Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:09 Hey everyone today. I want to talk about a very exciting project we've been working on for about a year that we're launching soon called the global workforce intelligence project. And this is really to me, the next big thing in jobs, careers, and organization design, and a really important topic. So let me give you sort of the context. If you go back a decade or more, most companies reached the conclusion because of the internet that they had to go through a digital transformation. And at the time a digital transf information meant building a website, building mobile apps, moving marketing, online, setting up e-commerce deciding what to sell on e-commerce, which led then later to omnichannel distribution and other digital delivery models that were different than we had done in the past. And this has been going on for about 10 years. And companies realized when they were embarking on all these digital transformation projects that they needed digital skills, they needed to know HTML and how to build websites and e-commerce and later agile organization and software development tools, iterative design design thinking.
Speaker 1 00:01:18 I mean, dozens and dozens of skills were needed to go through this thing that we call digital transformation. So those of us in HR and L and D built digital skills, academies, digital skills models, and we started to buy skills technology. And the focus of the skills technology was to try to infer what skills somebody has and what skills they need, and then find skills on the internet and content, and use that information for development, for growth, for internal mobility, for promotion, for recruiting, and eventually for pay. And, you know, and that has been going on for about at least a decade. And one of the things we learned about digital transformation, and this was something I did at Deloitte quite a bit is that digital's transformation is not really just using and implementing new digital technologies. It's being digital. It's operating in a digital way.
Speaker 1 00:02:11 When your company becomes digital, you become a real time company. You have to have different organization structures. New roles are created that never existed before. So we created all sorts of new job titles. Now we have a AI engineers, machine learning, engineers, data scientists, things called universal bankers that didn't exist. A lot of that started in these early days of digital transformation. Well, fast forward a little bit to where we are today. And we don't think about digital transformation as the adoption of digital technology anymore. Digital transformation is business information. We're going to sell different products in different ways, perhaps to different people. So instead of just selling cars, we're gonna sell cars and maps and digital information to our customers. And by the way, we'll also digitize the car itself. And eventually we'll make that an electric car instead of selling groceries or products in a store, we're gonna sell them online.
Speaker 1 00:03:06 We're gonna deliver them. We're gonna have a delivery center and you're gonna have omnichannel. So if you want to come into the store and pick them up, you can do that too. Oh, by the way, there's a third party. That's gonna do the delivery. So let's work with them. If you're an oil company, you might say, well, look, oil is a great business. We've made a lot of money doing this, but we really need to get into solar, electrical batteries, mining other ancillary, natural guests, other natural businesses. And the digital economy is creating an opportunity for us to do that. If you're a media company, obviously you wanna sell things in a digital way. Everybody dragged their for a long time. And now basically every media companies digitize their music and videos and movies and other assets and on and on and on. And in industries like healthcare that are a little bit slower, we've started to digitize the delivery of patient care, the delivery of instrumentation and testing.
Speaker 1 00:03:56 And by the way, now that we've digitized the testing and the pharmacological part of our healthcare business, maybe we should actually distribute our healthcare through a retailer. And what's going on now is we've gone from digital transformation to business transformation, to what I call industry convergence, new industries are being created. And every company E is going through some sort of adjacent industry transformation to become something new. So if you are Intel and you want to get into AI enabled chips, you need to learn about AI. You need to learn about software. You need to learn about probably the metaverse to be honest, 3d graphics and the interactions of that. And eventually you're gonna have to understand Chris crypto and blockchain too. If you're a bank and you do retail banking, and you have a whole bunch of people in branches and back offices doing risk management and portfolio management and processing credit cards, you need to get into FinTech.
Speaker 1 00:04:53 If you're a telecommunications company, you're gonna get into media and you're gonna get into 5g. And 5g means you're gonna be in, in added systems, which is something you didn't design your company to do. And anyway, this goes on in every single industry. And what happens to us in HR is maybe we don't think about this that much, but we are told we need more skills, go hire or develop people that know how to do this or that. And we get these directions and these marching orders from the CEO to move us into these new skilled areas. But what we know now, and many of you know this very well, is this just, isn't a problem of skills. Skills is a piece of it, but it's a relatively small piece of it. It's the organization design the job roles. Some of the job titles need to be thrown away and discarded clusters of jobs in these new functional areas.
Speaker 1 00:05:45 The career paths have changed the career pathways. We now have to move people from an adjacent expertise to a new one. And in the banking industry, for example, front office jobs are going away pretty quickly. The ones that are in the branches, but a lot of mid-office jobs are increasing risk management and portfolio management and customer service and customer relations. So we need to move people who didn't realize they wanted to do risk management into risk management or into cyber security in the healthcare industry, going from being maybe a normal customer service agent or a care technician to become a pharmacy technician is a huge growth area. So those are called what we call career pathways. And so we're in this new era of industry convergence and business transformation taking place at the same time. This is not just a reskilling problem. Now, the other thing of course that's happened is the HR tech market has changed.
Speaker 1 00:06:41 And most of you have projects to go out and buy something that the vendor tells you will determine and hold all of the skills that you need in your company. I'm not gonna get into that too much here. I just wrote a big article on it. There's lots of landmines in that kind of a project. And we think there's a very pragmatic way to do it, but you are being flooded with tools that claim to solve this problem. Well, we wanna get ahead of this and we wanna help you get ahead of it. So what we've done working with eightfold and the data from eightfold and the reason we're using eightfold by the way is not because we recommend them necessarily. It's a platform, but eightfold actually is a data company. Eightfold has more than a billion and a half worker profiles and has developed very complex, powerful AI to decode the trending skills, the trending job clusters, the trending job titles, the career path, the growth and shrinkage of different roles and role clusters by geography, by tenure, by industry.
Speaker 1 00:07:41 And we're using that data and what we're going to do, and what we are doing right now is we are analyzing this data by industry and what we're doing, therefore in the GWI, the global workforce intelligence project is we are going to be producing for you, very strategic information on the trending job roles, the trending skills, the trending career pathways and the trending organizational models in your industry and in your adjacent industries. What this will do is give you a huge insight into what's around the corner and why you're recruiting all these people. You can then decide that if we need these skills, maybe we need to go to these city or these sources or these universities, or maybe we'll do internal development through new career pathways. We have all that information now, and we can show you how to do that. Now there's a lot of findings that are coming out of this research and we're going to be producing it as reports and case studies and examples.
Speaker 1 00:08:38 And we're going to have industry for forums. So whatever industry you're in, if you wanna join us in the GWI, you can join one of our C H O or C level councils. And we'll walk through the data with you and you can give us feedback on what it means to your company, but perhaps one of the most interesting things of all is benchmarking. What we're able to do with the power of the eightfold database is we're able to look at specific companies and we can use time series information to go back in time and look at the trending jobs and the trending roles and the trending skills in these companies. For example, what we've done in healthcare and banking. The two that we've been working on lately is we have selected 30 to 40 of the world's largest healthcare providers. And we have consolidated all of the worker profiles in those companies and analyzed the job clusters, the trending skills, the declining skills, the new emerging areas in a way that you can look at that and say, how huh does our company look like that?
Speaker 1 00:09:37 Or do we look different? And how different are we? And do we wanna be different or do we wanna be like them? And we can use that information for you to not only see what's going on in your industry and where these jobs are going, but also benchmark yourself against peers. It turns out when you look in banking, for example, healthcare, by the way, there's lots of sub of the healthcare industry and different healthcare companies are organized in different ways. But in banking, for example, if you look at commercial and retail banking, it's very front office centric. 40% of the job roles are in front office. Almost 60 to 70% are front office and mid office. It is relatively small, and then there's also administrative and back office things. But if you look at FinTech companies and credit card, only companies that compete directly with retail and consumer banks in many, many areas, they're completely different.
Speaker 1 00:10:23 They have as much as 60% of their workforce in it and tech, they have product management and scrum masters and roles that simply are very rare, or maybe not even seen in commercial banking. And, and so what you can do with the GWI data is you can look at the adjacent industries and you can get really smart about what you're missing and what you need to plan for. Now, we're new to this, and we're really excited about it. We're building a whole team of people to work on it. There's several things that I wanna mention as far as how you work with us. The first is this is very, very valuable information it's going to be available for our members. And our membership program is available to any corporation at different prices to based on size. The second is we're not just gonna produce a bunch of reports like the world, economic forum, and hope you enjoy reading them.
Speaker 1 00:11:12 These are going to be in depth studies of these industries, and we're going to dive in, we're going to work on each industry over time, year after year, we're going to look at case studies and examples and solutions. And we want to hear your feedback and your ideas. So you will have an opportunity directly in interface with us and other C-level executives in your industry. The third thing is we will be providing advisory services. We're not a gigantic consulting firm, but I know a lot of you when we show you this data immediately wanna dig in. So what we'll be able to do is partner with you and show you where this information takes you in the various careers and job models that you believe you need to build. And because we're so connected to the vendor community, we will be able to bring in dozens and dozens of vendors to help you.
Speaker 1 00:11:59 Now, the vendor world is somewhat of a specialized world. There's talent marketplace, software companies, there's learning experience platforms. There's E R P companies, there's development companies who sell content. There's consult firms. Our job in the GWI is to help all of them. We're trying to help you build all of these practices on credible and reliable information. So we are partnering with everyone. And if you are a vendor or a solution provider of some kind listening to this, we would be happy to work with you and have you join this program. Also, let me conclude with a couple of big ideas that, that have really come across our minds. As we've been doing this, the first is this type of data and information will move you into a new domain. First of all, you'll be partnering with your CEO and CFO on the future of your organization.
Speaker 1 00:12:49 The second, the function of workforce planning is going to get a lot more in intelligent. I believe the big theme in HR in this domain is to build what I call a talent intelligence center of excellence. Someone that looks at this data compares your company to other companies, identifies trending jobs and roles inside of your company, and uses that data for recruiting, for development, for career growth, to build capabil academies and so forth. The third is that this will be a multifunctional effort within your company. We've now been working with some of the world's largest financial services companies, retailers, some healthcare companies. And what they find is this is not a project for L and D or the recruiting department. This is a multi initiative. And I don't think you're gonna be able to effectively compete over time. If you don't do this, when you see a competitor entering your market and doing things, you don't know how to do, it's not just because they have more skills it's because they understand the job roles, the job pass the capabilities, and they've organized themselves to succeed in this new domain.
Speaker 1 00:13:58 Now, you may know how to do that because you may acquire a company that's done that. And that's been one of the most successful ways to do these kinds of industry transformations is to acquire a company that's been doing it. But, you know, for just as many times that works, there's more times that doesn't work because the people leave or the leadership team doesn't get all long. So I think this is a very important capability that you need to develop inside of your company either way under the covers of a lot of this is the concepts of organization design. We have just finished a year and a half long effort to understand organization design. And you'll be seeing that as part of the GWI also. So we're going to give you some really good tips and techniques on how to organize around these new jobs and roles, rather than just throw out a bunch of skills and say, go out and build them.
Speaker 1 00:14:43 The final thing I wanna mention is education. One of the things I've learned in our business as an analyst firm is that it's great to write and publish and give speeches and communicate. But we want you to understand this information. We want you to use it. Our core mission really is to make organizations better, better for employees, better for customers, better for you, better for stakeholders. And we do that in many ways, by teaching you the things that we've learned through the research and advisory work that we do. So we will be building super classes and programs in the JBA and other places to educate you. So if this sounds a little bit confusing, that's okay, we're gonna be giving you a lot more information to come. So that's the introduction to the global workforce intelligence project. We call it a project because that's what it is. It's never gonna end. We think we're just at the beginnings of this. The relative speed of industry transformation is accelerating. The pandemic has fueled this fire in a huge way, and we really welcome your participation as a client, as a thought leader, or just as a con tribute, to share your ideas and feedback. Thank you so much. Look at some of the links in this podcast and read more. We look forward to talking to you directly.
