Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:13 Everyone, it's Josh Buron. Today I want to give you a little update on the Josh Burton Academy, and I promise this won't be a sales pitch, but it is our two year anniversary. So I thought it warranted a little bit of an update because we have been doing a lot and not telling you enough about it. The first thing I wanna mention is when we started the jba, it really launched around May of 2019, so it was about two years ago. Our plan was to build the Global Professional Development Academy for hr. And as you know, uh, and I mentioned this, HR is a very complicated craft. We call it a profession because it has typical professional career roles, but it's constantly changing and you don't learn it by going to class. You'd learn it by doing it. So what we decided to do is to create a highly collaborative case study based program that allowed people to learn from each other as well as from us, and to constantly bring information and data and ideas from you.
Speaker 1 00:01:21 And that's what we did. And our first program People for Competitive Advantage was really massively successful and everything kind of took off. Since we did that, we grew very rapidly and during the last two years, we have almost 30,000 professional members of the academy, more than 400 corporations, some of the largest companies in the world. And the momentum is building now because we're not really in the education business, although we do that, our real mission is to solve problems and to help you and your companies get better at managing people. And so one of the things we discovered is we have a pandemic. There's a whole bunch of new issues that come up in the world of people. We just faced the worst public health crisis in most of our lives. We sent everybody home. All of our companies became more agile and cross-functional. We started a massive interest in employee experience and wellbeing and mental and physical health and sustainability and resilience.
Speaker 1 00:02:27 And so the J JBA really changed and we built a whole bunch of programs and assets and resources on remote work, resilient HR wellbeing at work, listening, the voice of the employee, and we're continuing to adapt. So the JBA is turned into a highly adaptable, highly relevant experience. The third thing that happened, of course, is I'm not the expert on everything. You guys may think I am, but I'm not. I learn as fast as I can and a lot of you are expert at many things. And so during the last two years, we attracted more than 40 senior faculty who've joined the JBA to contribute their ideas to the community. Now they work part-time and they come into the programs and they answer questions and they do online experiences, but they're there to advise us. And so as you know, if you're building your own academy inside of your company, you and l and D don't know the topics of everything that people need to know inside your company, but lots of experts do.
Speaker 1 00:03:31 So we want to embrace and reinforce and honor the experts that exist. And so that's what our senior faculty do. By the way, in the academy, we now have leaders who've really come to light through the academy experience, who are also leading activities and communications as well. The fourth thing I want to mention is the capability model. Now, most of you have heard me maybe mention the story, but early in our days of selling the JBA companies said to us, well, where's your competency model? And I said, well, does the world really need another competency model for hr? There's a whole bunch of them out there, they're all sort of the same. And what are, what are we gonna add value by adding another one? So after having spent many years studying skills and competency models and capabilities and skills taxonomies, I felt that isn't really the problem.
Speaker 1 00:04:25 The problem is we need to figure out the skills and the capabilities that HR people need, and we need to develop a model for assessing those capabilities so that everybody in the world can assess themselves. And so we came up with what we call the jba Global HR Capability Project, which is led by Amy Farner. Now more than 4,000 of you have now gone through the capability assessment and it assesses you against 94 capabilities that we know are relevant to HR because many of you have given us feedback on this model and this model will change. And that's why we call it a project. And as we built and started to roll out the capability model, we realized, hey, when people assess our capabilities are gonna wanna know what to do about those capabilities. So we built out what we call the capability accelerators, and we now have 15 capability accelerators and more to come that give you directed highly curated learning paths or learning curriculum that will take you into the jba and through a whole bunch of developmental experiences that can help you improve your capability in whatever area you decide to need to focus on.
Speaker 1 00:05:38 By the way, for those of you that are corporate members of the academy, you can use the capability model to assess your whole HR team finds strengths and weaknesses in different parts of the organization by role, by tenure, by city, by geography, by business unit. And it's amazingly useful. In fact, one of the largest software companies in the world is now using the capability assessment to benchmark their entire HR function. Now, the fifth thing I wanna mention is something that's really exciting that just happened when we rolled out the capability assessment over the last year. And a lot of companies started to use it. One of the organizations in Asia took it upon themselves to correlate the assessment data against the employee retention, engagement and experience data and their employees surveys. And guess what? They found a very, very high correlation between the capabilities of the local HR team in a given business unit or geography or city.
Speaker 1 00:06:37 And the employee results on retention, engagement, productivity, and experience in that location. In other words, HR capabilities are one of the most important tools you have to build and improve your employee experience. And let's face it, employee experience is everything in business today. Your employee experience drives your customer experience, it drives your ability to recruit and grow. It drives productivity and it drives profitability. And HR is instrumental in driving that forward. Now, that's not a small finding. We know that every vendor in the world, from Workday to Oracle, to SAP to Microsoft, to Qualtrics, to Medallia, to thousands of companies are spending money to build tools and software and journeys and case management systems to help you improve your employee experience. But guess what? Maybe the biggest thing you can do is improve the capabilities of HR because at the end of it all the HR function, the HR team are the ones who recruit people and train people and decide how people are paid and figure out what benefits they're gonna get and coach your managers and decide who gets promoted to management and work on succession plans and all of that and drive diversity and inclusion programs.
Speaker 1 00:08:03 So this capability stuff is not just a nice thing to have. It is a business imperative. And so everything that we started in the JBA has moved up and crawled up the value chain, as I like to call it, to become more and more important in business. Now, the last thing I want to talk about is where we're going. Most of you know me and you know that I got into HR as an analyst and a researcher and a consultant. And most companies in the learning business value their companies by recurring revenue. So if you look at Skillsoft or Udemy or any training provider in the online learning business, they measure their impact by financial revenue, recurring revenue, financial growth, number of users and so forth. Well, we don't really think that way. We're in the problem solving business. We wanna be your trusted advisor.
Speaker 1 00:09:03 We want your company to run better. We want your HR team to run better. We want your entire workforce to be happier and more productive. And that's really the reason we're doing this. And so the Academy is much more than a library of courses. It is a place, it is a part of a solution that we will provide for you. We are your trusted advisors. And what that means is we are constantly looking for ways to make the academy and all the surrounding materials better and better and better. We are now doing very active research on a lot of topics, and you're going to see a very big study of employee experience come out later this summer. We're starting a massive research project on talent acquisition, and we're gonna show you what the secrets are to successful talent acquisition in this ridiculously complex and highly competitive labor market.
Speaker 1 00:09:57 We're doing research on careers and career pathways for people who in frontline positions that don't have college degrees, which is also a massive problem. So if you come and work with us and join the jba, we're gonna be here to help you along whatever part of the journey that's the most important to you. And that's the most important thing I wanna leave you with. This academy is in many ways the pinnacle of my personal career. And you may not care much about what I have going on in my life, but this is important to me. And the way we work in this company is if you're not solving problems, we're not doing our jobs. So we do all sorts of amazing things for our clients. We put together development plans. We integrate the academy with all of your corporate systems, whether they be an LX P or an lms.
Speaker 1 00:10:48 We do analysis the capability assessment for you. We do social networking analysis of your users to figure out who the most influential people are. We put together change programs to make sure all your HR people are satisfied in getting the information you need. And we listen to all of your senior and most important technical and technology roadmap issues to try to advise you on how make your HR organization better. Because we believe, and the data now proves that when your HR performance is high and your HR team is operating at a high level of professional capability and is well integrated and communicates well, your company will outperform. Your employees will be happier, the workforce will perform at a higher rate and the entire economy and society will be better. So the J B A is really moving fast. In our second anniversary, we have really built some amazing stuff here and I just wanted to tell you about it and invite you to join us, us, it's the best deal on the planet, and we continue to maintain the pandemic discount. Call me, call us, and I welcome your feedback at any time. Thank you.
