Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: You know, one of the things that I find fascinating also is that the idea that the company that you work for understands something that's so deeply personal to you. Right. The skills that you've taken the time to develop and own may not be necessarily applicable to the job you're in, but you would love to be able to apply them in other areas to align with your aspirations. And the idea that that's visible to the company, it's visible to the recruiters, it's visible to the talent folks. The hiring managers can really, really, I think, inspire folks.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Welcome to a new episode of the what Works podcast series. You just heard from Tim Gregory, managing director of HR innovation and workforce technology at Delta Airlines. In this episode, Kathy Anderas, senior vice president of research and global industry analyst at the Josh Burson Company, delves into a conversation with Tim about Delta's journey towards becoming a skills based organization, the role of AI and workforce planning and opening new career pathways for employees. Let's take a listen.
[00:01:04] Speaker C: Tim, welcome to the what Works podcast. I'm so excited to get started on our conversation about how to become a skills based organization and how to use skills and what the role of AI is in that. So it's going to be a fantastic conversation. But before you jump in, tell us a little bit about yourself, your role at Delta, and just basically introduce yourself to our listeners.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Absolutely. And Kathy, absolute delight to join you today and have discussion. So I'm Tim Gregory. I am managing director of age innovation and workforce technology here at Delta Airlines.
And I have over 20 years of experience working and driving HR transformation. And I think we're at an extraordinary time right now. We're focused on skills and aihdenhe things that were never possible before an hour in our grass. So looking forward to the conversation.
[00:01:56] Speaker C: Wow. Fantastic. Fantastic. So tell us how you got started on skills and what was the reason behind focusing on skills.
[00:02:08] Speaker A: Well, I think we kind of came across a period of time here, Kathy.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: And senior vice president of research and global industry analyst at the job requirements.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: That may have required, for example, university level skills and things like that, they were put into the job definitions and just through inertia almost have been sort of copy and pasted and maintained. But when you really look at it, a lot of the jobs do not necessarily require advanced university degrees. And we really wanted to make certain that we're giving everybody an opportunity, folks who may not have had an opportunity to get those university degrees.
What we're really interested in is the skills themselves as opposed to where you got the skills. So for us, it was just sort of a natural evolution. I think a lot of companies for a very long time have been focused on skilled transparency and being able to have this dream of being able to understand all the skills that are necessary to run your business. And it has been quite elusive for lots of reasons, inventorying those things, it's a very daunting sort of experience. But for us, I think a lot of the cultural changes that were going on in the world related to DEi and making certain that we have good visibility to the skills and enabling opportunities for folks. That's really where it began. And it always, for many reasons, made lots of good business sense for us in unlocking the potential of our workforce. So that's really where it started. And I would say that it's been a good year and a half now since we began in earnest of really attempting to get at this business problem.
[00:03:39] Speaker C: That's great. So we started on this journey in order to open opportunities for the workforce and for the organization, of course, to fill roles and to fill jobs and to actually power the business, obviously, with the skills that you already have in the organization, as well as tapping maybe into broader talent pools outside of the organization as well.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. We have the best workforce on the planet. And folks who work at Delta, we've got a very strong culture. No one better connects the world. That's our mantra. And we would love it for folks to be able to have multiple careers working here at Delta. And to the degree that it was difficult to do that, because understanding what skills you need to be able to move from different parts of the organization was always a difficult thing to communicate clearly and make it actionable. Right? So it's one thing to say, hey, here's a job description, you can see the skills. It's another thing to enable that with the training that is necessary. Right. Or to almost create, like a shopping experience where you could find your aspirational role, learn about that organization, make it a goal, and then understand the steps that you need. And allowing us as an organization to take all this investment that we make in our development and target it in very precise ways, in ways that can really unlock a lot of that value, for sure.
[00:04:57] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, every organization, I think, is seeing this sometimes, this imbalance that you have too many skills, too many people maybe in some roles, in some skills, and not enough in another one. And how do you real balance and how do you make sure that you, from a business perspective, can actually support people to even know what the organization requires? Where are these future proof jobs, where are the skills that the organization will value in the future? That visibility usually is not there, right?
[00:05:27] Speaker A: No, not at all. And for a lot of employees who are motivated to do this, it becomes, well, you go to the applicant tracking system, you take a look at what jobs are available, you read the job descriptions and you try to piece it together, but you really can't see the trends. If you're trying to develop a longer term career, you're interested in what's happening 18 months, 24 months down the road here. I'm trying to build a career. I'm not really looking to go jump from job to job job.
One of the things that we're rolling out here very shortly is we're taking information from our applicant tracking system that shows the trending data. Where are those open positions? As you're exploring aspirationally where you would like to take your career, you also have real data that shows you have a very good chance in this space because there are more opportunities currently in that part of the business than maybe in another part of the business. So you can direct your career aspirations accordingly.
[00:06:21] Speaker C: That's fantastic. So at Delta, you have so many different roles, of course, right? So many different jobs. Give us some examples of where you saw maybe the need declining and where you see the need increasing and how this can help kind of build a much more dynamic workforce and a much more dynamic organization model.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Well, you know, Kathy, we had in the wake of COVID we went through a very large hiring exercise. We hired over 25,000 employees in the wake of COVID So for us, that presented lots of challenges, including making certain that when embracing these new employees, helping them to learn our culture and our ways of operating and so on. So that represented a huge challenge. So I think to answer your question, most recently, it was just really a large scale hiring that we went through in our operations. And that's sort of on a macro scale, on a more micro scale, with a lot of the work that I do, I have a lot of visibility towards technical trends and things that are going on in that realm and skills that are necessary to run big projects, skills that are necessary to understand how you capitalize those projects, technological trends and things like that, that's always a dynamic area and always difficult to find talent. You know, we've also found that in areas where we take our hourly workforce and they're looking to move into salaried positions and corporate positions and so forth, we've created programs within our finance organizations. We've got financial analysts and apprenticeship programs in the areas of data management and so on. So those, I think, to answer your question, are some of the bigger areas where we see some movement, but it's a very, very dynamic environment and it's changing all the time.
[00:08:03] Speaker C: So somebody who is in, I don't know, ground crew or something like that could move into a financial analyst position if they are so interested in and passionate about that. Is that right?
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. And a lot of times we'll have folks who join Delta. They come from a very wide variety of backgrounds and educational levels. And you'd be surprised if folks who joined Delta with the aspiration of just getting your foot into the door. So you may start off in one position, but start there with an aspiration that goes much, much broader than that. So we're really trying to help those folks with a roadmap of sorts and create a new level of transparency and skill visibility so they could see what's necessary and how to get there for sure.
[00:08:47] Speaker C: I mean, it's so interesting because sometimes employees don't even think about transferable skills that they might already have from other areas of their experience. Right. I mean, sometimes it's really just showing them, hey, these skills that you might use in other areas of your life. For example, you might be, I don't know, the controller on your kids soccer club or something like that, that will actually help you to be a financial analyst, like those kind of things. And oftentimes people don't make even that connection. And we, as an organization, we don't know that they have these skills from other areas because we have them packed in their ground probe, maybe.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: Yeah. And think about, you know, one of the things that I find fascinating also is that, you know, the opportunity to motivate and the idea that the company that you work for understand something that's so deeply personal to you. Right. The skills that you've taken the time to develop and own that may not be necessarily applicable to the job you're in, but you would love to be able to apply them in other areas to align with your aspirations. And the idea that the company that's visible to the company is visible to the recruiters, it's visible to the talent folks. The hiring managers can really, really, I think, inspire folks. Right. To build their careers and unlock all that great value.
[00:10:03] Speaker C: So one and a half years ago, you set up on this journey to understand all the skills that are in the organization. Tell us a little bit more how you went about that, how you think about skills categories.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: Yeah. Kelly Elliott, who heads up our compensation and total rewards. Here at Delta, she had a vision for enabling what we call our career architecture. So compensation was very interested in making certain that there was a standardization in these jobs across the organization. So let's suppose you have a data analyst in division one and you have another person who's doing very similar jobs, but that job definition was created in another division. That work is very, very similar, but from a systems perspective, it appeared different. So unless you go through that effort, you're never going to be able to get to the Skills foundation piece. So the job hierarchy, the job architecture has to be done. So we had leadership that says, hey, look, this is the direction that we need to go. We had our compensation total rewards team saying, we want to standardize this across talent acquisition, employee data management, our compensation modules and so forth. So it really was taking that momentum and said, hey, look, we're going to build a career architecture. We can then align our skills accordingly. So it really started with the career architecture, jobs standardization, then aligning that with skills and then ultimately aligning that with development.
[00:11:24] Speaker C: So really across the HL functions, you have lots of different people that have to collaborate on that.
[00:11:31] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's, you know, it's one of those projects. At some point, you know, it felt so overwhelming. It wasn't for the great leaders that we have in each of these coes. And Joanne, our Chro, driving that vision, to get each of those teams to say, okay, this is the mission, this is our priority. This is how we're going to focus on getting it done. I don't think we could have made the, the progress that we have.
[00:11:54] Speaker C: What's the role of technology? Let's talk a little bit about how technology can support this and the role of AI.
[00:11:59] Speaker A: Yeah, so the AI piece was really built in from the beginning. And as you know, data is critically, critically important for the AI to function. What we want to do is find out a way where we can capture the reward signals from within the organization to train the machine. So we've got our skills foundation piece built in and we, as we were discussing, we're partnered with SAP and their talent intelligence hub to get that core piece implemented around those important skills. So that's what we call our evergreen approach. So through job descriptions and the routing of job descriptions, we're going to be able to tell our global talent management team trends that are occurring. As hiring managers look at different sorts of skills, we can go back to our global talent management team. They can take a look at those and define new standards and keep this moving. So AI is going to play a critical, critical role for us down the road here.
[00:12:54] Speaker C: Wow. And so the managers, the hiring managers actually train in a way. They train the AI, right, because they know what the jobs are about. We in HR can't really know all the jobs and all the skills is impossible. Right. But managers know, of course, what it takes. And so I think that's a really good approach. And so training the AI through their managers, I think, democratizes that kind of knowledge and that insight.
[00:13:18] Speaker A: That's spot on, Kathy. I don't know any other way to do it. Right. I mean, if you hire good leaders and they're tuned in to the needs of your customers, they will know that, for example, we're rolling out free Wi Fi for our frequent flyers across the entire fleet. And the equipment that's necessary in the cabin evolves over time. So you think, well, maybe our flight attendants may need different skills for different sorts of equipment to maintain and support those sorts of things. And so the leaders of those flight titans, they'll know that. Right? So when they're hiring, like, you know, this particular crew is going to need certain skills. So that's just one example. But that happens millions of times a day as the world continues to turn.
[00:13:58] Speaker C: Wow. So with AI, you can now keep on top of that, obviously, and continuously train it because you couldn't do this manually, of course, as you said.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. And to get the ball rolling, AI needs training data. So at the very beginning of it, you don't really have it. You have to have a period of time wherever you're gathering that reward signal from hiring managers. And we did it the old fashioned way. You know, brought consultants in, we routed spreadsheets around. We got our leaders to review them and sign off. And they have the patience to do that once we can't go there every week. Right. You embed it into natural processes like, you know, hiring, you know, creating a job description and allow the machine to participate in that. You can get some really good predictive quality results over time.
[00:14:42] Speaker C: Now you're almost ready to roll this out. Tell us a little bit more about what's the plan on rolling this out. What will employees be able to do? What will managers be able to do, and how is that gonna, how is that gonna work?
[00:14:56] Speaker A: Yeah, we're really excited. We're gonna be launching our beta version of the talent intelligent hub with success factors, and we're gonna roll it out to hr first. Right. Because there's a big learning that needs to go on there as well. Not only have they gone through the training, but the training to actually see and use this machine is going to be really, really important for them. So what the experience allows our employees to do is to shop. We've created very much like a shopping experience where you can go in and you can shop for your aspirational role, and you can do that in ways that are common to Delta employees. We are organized by different divisions, so you can sort of shop to different divisions, understand what that division does, understand the types of roles that they have, and navigate through areas of interest. Find the job that you aspire towards, and then add it to your shopping basket, so to speak. And then once it's in there, you can then see the skills that you have, the skills that you need, and you can assess your proficiency. When we launch, we're allowing employees to go in and edit their own proficiency levels. There's a standard proficiency guide so you can self rate against that guide across all of those skills.
In the future, we are planning that there will be some assessments for certain types of skills. Some others may need managerial approval and those sorts of things. Obviously, all the skills that are regulated and so forth, those are a different category of skills. But for your aspirational sorts of roles, you can then go in and see all the wonderful training and development, whether they're in the future, we're going to have apprentice programs and things that will be aligned. In the beginning, we have partnered with Skillsoft and they have their training library. We call them skill builders, curricula that have been established for each of those skills. So you go in, you find your job, add it to shopping basket, see the skills you need, and then take the training that you need, and that's going to start rolling out. We'll roll out to a couple of additional corporate divisions this year and then in January we're going to roll out through the entire company.
[00:16:56] Speaker C: Wow. So very close. Wow. I can't wait to hear how it goes, but I'm sure it's going to be fantastic. Well, I know we're almost out of time. Tim, any last words of wisdom or any last word of advice for anybody listening in and thinking about this kind of daunting problem of going down that skills journey?
[00:17:13] Speaker A: Certainly. I think parting advice here is sequencing it, getting the alignment with leaders, get the jobs built out, move into skills, keep it at a fairly high level to start, make sure you got your learning established. So get all the intellectual capital and design stuff set up. Be ready for a daunting technical lift that goes underneath it. And then the AI piece training data is really, really important, right? So as you go through this, think about ways as we had mentioned with the hiring manager example and job descriptions of ways to capture reward signal as you're implementing this process so they can stay evergreen for the foreseeable future.
[00:17:54] Speaker C: Wow, what an amazing journey you've been on and I know it's going to be fantastic, so I look forward to hearing how it goes.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: Cathy, thank you.
[00:18:02] Speaker C: Thank you so much Tim, really appreciate your time.
Thanks for tuning into our episode with Tim Gregory from Delta Airlines. Tim provided fast and insight into deltas journey towards becoming a skill based organization. Every company is trying to become skill based, but Delta is using skills to transform everything from workforce planning to recruiting to talent development and careers. Tim explained how they went about it step by step and how they are using SAP's talent intelligence hub to enable employees to find opportunities, jobs, mentoring projects and development opportunities. As easy as it is to find a flight on the Delta app, what a fascinating employer centric approach. I hope this was valuable. Join us for more discussions with HR leaders who are shaping the future of work. Keep exploring what works.
