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

Sam.

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 Attacking 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 right resignation that we've 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, has been here seven and a half years. Seen us tremendously grow over that period of time in terms of who have and 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 coal 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, Jonny. It's certainly interesting obviously in terms of just 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 had 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, invite you to jump on the chat if you have any questions for Paul, any comments we'll make during the show, please do jump in and use our chat functionality on LinkedIn or YouTube and we'll absolutely call them out. Any, by the way, articles we do reference on the show, we'll put in the show notes for 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 sherm, published in the US the Society for Human Resource Management in the US 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 filling vacancies with internal talent. There's a lot more, there's arguably overlap there. So when you look at those three points, first of all, 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 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 early. 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 market's 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, Jonny, I think we're all acknowledge the fact that we live in a world now of instant gratification. And what I mean by that is I remember and I'm probably showing my age here. When I was younger, if we wanted to rent the 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, no, 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 any needs, you know, we leverage multiple online retailers to help us deliver goods, you 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 that will 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, 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.