Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:12 Hello everyone. Today I want to talk about a really important, exciting topic, the emergence of career pathways. We just launched a whole body of research on this to help you understand it, but let me give you the high level story. If you look at the job market and the way careers work, most of us grow up taking a career similar to our parents. So if your father was a truck driver, hmm, you know, you're probably gonna think about doing that. If your father was a scientist, you're probably gonna think about doing that. If your father was unemployed, you're gonna have to figure out what you want to do. And somewhere along the way, through primary school, secondary school, people, you meet part-time jobs, sideline jobs, you end up in a career, whatever that career is, whether you like it or not, at some point in time it may not be enough.
Speaker 1 00:01:00 And for most of us, the signaling and the advice we get on our first career is weak, is since we're all living long lives, I mean, most people who are graduating from school today at the age of 18 or 22 are gonna live into their hundreds. So they're gonna have a 60 or 70 year career. Those decisions as to what to do over those years are very big decisions, and they change all the time. And the signals and data and information and advice we get on what career to take is very random. And like I said, if you're lucky enough to have really nice parents who are very successful and you really admire what they did, you're gonna go and follow in their footsteps. And that's wonderful if you can do that. But most people don't have that, particularly people in lower income families or people coming from immigrants or other locations, they need help figuring out what to do.
Speaker 1 00:01:51 Now, of course, on the employer side, we have the opposite side of this problem. If you're Walmart, if you're ibm, if you're Verizon, if you are Rocket Central, if you're Mercy Bond Secures Hospital, if you're Providence, if you're Kaiser Permanente, you have this massive need for people. You need operational people, you need technical people, you need clinical care people, you need technology people, nurses, managers, retail workers, sales people. And you're gonna look for these people on the internet or wherever through job postings, and you're gonna hope they show up. And in the middle, there's this massive market of billions of dollars of companies like LinkedIn and Indeed, and all of the software tools for sourcing and talent, marketplace tools, et cetera, et cetera, cetera, that are supposed to make this all work. But unfortunately, despite the fact that we have a very low unemployment rate, and it's very easy to find a job right now, and actually wages have gone up, and average savings accounts have also gone up during the last period of time until this latest interest rate rise, many people are left behind.
Speaker 1 00:02:54 Let's suppose you live in a city where the primary employer has left or it's a manufacturing plant and you're sick of working in manufacturing, you wanna make more money and there's no more opportunities. In some sense, this is the Red State scenario in the United States, those people don't have a lot of choices and they don't know what to do. And for those of you listening to this podcast who don't have college degrees, it's hard to get a college degree when you're working really, really hard. You don't have time, you don't have money, It's extremely expensive. You have kids to take care of other responsibilities and a job, which by the way, usually takes about all the time and energy you have. So what are we gonna do about this? Well, back in 2017 or so, when I was at Deloitte, I met some people at Walmart and they were building this thing called Live Better You.
Speaker 1 00:03:40 And they had a really big idea, and they weren't the only ones, but I'd like to give them as an example. They were looking at this massive investment. Companies were making I tuition reimbursement. I tuition reimbursement is a big benefit. And we studied tuition reimbursement multiple times in my career, and I was always amazed at how much money company spent on tuition reimbursement and how little they could measure the results. Because the way tuition reimbursement traditionally was managed is it was a benefit like healthcare. And so if you wanted to get a degree or take a course at a university on something and it was somehow aligned to the business that your company was in, we'll pay for it. And if it makes you happy and better at something that you wanna do, we're willing to take the company's money and spend it. And you don't have to pay tax on it because the government allows you to, to educate yourself with benefits that are tax free.
Speaker 1 00:04:33 So it's a great thing for the company, it's a great thing for the employee, but when we actually surveyed companies about what they're getting for this, they don't know. Fewer than 10% had any idea how much value the tuition reimbursement was providing to the employee to say nothing of the employer. And also the adoption rate is low and the completion rate is low because it's hard to use it. While Walmart had a better idea, they decided they were going to put together something called Live Better You, and they were gonna go further. By the way, since then Amazon has done this, Verizon has done this, at and t has done this. Other companies have done that with the help, by the way of Guild education or Bright Horizon's, Edy, the two biggest providers in this space. But this is a big idea and it still has a long way to go.
Speaker 1 00:05:13 What they did is they decided initially they were gonna give people a lot more support. They were gonna give them time, they were going to give them more money, they were gonna give them education assistance, coaching. And then later as the program progressed, they realized they could do even more. They could build what we now call career pathways. Career pathways being nonlinear pathways from a lower paying to higher paying, lower demand, higher demand career, profession or job that the company needs anyway. And this is a massive idea. Now, let me take a step back and talk about what a career pathway is. We are the ones who really coined the term, and the reason we wanted to define it explicitly is we wanna make it clear that a career pathway is not a career path. A career path is the old fashioned linear, stairstep, multi-year, multi-generational journey you go through in a given job family.
Speaker 1 00:06:08 So if you're an engineer and you go to work for Exxon like I did, you start as a junior engineer and after two or three years you become a project engineer. And after two or three years you become an advisory engineer. And after two or three years, if you make it, you become a senior engineer. And if you really make it, you become an engineering manager and director and vp. And yeah, you might rotate around to different responsibilities inside the company while you're doing that, but that's the engineering career path. And those worked really well in the sixties, seventies, eighties, when companies were organized as industrial hierarchies. And if you read chapter one of my book, Irresistible, you can hear all about the way this works and the way it's changed and those programs are still flare and they make sense and they're good and companies need them.
Speaker 1 00:06:50 But of course what's happened is there's so much disruption and change in the nature of every company and the nature of every industry, that those linear careers are not the number one thing that matters to the company anymore. Let's suppose we have a linear career for mechanical engineers in Chevron. And Chevron says We need hydrogen engineers, we gotta get them there from here. Maybe we need people who understand electric batteries. Well, there's some adjacencies there, but they're not obvious. And at Walmart, there's tons of this. We need logistics people, we need drivers, we need marketing people, we need people that can work on operation, on and on and on. And that's true Amazon, That's true at Verizon, that's true at at and t. That's true at every company by the way. And so what's now happened, and we're really introducing this research this quarter, is these career pathways have become a huge opportunity for you.
Speaker 1 00:07:42 And I want to thank, by the way, Ed assist Bright Hut Horizons and Guild Education, two of the big players for working with us on this research. We've done quite a bit of research on this now on our own. And there's a series of staff that companies can go through to create these career pathway. In the case of Walmart, over the years, the program has become much more advanced. And that's true of all of them. If you specifically know we need a certain type of nurse or a whole set of clinical professionals in healthcare, you can create career pathways, then include education, certification degrees, job experience, mentoring, coaching, developmental assignments on the job training to move to those new careers. And it might take somebody 2, 3, 4 years to get there, but it is cheaper for you as an employer to do this at scale if you're a big enough company than to go out and find these people on the outside market because not only are you saving money on getting them into the career, these are people you know.
Speaker 1 00:08:39 These are people who love your organization, who are gonna stay and gonna bring all sorts of goodwill with them. In fact, I think it was New York Presbyterian that told us that they believe that every employee in that hospital, even the OR gal sweeping the floors, taking out the trash, driving the ambulance, has a career to become a clinical professional. And they want these people to stick around and learn and grow into these jobs where there's a shortage of 2.3 million people over the next three to five years. So this is a big deal. So what have we learned about this? First of all, it's not simple. The reason tuition reimbursement programs were poorly used is nobody put a lot of time into them. We really need to look at what are the adja skills and who are the pools of people that are most likely to move into these new roles or opportunities?
Speaker 1 00:09:28 That's a skills adjacency problem. You need skills data, you need some talent intelligence to do that. You need to communicate these people that even though you're a financial auditor today, you could become a cybersecurity analyst tomorrow. I had this hilarious conversation a couple of weeks ago with a bunch of people in Europe that I'm going to see in November about driving vehicles, and I'm not sure where they're worried about that now because there are no self driving vehicles yet. And I said, Well, if you look at the skills of a great bus driver, it isn't just driving. It's also human relations. Bus drivers are pretty good at dealing with people because they have lots of people issues to deal with. They might become customer service agents, Some might even become sales people, I don't know. But skills adjacency teaches you a lot of fascinating things about who could be a good fit for what job.
Speaker 1 00:10:14 Now, the early days of this, back in the sixties and seventies when I got outta college, basically what you did is you took the strong vocational aptitude test and it looked at what you were good at and it gave you a set of jobs and careers that were appropriate. Because I was a science type of guy, I ended up getting recommended to become an astronaut, which was obviously a way long distant low odds role for me. But I actually did at one point think about going into the Air Force to see if it was worth it. Later I decided to become more academic and do the kind of stuff I do now. Or you read what Color Is Your Parachute, which was one of the most important books of my life. I hope most of you have had a chance to least write through it and give it to your children.
Speaker 1 00:10:53 But that's not enough because those books are just general self discovery. You need to know what's out there and what's changing all the time. And so this signaling system between new jobs, new roles, new careers, new opportunities and individuals who are busy working, taking their families, trying to do a good job but is really a big problem. And that's the responsibility of you. And I'm not saying it's gonna be easy, but it pays off. And that's why these companies like Guild and Edy and others are there to help you. So you might ask yourself, Well, why don't I just go buy a talent marketplace and just turn it on and all this stuff will happen automatically? No, that's not true. Now, as much as I'm a big fan of the talent marketplace and I think it will become a transformational driver of a whole new way of working, which again, I also talk about in my book, that's not enough because if I'm a truck driver at Walmart driving through some town and I've decided it's time to look for a new job, and if there's a town marketplace at Walmart and I go and click into it and it shows me a bunch of jobs in data science, that's the end of that.
Speaker 1 00:11:59 I'm not going back into that website again. It's gotta be aligned to the roles that are appropriate for this person. And then it needs to show them, in order to get there from here, you need to do this, this, this, and this. And we're gonna pay for that and we're gonna help you do it. And if you stick with it, you're gonna get this job. So this is actually a merger or rather a collision course between the talent marketplace vendors who mostly are software companies and the solution providers who help you with your own career pathway. And let me tell you that understanding career pathways in building expertise in career pathways is a strategic competitive advantage for your company. And I know this cuz of where I've worked and what I've seen many years ago when I interviewed the CHRO of IBM and the head of talent at IBM before her.
Speaker 1 00:12:46 And we talked about what was going on at ibm. IBM is an old company. IBM has technologies going back to, I wouldn't say the dark ages, but the the disc drives that are the size of a truck, believe it or not. And they have come a long way. And many of the people that engineered and designed and built and serviced and implemented some of those original technologies are still kicking around. What is IBM gonna do with those people? They need to become Java engineers are cloud engineers or implementers of digital technologies or designers. Ibm, in order to stay current in the IT domain where the company was really the dominant player for most of my early part of my career has to help these people move. They can't just give them a bunch of little courses with badges. They have to show them what is the pathway to move to this new domain.
Speaker 1 00:13:33 And it is a pathway. If I was a Cobalt programmer working on MBS and now I'm gonna become an Angular programmer working on an iPhone, that's a lot of change. I mean, that's not as much change as a truck driver moving into a data scientist, which is probably not a likely path, but that's my point. If you don't get good at these pathways, you're just gonna be hiring more people, you're gonna have greater retention problems, you're gonna have skills problems, all sorts of other things. Capability academies are part of this. But the problem with the capability Academy is it assumes somebody is at some level of capability before they enter. What if this person doesn't even have a college degree yet? What if they don't understand math or accounting or basic science cuz they just never learned it and they didn't need to learn it for the job they were in.
Speaker 1 00:14:17 Those are the things that happen in these career pathways. I guess the final thing I'll say to motivate you is if you're a good hearted person, this is the way you can take all of your expertise in HR and really make the world a better place. Most of you know I live in Oakland, California. It's a very heterogeneous community. We have upper income, very expensive houses and wonderful places to live and people with great careers here. And we have people here that are unemployed. We have people that are homeless. We have a lot of clinical workers with a lot of healthcare companies here. We have a lot of public sector workers, many of whom are happy to work in the public sector. We have doc workers at the port and many of these people want more opportunities and they don't know where to go. And so they continue down the path they're on, they retire, they live with whatever it is they did.
Speaker 1 00:15:07 And that's the end of it. And I don't like it. I look around based on where I live and what my life has been like, and I keep thinking to all these people, Can I help you find a better career? And I don't have time, I'm just one person. You can do that at scale and it will transform people's lives. One of my friends when I was younger in life was a woman who was an X-ray technician and she became an X-ray technician because her mother was a nurse and she believed she came from Cincinnati. Her father was a fireman that becoming an X-ray technician was the greatest thing she could do. And she didn't like it. It was repeatable work. It was boring. She didn't like the way she was treated by the patients and she had no way out. She couldn't go back to school and become a nurse.
Speaker 1 00:15:49 She didn't want to be a nurse, she wanted to do something else. And I got to know her and told her what my life was like and what I had done in college and what had happened to me. And her eyes opened as big as saucers. And I said to her, You know, this is not gonna be easy for you. You're gonna have to go back to school, you're gonna have to get a degree, you're gonna have to go to a community college. It's gonna take some time. And she just decided she was gonna do it. And so, So through hard work and scrappiness with some support for me and a lot of work on the side, she put herself through community college. She put herself through a four year college. She got a degree and her entire outlook on life was completely different. And that's the kind of value you can create and it's maybe one of the most gratifying things we can do in hr.
Speaker 1 00:16:31 So let me leave you with that. The research that we've produced is voluminous and in great detail. Most of it's available to our members, but some of it's available to non-members. We're gonna be doing a whole series of webinars and education events on this topic. We are also ex exploring and detailing the career pathways in each industry we do in the global Workforce intelligence project. So in healthcare, if you read the Gwi research on healthcare, you will see explicitly designed career pathways who we've identified through our work with eightfold and others. We're gonna do the same thing in banking. We're in the middle of that right now. So we're gonna do everything in our power to make this easier for you. But I think you should put it on the list of something you can afford to spend money on. Take that tuition reimbursement money that's sitting there and being used, but you're not sure what you're getting out of it. And spend some effort on this. Focus on the most urgent needs you have inside of your company and do some work to get some people down these pathways. And over a period of years you'll do something really transformational for your company and for the rest of society. Thank you.
