Tackling the skills shortage and improving opportunity with L&D | with Paul Phillips

Foreign. You're very welcome to episode 86 of the Shortness. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm going to be your host for today's broadcast Slash Podcast. I'm the CEO and co founder of Social Talent and I am hugely passionate about today's topic. Today's topic is skills Skills Tackling the skills shortage, the crisis and improving opportunities with learning and development. Our guest today is going to be talking about how he and his peers and colleagues in his organization are tackling the skills crisis. But before we introduce our guest today, it's only important for us to give context to this skills crisis. And there is a skills crisis, by the way. According to McKinsey's research, nine out of 10 organizations say that there is a skills crisis today or there will be in the next couple of years in their organizations. That's nine out of 10 organizations. It's a big, big priority. And the pandemic kind of made it worse. And the rate resignation that we kind of are seeing at the moment and coming through hopefully of 2021 is making it worse. So organizations are facing multiple battles. They're trying to retain employees, fill increased vacancies with growth, cover talent gaps as well. And the result of this has been and acute scarcity in particularly attractive employee skill sets. But as I said, our guest today has a solution to combat that. Paul Phillips is joining us today from New Jersey in the United States. He's the global head of TA at Avanade, a company that itself is experiencing incredible hyper growth and an effort to find elusive talent. The organization is investing in careers upfront. They've established internal academies to train develop employees, launching different pilots across the globe to grow alternate talent pools, give more opportunities to candidates and employees and really leveraging learning and development tools like social talents platform. They've seen great success already in terms of numbers experiences and diversity equity inclusion efforts. I'm dying to dive into this, but perhaps before we do, I'll let Mr. Phillips introduce himself. Paul, you're very welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Jonny. It's delightful to be here. And you know, in terms of who am I, I think I always describe myself. Firstly I'm a dad and a doting husband. So I'm a father of four. I've got four kids, three boys, one girl, Harry, Zach, JJ and Sienna. And incredible wife Joanna that puts up with me on a daily basis. I would say we have a great marriage but you probably have to ask her for a proper opinion and thought on that. And then on the side I'm also head of talent acquisition globally for Avanard. I've been at avanard now since 2014, so been here seven and a half years. Seen us tremendously grow over that period of time in terms of kind of who have an R, to put it in its simplest form is really fuel transformation and growth for our clients and their customers through the power of both our people and Microsoft in terms of how big we are with 55,000 people digitally connected across 26 countries and remarkably, just in the last 12 months, we've grown over 40%. So seeing staggering growth. Unprecedented. And it's long may it continue.

It's not a small company, huge impact. 40,000, you know, 55,000 people now, 40% is insane. But I imagine you're also due to the nature of the services you provide. You really are at the code face of the skills crisis. Paul, would that be fair? Like you don't go to a consulting organization and ask them for the skills of a decade ago. You probably are an organization who are asked, being asked to solve some of these problems for your customers and to intervene. Would that be fair to say?

Yeah, I think that's a fair reflection, Johnny. It's certainly interesting obviously in terms of our own lives, we've seen how every part of our life obviously has kind of a digital touch point now more so than ever. And so what that means is we're now competing for that same digital talent that other organizations have not tended to be in the same marketplace as us, which is struggle in sometimes, but an opportunity for us to up our game and look for alternative ways in which we can bring talent in to the organization. I think first and foremost, Jonny, something that we have majorly focused on at Avanard is specifically trying to understand and get clarity on the types of skills that we need not just today, but tomorrow. So investing in technology and resource to support us on our workforce planning efforts and getting more clarity in terms of not just in terms of how much we want to grow, but where we need to grow and by how fast and looking at the right levers that we need to pull in order to make that happen. Because obviously talent acquisition is only one of those levers that we can leverage in terms of meeting that challenge.

Absolutely. I'm going to invite, by the way, our live listeners. For those of you who are listening live on LinkedIn or YouTube, I invite you to jump on the chat. If you have any questions for Paul, any comments you want to make during the show, please do jump in and use our chat functionality on LinkedIn or YouTube and we'll absolutely call them out. I need, by the way, articles we do reference on the show. We'll put in the show notes for those listening, those of you listening to the podcast. And on that note, I'm going to bring us to our first news article. I want to dive into you around this topic or dive in with you on today, Paul. And it comes from Shuram, published in the U.S. the Society for Human Resource Management in the U.S. and it's a recent article that is entitled How Learning and Development Can Attract and Retain Talent. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. And just to kind of summarize, I guess for our listeners who haven't had the chance to read this, really the premise of this is saying that you have to build a strong learning culture in your organization because this is what talent wants. They want opportunities to learn and develop. And it references several surveys around that and it talks about it not just being a solution for, you know, acquiring talent has been a thing that obviously that incoming talent are looking for, but it's also strong around retention and other aspects of talent. Anything here that surprised you, Paul, or anything you want to just kind of hammer home going, yes, you know, this is preaching to the choir about whatever point what jumped out at you, what surprised you?

Sure, it's interesting. I suppose it's probably not surprising, but I think it's the role that learning development has to play now in tandem with talent acquisition. So I think, you know, I think we often talk in certainly in the HR space about sometimes how we come across either to the business or even amongst ourselves that we're kind of siloed. I've really seen this opportunity and challenge that we have before us really help us drive more synergy and overlap between the learning and development function as well as talent acquisition or recruitment. And so it's really helped us get closer to each other and ultimately showcase how now learning and development has in some instances a pre hire activity. So offering education and support and learning even ahead of being, you know, part of our organization again having a corporate social responsibility aspect too. And that's really backed up by the survey that talks about the fact that, you know, 2/3 of workers and you know, in the 18 to 24 market. And I really feel that, you know, learning and development opportunities is, you know, in their top three in terms of what would attract them to an organization.

I know that I mentioned McKinsey's earlier on and their research around 9 in 10 organizations declaring that they have a skills crisis is in similar research published on McKinsey's updated only a couple of months ago, they've highlighted amongst enterprises that they surveyed, organizations were bridging the skills gap in three ways. And the three ways were developing skills. That's the L and D part. Hiring in skills and then using internal mobility to a lesser extent. Contracting in skills is probably a smaller fourth one. But you know, the development of skills versus hiring in and force and looking at internal mobility, you know, outstrip those two by kind of three to one. Right. So developing skills is absolutely seems to be the number one way organizations are saying they need to tackle this skills crisis. But it's not ignoring to your point, talent acquisition is being an important part of that and you know, it's related cousin are often part of the same team. Internal mobility, which again is a little bit more complicated than just looking at getting vacancies with internal talent. There's a lot more, there's arguably overlap there. So when you look at those three points, just first of all, I'd love to get your opinion on the dynamic between the three of those. You know, the L and D development of skills across the organization, the hiring and hiring in of additional skills and then the increased mobility of skills within the organization. What's your experience of those three pillars and how do they mix together?

Sure. So what we've actually done at Avanard is actually kind of break learning and development down to three distinct areas. So we talk about first off attracting talent and that's what I was talking about previously around some of the activity that we want to do pre hire, around providing opportunity for individuals that may have not considered a role in technology beforehand. The opportunity to partake in MOOC classes. So massive open online, open courses in the Microsoft space or in the consulting space as a, I suppose a teaser for what life could be like at Avanard or another organization. I think that the important piece here, it's about us being educators and helping open opportunities for more on that, on that pre hire piece. And then we kind of split, I suppose more of our core learning and development into two key areas. We talk about keeping talent ready. I know this is an ongoing debate and some of my colleagues recently contributed to an article in Forbes around continuing the need to unlearn as well as learn as well. And I think the point here is that what's clear and what we've seen over just the last two years is how fast technology changes and ultimately that we as individuals need to be able to understand how to leverage technology to either make our lives Easier or do our jobs better or solve certain problems. And the actual technologies will likely change and evolve quickly. So looking at ways in which we can keep our talent ready, and we do that under a pillar of what we call limitless learning for our employees at Avanard. And the third piece is around getting talent ready. This is a piece that's really exciting for me because this is where we look to bring in early talent. So those people at the foundational step in the kind of pyramid hierarchy and organization also bringing in non traditional hires, speaking to our DNI piece as well, enabling the opportunity and providing more equitable opportunities for others to join us here at Avanard. So that's the piece to question one in terms of internal mobility. Again, this is a really great point, Jonny, and it's something that we've really leaned on the last 18 months at Avanard. And we've actually just reintroduced a new internal mobility approach at Avanard where we're enabling everyone to actually apply for opportunities not just one grade above their current level, but two grades above their current level. So looking at ways in which we can enable, you know, not in a vertical opportunity for those already part of Avanard, but more importantly, it's about the fact that this does not just work from the individual's perspective, but from a company's perspective as well. Looking at ways in which we can create more stickiness and if an individual wants new opportunities, thriving to that next challenge, that we can provide it in house. And I think we're starting to see some great success. And I've got examples even within my own TA team where we promoted people two levels because, you know, A, the job required it, B, they were capable and C, you know, we could afford it. So I think it's been great for the organization and great for the individuals as well.

When you look at that connection between, let's say the hiring or pre hiring L and D approach and then the kind of post hiring and development piece and you mentioned de and I obviously as well, Paul, I've talked to a lot of DEI leaders and they've told me that one of the ways, again, one of the many ways, but one of the ways that you can combat some of the challenges around hiring more diverse talent is pushing back on leaders around their requirements and asking them to open up the requirements to perhaps not be as rigid in their skill requirements. So that's been a thing in DEI for a while and arguably the markets are forcing that in pretty much every job. Do you find that there's a lot of pushback from managers around what they ideally want and what you feel you can deliver in the market. And how, if so, how has the role of L and D helped your team communicate with managers about how they could fill those gaps and what the way forward could be?

Sure. I think, you know, Johnny, I think we all, we're all acknowledge the fact that we live in a world now of instant gratification. And what I mean by that is, you know, I remember and I'm pretty sure my age here, when I was younger, if we wanted to rent a VHS movie from Blockbuster that required us to, you know, get mum and dad to take us up in the car to the local Blockbuster Video, then probably find out the video you wanted, it already been taken out and therefore you had to wait another week until you have the opportunity to take that video out. Obviously now, you know, if, if any of my kids want to watch a movie, you know, they kind of think it's click and play and they can watch at will. And then, you know, from a. Any needs, you know, we leverage multiple online retailers to help us deliver goods, know, sometimes within a couple of hours to our house. And I think when you're talking and how this relates to business leaders, from my perspective is that sometimes it's more difficult to sell the opportunities or the promise of something that will come in the future rather than something come today. And you know, we talked about, you know, the great resignation or the great reshuffle. It's got many terms. I'm not sure I'd put the word great in front of it. From my perspective, I like to talk about the great attraction maybe. And ultimately there's an opportunity now to kind of rebalance the conversation with business leadership here. You know, you mentioned McKinsey before. I know they've done a recent survey where they looked at the certain attributes that either attracted or employees rather than employers employees felt were the things that really attract them to an organization or make them stay once they arrived. And elements of that really kind of baked in what we're trying to drive on a DEI agenda such as being valued by your manager, feeling a sense of belonging, having caring and trusting teammates. These attributes or desires that people are looking for in terms of their career to attract and retain are not paid enough money. That's what we've. How long have we heard that everyone's aware we can always earn more money. There's always more opportunity to earn more money at other organizations. But I think the quicker that we can really hone in on trying to drive some of that differentiated opportunities in terms of how people are valued at an organization, the better. I think that fact that we're seeing turnover increase creates the opportunity now to have a differentiated conversation with the leaders, say look, we can't put this off to tomorrow. Now we have to deal with this today. As I shared, we're on a great growth agenda. I always, when I talk to my business leadership, they always say Paul, how can I help? I said let's keep the people that we have here today. And to do that we need to make sure that we really tune in on some of these DI needs and individual desires. It's imperative.

Well, I'm keen to dig in on the specifics of what exactly Avalanche is doing and some of the academies and other initiatives you have. I want to pause for one second, just bring in a question from one of our live listeners, Craig Zimorovski. Two related questions, more to do with I guess the reaction to the ex resignation or whatever word you want to put in front of that. I agree. Great is not probably the best word to use. Craig's interested to know how have you adjusted the interview process in the competitive marketplace with candidates going off the market so fast? And as a follow up question, how quickly are offers generated after the interview process is over? So how you related there first being have you adjusted the interview process in this market? Maybe if I can bring in have you adjusted it? Maybe in line with the fact that you don't expect to have the skills that in the market that you need. Has that changed how you assess for talent then if it's not as skills focused? So maybe that's me sneaking my question in there as well. But part of the same thing. Has the market led you to change that process in the last couple of years?

Yes, I think the simple answer is yes. However, how I'd go about sharing what we've done and approach that, you know, certainly we have sometimes we have high growth needs where we need talent at scale and actually what we've done is we've actually created a more of a kind of tiger team or a team completely focused and pulled them out from their day jobs to help us support a typical hiring effort. I'll take Security as an example where we've done a project called Security at Scale. We call it Talent at Scale and it's over a short space of time. We've hired over 500 security professionals into Avanard. We haven't done that through the general kind of post apply interview. We've actually created a team that are solely dedicated on sourcing talent but also leveraging the business so they do the talent reach out. So making them ambassadors of the TA process and then also having identified interviewers and interviewing days where it enables us to move a much quicker pace than we typically would do in a, in a typical interview process. I can even sneak in academy here as well. We even started a cyber academy in Europe where we actually hired over 50 people across 13 countries into a cyber academy which was 25% female as well, to enable us to know, move at pace and realize that not all these skills are available in the marketplace with the diversity that we're looking for. So this was real opportunity where we really just kind of create kind of more of a war room environment around a typical typical task and drove it home. And our security talent community, the size of our practice grew 85% last year and a lot of that work was down to our ability to grow organically. And funny enough, we do look at opportunities to acquire other organizations and I was able to persuade management that, you know, investing some money in this space, we could have far bigger bang for our buck. And it proved to play out as I hoped. I love that.

So I'm hearing it. It's less about how have you changed the interview process, it's more about how you think differently about hiring to solve the problem more holistically about we need talent and the business needs, the business needs talent. How do we provide that talent, create that talent? Actually our reference, our last article, just want to quickly reference it before we dive into this, which is from the FT in the uk and the title of the article skills shortages demand grow your own training approach I think is a nice segue into what are Avanade doing to grow your own. What is, what has been the approach and maybe if you can walk us through some of the schemes and what successes you've seen and perhaps what challenges you've seen seen with those schemes.

Sure. More than happy to share. And you know, interesting enough I talked before about the workforce planning piece about how critical that is to do that upfront work, to have clarity in terms of the types of skills and how many we need and where. I think we then clicked down and kind of peeled the onion back on that one and looked at, you know, let's consider market availability of that talent, some talent. There's, you know, Azure Developers is an example in my space there's quite a lot of Azure developers in the market space. We also have a. Then you consider how much business need do we have for Azure Developers? We have a huge business need. And then we think about, you know, how long would it take to get someone job or project ready if we wanted to take someone from a base skill set or zero base to being able to be, you know, in front of a client and supporting our projects. And we kind of looked at that across a number of our different disciplines to really tune in on where we really wanted to hone in from a skill perspective. I think that was a really great exercise to do. And you can actually create a really nice visual which will help with having that discussion together with L and D in front of the business. In terms of when you look to trigger investment in terms of what our need is, in terms of what we've done recently. I would talk about the fact that in Brazil, I've got a great example in Brazil. Brazil is one of our high growth areas. It also has high turnover naturally, in that marketplace. It's something that we all struggle with. And so. And we also had a desire to really rebalance our diversity hiring. And so we ran a program that ran between last April and August which focused on bringing 200 female talents into the organization. Johnny, who hadn't had a technology background before, and we brought those talents in, actually we levered leverage influencers in the Brazil marketplace to actually showcase and share those opportunities. So Instagram influencers, social media influencers, again, a new medium that we haven't leveraged before to really get the buzz and get the traction. And we were overwhelmed with the response. In Brazil, we brought on 200 female talents. We then trained them up in multidisciplines according to those needs, such as in Power Platforms, D365 as your developer, depending on what their background skill set and where we needed our need. And it's been a tremendous success. We've also seen some of our competitors leverage similar approaches in the marketplace. And from a diversity perspective, Johnny, our Brazil hiring female percentage before the program was at 18%. After the program it went to 30%. Not just because of the 200 female talents that we brought in in Brazil, but as we went through that process of receiving applications, we actually realized that some people were kind of overqualified or had more skillset than they believed they had. And so we were able to actually funnel that talent into our kind of typical core pipeline and bring that talent through as well. So it was kind of a win win for us. In terms of Project ADA in Brazil.

The couple of examples you've given so far, and they're awesome. Paul, really to me highlight the increased blurring of the lines between talent acquisition and your other peers in talent. So with that approach, I know this is something I see very much as a trend in other organizations. It's great to see Avna doing that. How do you balance that as a leader when you don't necessarily own the budget in the other areas, but you rely on those colleagues to have the right programs in place to work with you as well? How does that end up manifesting itself day to day on these specific examples? How do you make sure you are involved in the other peers in the wider talent organization? What does that look like day to day?

Sure, I think it's great. Actually. Gartner released an article around this about 12 months ago about how the HR organization is evolving and how they're looking at the HR organization of tomorrow has what they call this kind of problem solving entity rather than that's a way in which you can kind of bring the relevant people from not just HR, but from the business around the same table to tackle an opportunity. And that's what we've done here, here at Avanard. So I'm sharing the stories today, but trust me, this is not just the work of my two hands, this is the work of many. And so I work with our head of HR business partnering as well as the head of learning and development. We've created a kind of a small steer co within HR and then we're bringing other leaders from the business to enable us as we look to drive this, drive this forward. We also very early on took this to our board just to kind of validate that directionally this was the right to go, the right way to go. And the board got super excited about this proposition which created a bit more pressure on us to deliver. But you know, having that buy in from the top really helped kind of, you know, maybe, you know, drive some other conversations at a faster pace than would have necessarily happened elsewhere. And I also think, you know, being in high growth mode and I think we're all very clear that all the skills that we require aren't going to be available in the marketplace and we can't all fight on compensation and value. Props. And then together with that, the role that we have for society in terms of creating, you know, more equitable environments rather than equal environments is increasing at pace as well. So it gave everyone an opportunity to lean in on that agenda too.

We focused a bit, or I focused a bit on finding talent and bringing in talent in that angle of L and D. But has the business seen an impact when it comes to retention and engagement by investing in these increased L and D efforts over the last past couple of years. Paul?

Sure, yeah. No, we have seen benefits. And I go again, going back to Brazil, you know, I think the Brazil market on average is trending around 37% turnover. That's not Avanard. That's the market itself. In the space that we work in, we were trending in the early 30s. At one point, we've actually seen our turnover come down by five or six points in the most volatile market ever. And I'm not going to attribute that all to the work that we're doing from a learning perspective and providing opportunity in terms of getting, keeping talent ready, new opportunities for bringing talent in. But that stickiness and that support is certainly contributing to some of that success, for sure. And then even from a global turnover perspective, we're remaining relatively stable despite the increased pressure. And I think it's very clear when Pam Maynard, our CEO, joined, one of the first things she did is have the words create a genuine human impact into our purpose as an organization. And that's really resonated with us. And it's a principle that we use in everything we do. And I think as a result of that, you know, we're very authentic in terms of decisions we make as an organization around people. And as a result, we do truly care. And I think we're seeing that impact from a retention perspective, which is great to see, and governs us as we make decisions going forward. And aligned to that, Jonny, is the fact that you and I are partners. We leverage social talent not only for talent and acquisition training, which has been incredibly successful, but more importantly, again, sponsored by our executive committee at Avanard, is what we're calling a License to hire program. What we realized is this high growth, this high need is we need to make sure that we professionalize how we interview candidates and provide a stellar candidate experience, as well as making sure that we kind of remove as much unconscious bias as we can. And so, you know, we embarked on a program called License to Hire. Very James Bondi. And, you know, the idea is we remove all the rocks from the recruitment process and it's a smooth martini rather than a martini on the rocks. But ultimately, you know, we've had over 5,000 people in the last six months achieve their license to Hire certification. And the feedback has been phenomenal. You know, this is not compulsory compliance training. This is recommended training that we're, we're driving. And we've opened it up to everybody above consultant level at the organization now. And the feedback's been great in terms of what we're seeing is that around, you know, 96% of people think that this is going to contribute to a better candidate experience of taking the training high 90s again, 97% about an inclusive hiring approach. And it's been tremendous knowing sometimes when you push out training, Johnny, you know, no one bites and you're like, I've just done all this. We've just done all this work. And you know, maybe we thought it was important. No one else thought it was important. It was clear to see that this was felt, this is important. And honestly, it's also going to make everyone's lives easier. And what I mean by this is we've shared how fast we've grown as an organization. We, we need more people to be part of the interviewing process. You know, when we did this in North America, we had about 500 interviewers initially. We've now got 1400 additional people that have a license to hire now can be involved in the interviewing process. And we've got confidence that they can be conducted in a. Provide a better experience. So that also means that the expectation and need on that 500 is lessened as well. And so I think it's seen as a win from their perspective too. So it's something that you kind of again, need to all be all in on this. This is not just about what talent acquisition, learning development, HR can do. You need to be hand in hand with the business. And, you know, license to hire is an example of that. And another example of that is we've developed a program called the Talent Ambassador program. It's kind of like an everyone recruits. And we've had over 1500 people sign up to our TAP program. And we run bitcoining tappy hours where we kind of help individuals showcase how they can help our recruitment and attraction process. And it's been, again, a phenomenal success and we were quite cheeky. And we added a module on our license to hire training, introducing the tap. The TAP program and inviting people to, to join. And we saw that really help us, you know, grow, grow our membership base, which has grown over 400 just year to date.

Thank you for sharing that. And you've dug into some topics I wasn't planning to bring up. Actually, I think, I think they're worth digging into because we're talking about L and D and rolling out learning and development. And what I find, Paul, I don't know if you find this. Sometimes people come and go, oh, great. Learning in general is going to work if we roll it out. And the reality from what I've seen is that just saying, well, here's learning and therefore we're going to achieve the outcomes doesn't work. You mentioned two things so far that I think are really important. One is the quality of the learning. We're extremely proud of the partners that we work with to deliver some of that training you mentioned there. And we've worked with what we feel are the best in the world and try and deliver that extremely high quality premium experience to users. The second is how you launch it, how you, how you promote it in the business. Whether you get that high level buy in, you know, even using language like license to hire to make it more promotable, et cetera, these are critical elements that make L and D successful. L and D isn't going to be just successful by itself. You don't just rock up and go, there is learning, go do the work. Well, that's my experience. What is your.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's, for me, it's similar to onboarding. You know, sometimes some organizations do a phenomenal job of onboard. You know, you get, you attend, you join the organization. The first three days are magical. You're cared for, you're loved, you know, all your questions are answered instantaneously and then you go out to the big wide world and suddenly, you know, you're part of the furniture and no one's kind of reaching out. And I think to that point it can't just be about the learning. You need to create an environment around the learning that enables, you know, these individuals to flourish. And you need to create networks who are responsible for enabling that continued success. And so, you know, we've done a great program in the UK working with an organization called Women Returners where we've actually, in October, we welcomed 10 female talents into our organization that have been out the world of work for at least two years and some up to 14 years out of work. And you know, we've, we've brought them back into the technology space, giving them opportunity around no learning on specific technical needs. But at the same time, it's a six month program. Johnny, this is, this is not just you come in, you do two to four weeks of training, you get certificate and then you're left on your merry way. You know, we've got people that are focused on this and creating the right environment for these individuals to flourish, to be, feel careful, feel a sense of belonging, going back to what we've heard before. And I think that's what will pay itself forward. And we're now looking at opportunities where we can expand that program into the US as well. So something that we are good at, Avanard, is starting small, scaling fast and going. And I'd encourage everybody on this call to really think about, don't think about why can't we do this, think about how can we do this? And to start small, create a proof of concept. You can, it's, it's not a huge investment, but make it happen, showcase the value and then, you know, let it rip.

I can test testify to the fact that your team has done an amazing job making all of those projects a success. And you know, you know, and I'll put it out there. You can't just take social talent and, and not everyone's going to make it successful. You have to have the right team behind it doing the right things. And you definitely have that. Navanade I want to move on to a slightly, slightly different but related topic for, and that is the nature of the type of skills that we're developing in our workforces. And we talk generally about different programs and skills. But again, the research would suggest from Deloitte and others that, you know, most organizations, 60% by most surveys, believe that the future of skills development isn't in what we traditionally think of digital skills, technical skills, or maybe what you might call hard skills. It's in what has previously been called soft skills. But I'll call them core skills. And I'll define that a bit better for you before perhaps you respond being to me, technical skills or workplace skills are about the job you do, so they're specific to a certain job or profession or career. Whereas core skills, what war calls soft skills, are to every job and every career in every profession that are common skills across all the different job families, if you like. And there is a sense, although we get a lot of talk about digital skills and have since the pandemic, but that it's actually those core skills that we're going to be increasingly focusing on. Has that been your experience? And if so, could you perhaps share a bit more about that?

Sure, yeah. I think it's again, an eloquent point, Jonny. That's something that we are, that we are focused on now. We talk about them as human impact skills here at Avanard. And certainly I'm so glad we've got rid of that reference around soft skills. It always for me diminished the relevancy of how important they were. And you know, from a technology company in terms of who we are at Avanard, you know, we were very well known for kind of solving specific issues or problems through leveraging tech for our clients. And obviously the kind of digitization of organizations has meant that we had to become far more consultative in our approach and be more advisory led in terms of how we support our organizations. We don't only just talk to the CIO now we talk to the chief marketing officers, we talk to the chief people officers. It's a much broader bandwidth of opportunity in terms of how we can support and make our clients and their customers lives easier per se. And so, you know, having those human impact skills are critical to that. Sorry. And ultimately what we need for that to happen is that we need to look at how can we best look at inclusive leadership. For me, that's one of the things that I feel is really on the rise. Something that we've really focused on at Avanard and why is it important? For me, we're clear on the evolving IND agenda that we've seen in the marketplace and it's must needed. We've talked about focus on diversity and how this skills and training provides opportunity for more. However, then we also talked about the environments that we need to create. And to create those environments, it's really important that we create and make sure that our talent, our leaders are aware of how important inclusivity is. You know, looking at ways in which, you know, privilege, which is a tough topic, but looking we look at ways Avanard around, you know, how can we leverage some of our own privileges for the benefit of others either who are in our organization or, you know, external to our organization. I currently do mentoring for people that aren't part of Avanard and supporting them on, you know, writing their resumes or you know, how to let down an organization that's offered them a place and really helping guide individuals to their next steps and some work I love to find time and space to do now. Talking about how to build empathy, how to create psychological safety around, you know, people making sure that they feel included. It's safe to learn and safe to make space, make mistakes and speak up is incredibly important as well as courageous conversations. One of the best conversations we had last year at Abernard was when we got brought together with our gmc, which is our global management committee and we had a discussion about race. This was, it is a taboo topic and something that I've never had the opportunity to discuss, live in a forum before. And we talked about our own backgrounds, how that kind of influenced our experiences and some of the decisions and the pathways that we've all taken. And it was just super enlightening to have that kind of open, open debate and understand more about our colleagues and also help us make better decisions as we move forward. And I personally make sure I'm kind of a head, heart, gut guy, so if someone asked me a call, I can make a call pretty quick. I'm starting to kind of check some of my calls and make sure that those calls are the best for everyone, not just on what I kind of see, given the experiences I've had to date. So I think it's ultimately going to make us all better leaders and also better organizations as a result.

I love that in that, you know, what you're speaking to are, you know, you mentioned leadership training, for example, that has been in a lot of surveys in the last six months, signaled as the top core skill that organizations want to prioritize to a ratio of 3 to 1 above its closest competitor in the list of core skills that organizations feel they need to focus on. Which I imagine has quite obviously come from the massive change in how we work in the last two years, certainly in professional roles that are more office based. It's forced leadership to lead. And so much has happened in that time that we've had to really focus on the wider well being of our teams and what motivates them, not just at work, but just what's going on generally in their lives. So all the topics you speak to are ones passionate about. We love hearing social talent. We're investing heavily as well in our speakers and therefore in the training we have for folks in our platform. But when you look at, I guess I look at L and D as an attraction proposition, you know, how are you communicating this on scale to audiences? All the amazing work that Avanade is doing, all the great initiatives across different lenses and projects for different areas, you have to be. I'm surely using this to your advantage to start saying this is what Avanade is to future employees to say, you know, knowing that the data suggests this is what so many different cohorts want. They want opportunities to learn, they want safe places to work in, they want opportunities to work in inclusive cultures and they want us to be supported, which, you know, it seems Avanade is absolutely doing all those things. How do you communicate that to the market or does the market communicate it to itself, you know, by virtue of social and everything else?

Yeah, I think we see a lot obviously in the likes of Glassdoor and those social, social platform environments. I think it's something we probably can get Better at Johnny, if I'm going to be honest with you. It's, you know, I think, you know, celebrating successes, standing back and seeing all that we've done and actually spending time and energy and pushing that out and curating it into a format that can be leveraged externally. It's more, you know, we're just moving at such fast pace and such growth. We kind of deliver, move on. Deliver, move on. I think we can be better at looking at ways in which we can communicate that to the marketplace. Having said that, I have, you know, seen that. No, we've been nominated in the top 100 companies and by Newsweek. We've had a number of top employer awards recently, top recruiting awards and also L and D awards in terms of being the top 100 organizations. So we do invest in making sure that we can showcase that work and be valued. But something that we are doing on an increasing pace is leveraging the voice of our employees. So we've just introduced a new video technology that we're leveraging that helps just capture 60 second videos of our people. And something that we've seen have a really great impact on LinkedIn and other platforms, you know, such as 2,3x. The number of clicks. In terms of people really wanting to see who works at Avanard, what is their day like? You know, yes, it says it's cool place to work and it's fun, it's hip, it's got, it's cool and it's awesome. But actually the word of mouth and seeing people actually share their own experiences is really empowering. And so the medium of video and leveraging the talent that was already here is going to be one of the avenues that we are going to be doubling down on as well. We move forward to kind of share our success and leverage that to tell our story.

I love that employee advocacy. Certainly we're seeing this trend increasingly that it is the way to deliver employer branding on scale. Less polish, more employee advocacy, but more control out to the employees to drive that and encourage themselves. But it's also a brilliant retention topic to connect the dots back again. It's not just about attracting new people in by allowing people to have that voice to share their story. They feel better about where they are. They're reminded about where they are as well. Paul, I can't believe we're at time. We're almost at time. We've gone through so much. I could keep you for the 45 minutes. I know you're a busy man. Not alone with your part time job in Avanade and your full time job as a dad. But I wonder if you would indulge us one more, one more question, which is advice. We ask every guest on the show to leave us with one piece of advice to end with, to add to our shortlist of advice that 87 others have given us over the course of the last two years on the shortlist. But what advice comes to mind that has been given to you by others throughout your career or you've garnered through your own experience that you think will be good to share with our audience here today?

Sure. It's a great, great question. And you know, it's actually, I'm actually going to share something I heard very recently. We're doing a session around well being and someone shared a piece of advice that's resonated with me and really touched how we've been acting and behaving at Avanard and something I feel that I need to do more as we move forward and that is create space for the human, not just the task. So I think, you know, it's about how can we be more authentic and be more genuine about thinking, about being people first in some of our thinking. And this plays very nicely to what we've been talking about from a skills potential perspective rather than a pedigree perspective. And I think the more that we can focus on creating space for the human and less about the task, the more successful we'll be moving forward. And I've certainly seen from an Avanar perspective reflecting on our success in the near term, great dividends from us behaving in that way less about what we say on slides and more about what we do.

I love that. It's amazing to hear about the culture of Avanade and the success. It's a culture and growth rate you expect to have of a 500 person startup that can't be sustained at scale. But to be 50,000 people and still living and breathing that culture and growing at that rate, it's a testament to the team of Avenad. Paul, thanks so much for coming on the show today to share some of the story about what the team and business is doing. Hopefully we can get you back again to continue that and tell more about what the team is doing to get it promoted out there. Thanks for joining us. I wish you well in the snow I think in New Jersey at the moment and we'll hopefully have you on later, later in the year as well to talk more about the Avanade story. Thanks Paul.

Thanks Johnny. Appreciate being here and thanks everyone for.

Listening and joining us this week on the show. If you want to find out more about the shortlist or our back catalog of shows, you can do so@socialtalent.com the shortlist. You can find the podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you find your podcasts. And we're live every afternoon UK time. That's the morning in the US it's the evening in Asia and you can find us on LinkedIn and YouTube on my personal page on LinkedIn or the Socialtown page on YouTube. Come back next week though. We've got another great show coming next week, Show 89, I think, where Alan Bailey will be joining us. Alan is somebody who I've known for many years in her most recent role in intel where she drove a lot of technological innovation and process innovation in their recruiting team globally for many, many years. And she now has running her own business and she's a talent futurist and founder, founder of her business Transformation Tapas. I love that name, Transformation Tapas. She gets to work with loads of organizations these days on transforming them for to be more future ready to some of the topics we've talked about today. Alain will be joining us next week. That's Wednesday 9th of February, 4pm UK Irish time at 11am the east coast, the US and 8am the west coast. And we live on podcasts on Apple and Spotify by Wednesday evening. And that's going to be the day before we go off on our social town ski trip to celebrate our success of last year. The team is going to Austria to solve skiing next Thursday. So I'll be in particularly jovial mood when we have Elaine on the show next week. So don't forget to join us next week. Thanks for joining us this week. Hope you enjoyed the show and we'll talk to you soon.