting to achieve that, that uplift in performance, but just not sure how to go about it. So they're naturally just looking for that silver bullet. And and I guess what, what happens when you think you've found it and you implement or you try to implement it, there is an operational risk that it may not land well. Right. And I think that's what sometimes an external may not understand, like an external partner may not understand with the business how that works. And what we are able to do is actually call out what some of those challenges are, work with the business to actually work out what are the best aspects that we need, an external IP or information or partner to come in and where they can play a stronger role in the development themselves. And I think it's easy to take a hands off approach for certain parts of the business when actually what we're trying to do is explain that it needs to be a hands on approach. And sometimes what we do is share lessons, learn from different parts of the business that we see. Things are working well, not working well, and share kind of those best practices so that they can understand that whilst the content may be unique or the subject matter, maybe the problem is it is actually quite a shared problem. 

Sue: [00:37:17] Yeah, that's interesting. 

Kylie: [00:37:20] I have another question perhaps to bring you into the conversation again, Diane. And so how has skilling changed over the last 12 to 24 months? 

Diane: [00:37:31] I can jump in first if you want, Sue. Actually, I was going to say my instant response to your question about the cost is we simply can't afford it, because if we don't do that, we'll be losing our people and then our business competition will just fade away. Right? We're just going to be really losing our competitive edge. 

Sue: [00:37:52] And that's what comes. How hard is it to learn? Sorry to implement the ROI on learning. Different organizations do different things. Is it engagement? Is it like how do you measure all of that and what's what's the most meaningful thing for each organization? Because it's really different. 

Diane: [00:38:11] Yeah. And then Kylie, specifically to a question about skill changes, actually, something interesting from LinkedIn the other day. Again, this is testing my memory on the numbers. I think what I have read is the number of skills or skill set. It's the changes between, since 2015 there's about 25%. So 25% of the skills have changed things 2015 and the number is actually expected to double by 2027. That means between now and 2025, we'll need three new skills as top skills for a job. In other words, to keep pace with our existing jobs. We all need three new skills or need to possess those three new skills that we don't have it today in just three years time. So there's really a sense of urgency there. And with that, I think have an open mind and then being able to learn or learn how to learn is really going to be critical. If you look at the skill gap and then constantly review what we have and to what extent that we need to learn, it's not going to be it's not going to be a static picture, I guess. And then to a point about accreditation and certificates, I mean, those are really critical. Point in terms of giving our employees a rewarding experience, recognize the skills and then being recognized by the industry as well. Yeah. So that's, that's my first best reaction to your question, Kylie, about the skill changes. I just feel like this is something that we have to actually take actions right now rather than wait until it's too late. 

Kylie: [00:39:49] Yeah. Did you have anything else to add Sue? 

Sue: [00:39:53] So can you tell me that article, Diane? 

Diane: [00:39:55] Yes, I can. 

Sue: [00:39:56] Please. That's a good one. Always looking for great bits of bites of information. So that's. That's excellent. Yeah. I think the only thing I can add to Diane, because that's a really great point about the change in the skills baseline, let's call it, but. What I've seen over the last 12 to 24 months really is the evolution of learning and the way we went about it. And I think you all share that experience where we were. We were about, you know, digging that box and providing that to our staff so everybody had equal access to it, know. And then it became more around sort of job families and categorization and then, you know, really into the depths of skills and proficiency. And I mean, we got better at all of that over that time. And there's different models work for different stages of organizations, right? Like not everybody is at that stage to be looking at those particular things. But that's one of the big things also in terms of trends that I've seen over the last few years. And that's that's going to continue, you know, like without a doubt. Right. I don't know if you've got anything to add to that, you were saying. 

Siva: [00:41:09] Yeah, yeah. Well, I was just going to jump in as well. I've been, the last 24 months is is really a taste of what's to come. I think that's what Diane's article is talking about. So if you think this problem is going to go away, it's not it's going to probably going to get worse. So we now need to actually have this real conversation about, well, are we creating the time and space for people coming back by earlier point? I think in the first question, are we creating the time and space? Are we allowing our team members to really have the opportunity to upskill? Now, as from a business perspective, we can actually target the areas, find the right solution, make it available. But do they still have the time and space to do that? Skilling is really a critical thing. So yes, you can answer the organizational question that way. But I also think there is an element of empowering team members to actually choose what they want to skilling and reskilling. You don't. I think gone are the days where you can take time off from work and immerse yourself into education for six months, 12 months, 18 months or whatever. You actually now need to start thinking about how you're going to transition while in your current job. What is the next skill where you want to go after? How do you want to go about doing it? And if you're not prepared to carve out that time and do it for yourself, then you're going to have a lot of things sort of happen to you. So I think there is an opportunity on the individual front to be proactive, and I think there's an opportunity as an organization for us to have those difficult conversations and say, Well, this is not going to go away. We have to keep creating that that time and space. 

Sue: [00:42:36] That's going to that's really interesting Siva. I think one of the one of the trends I've seen in the Australian marketplace, as well as the increased uptake in professional certificates, not necessarily sort of like the everybody's going out because, you know, you partner with us and Google and like everybody is kind of going hard at trying to achieve some professional level of certification using those technologies that professional certificates and again going back to both your comments on credentialing is also sort of like rising as well. 

Siva: [00:43:13] Yeah, absolutely. 

Kylie: [00:43:15] Thank you to all three of you for your great answers to that question. We'll now launch our third and final poll for today, which you should all see appearing on your screens. Yes, there it is. Poll number three. The question is, the best way to attract the top talent is, A, provide competitive salary. B, provide opportunities for career growth. See a clear employee value proposition EVP. D Inspire potential employees with your company culture. E Invest in learning and development of employees. And then we also have other as an option. So the best way can only choose one. And we'll give you guys just a few more seconds to select your answer before we post the results. It'll be interesting. Okay. So we have a look at the results. And here they come. Oh, there we go. The EVP has come in at number one with 40% saying that's the best way to attract the top talent, followed by provide opportunities for career growth and then a tie for the competitive salary. That's interesting at the third and then inspire potential sorry. Third is invest in the learning and development of employees and then coming in at the very end is the competitive salary. Wow. And inspire potential. What do you guys think? 

Diane: [00:44:46] Well, I would have definitely hope that the invest in learning and development will be the top one. But then the second thought, it would think that all of these are actually interconnected with each other as an overall experience that we want to create for our employees. Right. I mean, none of them can really go stand alone. Learning is probably going to always be part of the EVP, and it's very important for people's career growth and it's always part of the company culture. And of course salaries are important piece as well. So I do see this in the overall kind of setting all surrounding that we are providing for our our employees to to keep and develop our talent. Yeah. 

Sue: [00:45:25] I remember one of my very early conversations with you, Diane and EVP was definitely number one. In our conversation. You talked about EVP very strongly and that I'm finding now it's coming up more so in the conversation. For us, we try and approach it from understanding like what is what is our partner or business partner actually going through? What are they really trying to achieve from a business perspective? And often enough, EVP is one of those things that that pipes up and then we're able to kind of link in to that EVP story. So we try to find where we can link in and enable increasingly that conversation. 100% agree with the audience and much the rest like the salary that's global. Like we're seeing these sorts of trends. Yeah, a global. 

Kylie: [00:46:20] And Siva. Did you have any thoughts? 

Siva: [00:46:23] Yeah. I think EVP is is is a broad enough kind of. In a topic, right? Like it kind of everything's all encompassing, I think how clear you are in articulating that EVP is also part of it. I mean, you can you can take a very broad brush approach to it or actually really be clear on how what you mean by it and how you stand by it. I think that's going to be interesting. Everyone's got a choice now and everyone's free to exercise that choice, right? Be it in where you stay, where you work, to your lifestyle choices. Everyone would have reassessed that over the last two years, and I think that's what organizations now need to start thinking about is actually how we positioning ourselves that we're going to attract them. 

Kylie: [00:47:10] All right. Well, thank you so much to our audience for your wonderful participation in the polls that were so interesting. We will now start the Q&A section of today's webinar. And I can say that we've had a number of questions already come in and some questions have come in through the chat function. So thank you so much. Please feel free to keep submitting any questions that you might have via either of those options. The first question I have for the three of you is what role do human skills play in the overall development of talent? 

Sue: [00:47:45] I mean, from my perspective, it's fundamental, right? Because really everything is about sort of the technology, the systems and the people. And you have to have that synergy working, working really well to enable any element of that dynamic. But. So let's take. 

Diane: [00:48:03] Yeah, no, definitely. I think human skills, technical digital skill, they're all integral part of personal development. So we can't. To me, we can't really separate them from other talking about developing people because it's an all around it's an all around offering to we really need to think about that. We want to offer to our employees and actually many of our many of the human skills, like I said, they are transferable. So it makes it a more important or appealing to our employees when they think about career mobility or internal transfer that really enables that kind of opportunity for our learners. 

Siva: [00:48:46] Yeah, absolutely. We are social beings, can run away from it. Right. I think Josh Bersin has got a really great way of describing he call it like the T shape way of skilling. So all these kind of human communication, kind of the broad skills that are transferable, you will need and then you need some level of deep skilling depending on where you  you want to be an expert in. And that can change. But I think what's the broad kind of human skills will never go away. And you have to keep working on it. 

Kylie: [00:49:16] The second question I have is another anonymous one. It's an excellent question. How do you shift the perception around what learning is, i.e. not just formal learning? Any thoughts, guys. 

Diane: [00:49:33] I can pull and pick that one. I'm thinking what Sue has mentioned at the start of this webinar, talking about the two challenges that our employees are facing. One is timepool. The other one is the lack of career development. I think that's actually linked to this question about what learning is and how do we actually help our people to learn. So with such, it was such a kind of time pressed environment. A lot of people don't really have time to do a proper course or a formal learning. So how do we create space for people to do more like a nimble or bite sized learning kind of way of learning, as well as being able to kind of relate that to their career development. So it's kind of like two elements in this in this equation. So how do we make the learning relatable for our learners so that they see the meaning behind? And then we also help them to kind of not, say, solve the problem, but help them to look at how do we fit the learning into their daily job by providing them different types of learning approaches, not just looking at, okay, I need to block two or 3 hours to complete a course instead maybe looking at videos, maybe even look at YouTube to find out what are the things that I want to kind of quickly learn to be able to complete my task. So that will probably be my thoughts on this question. Yeah. 

Sue: [00:51:00] I mean, you have to kind of approach it with experiential stuff as well. Yeah, videos. And the only other thing I was thinking about while you were talking, something that we've done internally is actually shared the story of the impact of what somebody have done and how it's enabled and how it actually impacted their career. Career development. So yeah. 

Siva: [00:51:25] Yeah. I kind of look at it as it's easy for us as a learning function to say we've, we've provided the skills acquisition to the courses through the formal aspects of it, but I think skill application is a whole different ballgame altogether. Right. So you can acquire all of that, do all the necessary courses, but if you don't use it, you're going to lose it. And I think that's what we need to also make the business aware of and get them to take some accountability because it's not just a one way street where it's just one thing that's going to happen and you're going to get all the skills. It's actually giving them back to time and space to apply to practice, to get the feedback, to get the coaching and to get better at it. 

Sue: [00:52:06] Yeah. 

Kylie: [00:52:07] We have a lovely comment and question from Alison Hernandez. Hello, Alison. Alison says great conversation. Thank you. I agree with the panel with the empowering people to choose their learning pathway. But how do you support people to do this successfully to ensure relevance to future of work and their future career pathway, etc.? 

Siva: [00:52:33] Great question, I think. If I look at it from a personal perspective, I, I approached Skilling from exploratory Skilling. It's kind of how I would describe it. So if there's something that I'm interested in, I actually want to go actively and seek it and learn it and then figure out, is that something that I'm going to continue using or do I see kind of potential in the future for it? And if the answer is yes, then I'll continue pursuing that and then work out in my schedule how I would create that time and space to continue pursuing it. I think for some people the risk is that you may jump into something that you may actually not find your interest in, and you sometimes might have to kind of back out of it and figure out something else. So there's a level of experimentation that I feel needs to happen here, that you have the choice to go in and try a few things at once. You found what you're really passionate about to actually then continue actively pursuing it. For me, learning is learning, right? At the end of the day, if you gain something from it, it's it's something that will come back and apply. But you really want to kind of go into that deep skilling. I think that's where you've got to work that through as you're sort of transitioning. 

Sue: [00:53:43] That's where micro credentialing and micro training, I mean, that's where you can test out some second see opportunities like are you going to be interested in it. And then further the you know that learning and deeper skilling that yeah. 

Diane: [00:54:00] Yeah. And I really like Alison's question with the two key words as empower and support. And I think to make quick thoughts from my end, three things I can think of. One is protected time. We really need to give our people the time and permission to really explore and find what's suitable to team leader support. Because we do need that kind of nurturing environment to to help our learners to know that they're not alone. And then three, would it be really help them to connect to the bigger picture so that they know why they're doing this? Being able to find the meaning behind. So those will be the quick three quick things. Yeah. That I would like to contribute. Yeah. 

Kylie: [00:54:44] Thank you, Diane. We have another beautiful comment and question from Peter Buerkle. Hi, Peter. Thank you for a great discussion. I agree with Sue that there is a clear cost and risks associated with not upskilling, reskilling employees. But how do we get managers to support this allocation of time for staff learning investment when they don't want to lose valued employees to deliver immediate outcomes? 

Sue: [00:55:10] So the opportunity cost question one. 

Kylie: [00:55:15] Yeah. 

Sue: [00:55:16] What are you guys seeing in your working environments? Because obviously you've been coming up with this every day you're trying to influence. 

Siva: [00:55:25] Yeah. I'm just sorry. 

Diane: [00:55:28] You go ahead. No it's okay you go ahead. 

Siva: [00:55:29] Reflecting on on a recent conversation we actually had where we were sort of reviewing one of our Academy programs. Right. And we were working out with the partners and we're saying, right, what's what's working? What's not working? And they talked about how the the engagement is really high at the start, kind of drops off in the middle. And when it comes to the point of meeting the portfolio of work, it's it gets a bit challenging. And so we started looking at what are the barriers and what are the things getting in the way. And we even had we started looking at even changing the format in which we structure. So whether is it we give them 4 hours before the submission for them to come together? That made sense when when you could come together in one area. But if you're doing it, virtually 4 hours didn't make sense anymore. Actually giving them an hour or 2 hours to come in, ask their questions, and then they can jump off and have the rest of the time to work on the portfolio. Work is really important. So I think sometimes that's what we're starting to do. We're starting to build into our program, design that time and space to actually give them the ability to do that. And hopefully, you know, explain that to the line managers as well, that this is the commitment that's required that you need to support them. And if you've got other priorities coming in, then then let's have a conversation about it. Because at the end of the day, as a business, we're not going to reach the outcome that we are the overall outcomes that we're going for if we're kind of chasing those short term goals. 

Diane: [00:56:57] Yeah. To build on what Siva just mentioned, which we did ask a lot from the managers. So making me think that we also want to find a way to make the managers feel rewarded and recognized for supporting their team to invest in their learning. And then also, like I was saying, we wanted managers to to kind of realize or appreciate the long term benefit of developing their employees versus the immediate outcome. I think that is the bit of the balance. We all need to help the line managers to really understand and appreciate the value behind. 

Kylie: [00:57:34] We have 2 minutes remaining. So I think we've got time for perhaps just one last question, guys. Unfortunately, there are so many that we're not going to be able to get through. If it's another great one, it's anonymous. If you had a magic wand, how would you transcend? Nice, this contest test for talent. 

Sue: [00:57:54] Wow. This is a good question. 

Siva: [00:58:03] I'll jump in and then I'm happy for you guys. For me, this this whole war, for talent, it's it's going to be one of the battlefield of skills and anything we can do to enable that to happen, be it programs, leadership support, business alignment, all of that is is going to is going to help. And I think what we have to do is really be clear that it's a problem that's not going to go away. And so it's an issue that you're going to continue grappling with. And so the time and effort that you're going to put into solving it here and now is actually going to set you up for the future. So it's a worthwhile investment. 

Sue: [00:58:42] I'm going to quote you the war for talent is going to be won on the battlefield of skills. That's amazing. That's impressive. 

Diane: [00:58:54] Yeah. Yeah, I was I was going to ask, can I wave the magic wand twice and be selfish? As a learning professional, I hope that we can understand what each individual really valued for their personal development, just so that we can focus on building the right solution and providing the right resources and support at the right time. That's going to be the dream. And the other one is more practical simply because we've got so many technologies and platforms on the market. If we can make them all talking to each other, if we can make the implementation, we can make the integration a little bit easier than they are right now. That will be super brilliant. 

Kylie: [00:59:38] Well, thank you so much, Sue, Diane and Siva, for those great answers and once again for such informative and thought provoking discussion today to our audience. Thank you so much for joining us and for your valuable participation. Today would not have been the success that it was without it. And also just a reminder to the others who are asking about whether they could access the webinar afterwards. Yes, you can. The entire webinar has been recorded and it will be emailed to you all. And if anyone would like more information about how Coursera can help upskill your employees, please visit coursera.org/business. In the meantime on behalf of Coursera and HRD I hope you all have a wonderful rest of the day. Thank you so much once again. And we hope to see you again soon. 

Diane: [01:00:18] Thank you, bye. 

Sue: [01:00:19] Bye. 

Siva: [01:00:20] Bye.