The importance of up-skilling and re-skilling in the modern workplace | with Becky Chung

Upskilling requires not only giving people the information through a training, but helping them learn how to apply it. And so that is a big gap that we'll often experience. As you know, one of my favorite things to say is training is a moment. It is not the solution. We have to give the person the information, but we need to make sure that their leader that they themselves understand how to digest that information, apply that information, self reflect on how their skills are evolving. And so making sure that we really structure leaders need to make sure these programs are really structured to help them understand what is the skill, how should they know that they're improving and why does that matter for them?

Hello and welcome to Work Smart, a podcast from Social Talent that's all about becoming more work smart. I'm Johnny Campbell, CEO and co founder of Social Talent and this week we're going to be talking about upskilling and reskilling with Becky Chung from C eleum. At the end of the episode, we'll be running Becky through a Work Smart quiz that you can learn how to be more work smart. Let's do this. Becky, it's such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. You're really welcome. Thank you for joining us today. Wondering if you could give our audience a little bit of an introduction to yourself and tell us more about who Becky Chung is.

Thanks, Johnny. So excited to be here today. I'm Becky Chung, the vice president of talent development at Cielo. Cielo is the global leading partner in talent acquisition. So we partner with clients all around the world to help them as they're seeking talent and looking to have the right talent at the right time for their organizations. My almost 20 years of experience have really been in the space of helping build workforces that can deliver in a high performing, high engaged way. And so really excited to share more about what I know when it comes to upskilling talent.

So Becky, the talent that you work with across Yellow, tell me a little bit more about where those folks are, how many there are and what kind of skills you're working with, kind of roles you're working with across the business.

So we are a global provider. So we have employee about 3,000 employees all around the world. I think it's 140 different countries now that we work with. Common roles are any of the corporate service roles that you would have in a business, so finance, human resources, it but also a large population dedicated to recruitment. So those are individuals who do more administrative support who have to be experts in finding talent, who are recruiters Engaging with talent or hiring managers and individuals who are really helping to advise our clients on where's the future of talent acquisition going and how can we help them achieve their goals.

Skilling and upskilling is something very close to my heart, as you can imagine, in social talent. But tell me about your journey with skills. Like, you know, surely we've always, always needed skills, and it's always been something that organization should do, which is to look at upskilling their employees. So, so why is this the topic that you chose for today? And why do you think so many people as they are, are talking about skilling in 2023 into 2024?

Yeah, there's part of. This is just a personal passion of mine and something that I just get really excited and energized about because I am at the core somebody who loves people, but also loves labor economics. And so when you put those two things together in one person, what you get is somebody who's just really interested in seeing how you make the most of the talent in the market. And so that really plays into understanding the motivations of people. And at our core, we all have a need to be successful. So regardless where you sit in the world, what language you speak, what country, what role you have, everybody shows up wanting to be successful, wanting to feel they have security in their roles. And so development and upskilling is such a crucial way for us to meet that need for talent. And then when we look at what's happening with talent, there's a natural shortage of people becoming available. There's also a shift in work, and we look at the AI that's happening, the new innovation, the technology disruptors that are out there, the way talent works is going to have to change. And so part of my role is really looking at, as we're leaning into the business challenges that we're going to see for ourselves, for our clients in the next three to five to seven years. How does that impact our workforce? And how are we making sure that we're not only allowing them to be successful in this moment, but they're going to be successful when we get to that next moment and the moment after, because that's going to keep them motivated, that's going to keep them engaged, and it's what's going to give us the advantage over others in our industry who aren't at that moment, aren't ready and can't retain that talent.

When I think about skilling from when I was in recruiting and working in staffing agencies at the time my first 10 years. You know, the training I received was I once asked to go on an employment law course and I was sent on that. That was great. And then we, we bought this collection of. But there were VHS videos at the time from I think Tony Robinson, who was this recruiting guru guy. And we watched his videos. You remember those? Dvd then before he, before he's passed actually bless him. And that's it. That's all I've ever done. From an upscaling perspective, formally through my three different recruiting employers in the first 10 years of my career. What does the skilling of a workforce of 3,000 people, majority of them working recruiting look like to you these days? What does a modern, you know, supportive skilling program look like these days compared to what perhaps you and I originally did in our earlier careers?

For sure, it has evolved especially over the last few years. So there's a couple of things, and some of those are definitely born out of lessons learned as we started out on this journey. So one of them is using a multifaceted approach. The traditional days of a live learning where you sit in a classroom for whether it was an hour or eight hours, this just doesn't fit in today's workforce. It's not accessible, it's not flexible. It requires an investment that doesn't necessarily produce the same return. So really looking at things like partners, like social talent has been huge for us and saying who has the expertise in certain things and what should our expertise be? So we have a core team that delivers training, that designs trainings that really fit to our specific business needs. And then we go to the experts and look for those right partners that can deliver it in a way that is digestible for everyone. And so I think that was definitely a lesson learned. If you can't take a traditional approach anymore. The other lesson learned is upskilling requires not only giving people the information through a training, but helping them learn how to apply it. And so that is a big gap that will often experiences. You know, one of my favorite things to say is training is a moment. It is not the solution. We have to give the person the, the information, but we need to make sure that their leader that they themselves understand how to digest that information, apply that information, self reflect on how their skills are evolving. And so making sure that we really structure leaders need to make sure these programs are really structured to help them understand what is the skill, how should they know that they're improving and why does that matter for them? So that's the part that we've certainly learned and I've learned that through the leadership programs that we've created, the programs for recruiters and all sorts of different.

Talent I've learned over the last few years. You know, being somebody who came from a recruiting background into learning, you know, I didn't start as a learning expert. That was my background. I was only sharing with somebody yesterday, last night in the call that we, we built a whole business around. What does the recruiter need from a learning perspective? Knowing that she's time poor, she doesn't want to do any learning, you know, she wants to get on with her work, wants to perhaps be more successful, you know, deliver. And she's, she's a low tolerance for, for bad training, for even just taking time out of her day to do this kind of stuff. So, so when you look at that, what are you, you know, what are your learnings around some of the different dynamics of learning, such as, you know, self directed learning versus, you know, passing someone based on, let's say their role or career path, you know, putting in suggested or even mandatory training time or days, the role of leadership and that all those different dynamics. What have you learned working in that kind of an environment around some of these? This works and this doesn't work.

It's, I think back to a lesson I learned the hard way is we had built this really great program and said it's going to be completely self guided, so it's flexible, it's accessible, you have a handful of meetings you need to attend, four months to complete it. Go. And we are like this is going to be great, everyone's going to love this. And it was a pilot program, so we are taking like basically weekly feedback. I want deadlines. This was the constant feedback and I could not fathom this of really like. And these were professional experience, top performing individuals and every single time the feedback was I need better structure to this program. So that to me was a lesson learning of. As much as you have to honor the need for flexibility and accessibility, you also need to be really clear about the milestones, how to know that people, how people can feel that they're being successful. This is the part that as leaders I think we assume everyone understands what we mean when we're giving coaching and feedback, that we assume they understand what, what skill, why it matters, how this is showing up in their work. And so I would challenge leaders to not only make sure that they're being really clear in their feedback, but also when you are creating these programs that you're clear on, how are you measuring the impact not only for yourself to know that you have the return on the investment, but so that the learner knows as well. And so this is something that we did, we did do up front with this group to say this is how we're going to measure if this program had the right effect for, for you. And so we've watched that and we can communicate with that, that with them.

That ROI can be difficult sometimes. The ROI of particular learning just takes time, right, because you learn a new process, you have to put it to place and you have to go through the natural time it takes for perhaps hiring to, to happen and then the results to be measured and even the measurement of some of these things. Not every company's brilliant at measuring all these different things along the way. They'd love to, but they don't actually have metrics. So what have been some of your big learnings around measuring roi? The approach, let's say upstream and downstream measurements. Some things you can see early, some things you have to wait on.

There are definitely things that are early indicators that a program's progressing well. And that's one the engagement of the individuals who went into the program. So are they feeling that they have developed? Because we know that development engagement are hand in hand in our organization in particular, but I would say all organizations. So as we see that they're feeling that they receive development, we know that they're going to be more engaged, which means they will be more productive. And we should see that impact come. We've also learned to give it three to six months to see does performance actually improve and to be willing to go a little deeper and not only focus on one productivity measure, because we know a variety of things can be impacted, but to look at all of those, you know, are they producing offers at the rate that we would like them to? Are we seeing client satisfaction increase? Are we seeing candidate experience increase? Looking at some of those quality measures also helps us certainly understand the ROI of our programs.

So when you look at those kind of ROI metrics and measurements, when you're trying to figure out if something works, are you looking at a learner based on a baseline that you've taken before she starts learning? And. Or do you look at a learner who did the learning and then someone who didn't do the learning and try and compare the two or one of the different ways you could try and figure out these correlations.

Both. So you're definitely going to want to look at what the immediate impact to the learner was, but then also look at how that compares to others who didn't go through the program. And there's two different reasons for that. One, productivity isn't based on just training and learning. So you do need, I shouldn't say productivity only, but performance isn't based just on learning. So there are going to be a multitude of factors that you want to baseline and understand. What's the experience like for this person compared to others. Now that we've given them this enhanced information, have they been able to put this into practice? There's always the qualitative feedback of what are they seeing, what's their leader seeing to help us understand how is this truly showing up. So looking at them as an individual, but also comparing them to their peer set, it's going to be really important so that you can start to remove some of the noise around performance.

One of the things that I've seen over the last decade working in learning, working particularly with folks like your team and others who are in recruiting, especially where we started, is that given the same resources, the same tool, let's say access to something like social talent or similar tool, you're not necessarily going to have the same results. I say to folks that implementing social talent or buying social talent doesn't mean successful. And I would argue, and this maybe is doing myself somewhat an injustice or our company an injustice. But you know, the tool itself, and you hinted at it earlier, isn't, isn't even the most important part. What I've learned is how it's implemented, how it's rolled out, how it's supported. These are the things that matter and differentiate two different organizations with access to the same information and knowledge. Again, all of us can look into a bookstore and learn all the things you want to learn. But some people walk by the bookstore, some people walk in, sit down, methodically read it, practice it, and put it into practice. So what are some of the things that you think Yellow does well to make a success of something like an opportunity, like learning. So the talent or learning something else?

There are some things that we're still evolving. How do we make sure that we're meeting the learner, where they're at and helping them make those connections themselves? And to apply that, but also really looking at how are we equipping our leaders to make sure that they're able to support that learning journey? Because training is one of the early steps of the learning journey. There's elements of self assessment, self awareness that are important. There's the leadership feedback. There's the other external individuals around that person that's going to help influence and shape how that learning translates to different skills. And so things we do are really trying to support our leaders in understanding. We've selected this criteria of learning because we think you will see a result in X factor. If it's the learner saying, are you struggling with this, this, this, this experience, or what does that experience look like? Do you feel like you're not as successful when it comes to speaking with a stakeholder? Do you feel like your candidates aren't engaging with you how the way you want to? Here's things that we'll recommend for you to help that person. Okay, well, I understand where I'm struggling. Here's how I can use that information to find the right training. But making sure that they're creating a development to track that result along the way. And we focus a lot of effort on teaching people about their individual development plan, how to set that up, how to set the goals for themselves and making sure our leaders are supporting those.

And when you look at that leadership support, because that's something I've also seen as being really important to success. You know, what are the behaviors of a leader who's successful at developing her team and upskilling her team? What are the things that that leader is typically doing?

They are going to be a courageous, compassionate leader. And so that is honoring someone where they're at in their moment and what their needs are and having that compassion for their experience and understanding. It's different than yours, but then also having the courage to be honest. And so that looks like not being afraid to tell your top performer, hey, you could actually be better. It's being enough read saying to somebody, I think you're really great in all of these things, but you have complete lack of awareness that you're missing the mark here or that you could be this much more successful or that this is holding you back. So it's having that really open discussion that can be kind of scary as a leader. And so part of my role as our leadership development program owner is how do we develop those skills? How do we encourage that kind of conversation and candor to make sure people really understand where they stand and what others see about them?

You mentioned leadership development. And certainly from the perspective of a large team of recruiters, notwithstanding the fact that I know not all of your learners are actively involved in recruiting, there's a lot of commercial kind of head office roles there. But let's say taking the recruiting role, a lot of teams focus their attention on skilling someone on the act of recruiting and perhaps don't focus their attention on, you know, developing those recruiters into perhaps leaders developing their skills in other areas, you know, budgeting, presentation skills around business cases, project management, etc. You know, you know, tell me about your kind of thoughts on or your experiences in developing programs outside the typical. Here's how to do recruitment for recruiters.

There's a few things that we look at when it comes to our leadership programs. The first one is self awareness and understanding how you show up to others. And so that's all about your competencies to work globally because we are a global organization which also relates to just working with individuals who aren't identical to you. So it's all very important for our inclusive efforts. We also focus on what's your business acumen in understanding not only the work that's in front of you, but what's going on around you and the industry. How are you looking, looking at what's your client's experiencing so that you can really advise and consult. We look at performance management, which I know many organizations kind of use that as a we're going to performance manage you, which makes me cringe internally. But really performance management is about making sure somebody is performing to the best of their abilities. And so how do we make sure we're giving them the feedback, helping them understand what success looks like, making sure we're keeping them engaged so they want to perform. And pulling all of that together is what has helped us build leaders that can deliver.

You mentioned obviously that consuming learning content is but one of the states. Talk to me about what CIELO does to drive practice, to drive feedback as well, above and beyond, let's say the rote learning that you might produce in your own team or you might get from a who are here like ourselves.

When it comes to giving feedback, we do approach that as it should be an ongoing regular experience. And that's one of the expectations we set for our leadership team, is that you are meeting with your individuals weekly, you are monthly having team meetings at minimum, that you are quarterly sitting down with that person to talk about their development, their performance needs and, and that you do have an individual development plan for every person on your team so they know that you care and that you're invested in their future and that you are taking time to recognize the efforts that they're putting into evolving and learning their skills.

What are some of the benchmarks you expect of individuals in the organization in terms of, let's say, hours they spend learning a year, you know, their involvement in different programs. You know, what is it? What does typical learning year or learning period look like for somebody in the business?

We do look at it monthly to say how many learning hours have been consumed every single month. And we report that out to our leadership team so they're mindful of how those trends are changing. We also include questions around development in our employee engagement. In our employee engagement surveys, we'll sit down with our leaders to create action plans. If we're seeing that an experience is different than those within Cielo or comparing ourselves to others in our industry to make sure that they know how to continue to drive this, because it is such an important part of making sure our talent's going to be ready as we transform, but also so that they stay engaged, so that they stay with us, because that cost of losing someone is too high.

And what have you measured as being the impact of a healthy learning culture? Like when you look at a cohort of employees who are active learners meeting those goals, engaged in learning, do you see any evidence, positive evidence of changes in, for example, performance, attrition, engagement, propensity to develop into further roles? What are some of the metrics you've seen?

Yeah, so we're still early stages with some of these metrics, but the ones I'll tell you that I look at for a program that we launched a year ago, so we really have enough data at this point to say we can confirm it was a success versus where we're at. Early indications with some of our other programs, we do look at how do they respond about their own engagement scores. They are more engaged. We also look at when it compares to turnover of others, they are leaving at a lesser rate than others. We also pull their performance reviews to say what's the average score or rating that they're receiving throughout the year? They're higher performers. I look at their productivity, they are higher producers. And then we do have a way that we're watching all of them to see what does their future progression look like. So as internal moves happen, as promotions happen, we can actually use our data to pull that group out and say, well, what is happening with them compared to those who have not gone through the program? And all of our indications are really positive so far with our most mature program. And the leading indicators are really positive with some of our earlier programs that are going to be coming up to a year soon.

Wow, that's excellent. It's amazing to hear. Not probably. I'm glad. I'd hate to think that you and I are working in the learning Space, and it's not producing anything. Right. It's not. It's just a nice thing to do, and it doesn't actually drive the results. Fantastic to hear that on that scale that you're getting those results. But tell me about on the scale of the organization that you're in. Becky. 3,000 folks in the business, you know, typically, how many pathways and programs are you running? Because obviously not everybody does the same training. So how important it is to have personalization, how deep should you go in that to make sure that obviously not every single person is getting a completely different program? But how do you think about different pathways and different personalization on those tracks? Different careers in the business.

So setting up these programs that they're individual enough that the person feels that it's helping to evolve their skills, but also setting it up so that they understand what is going to be needed from them as their role is changing. And so that there is that personalization, but generalization as they're going through the organization, understanding what the future state needs to look like for Cielo.

So if you set up pathways. So, for example, if I'm a person in role level C, whatever role level C is, and they're saying, I'd love to eventually work in role level D or E, are you seeing a structure where, you know, an employee can say, I'd like to then proactively go after that learning, and then upon completion of that learning, perhaps I'm more eligible for a position in that area? Is that something that you're setting up?

Yeah, that is what we set up. So we have some programs that are really about developing you to move across a business function so that you can get all of the skills that you'll have enough experience and exposure to move to the next level. We also have programs that are very linear of saying, if you enter this program, it's a fully dedicated program, at the end, you will receive this role. So we do a combination, and we base that on the business strategy and what our talent needs are. We know that we have a core internal population that wants to be recruiters in the future, and we want them to be recruiters. So we will invest in. We have very tailored programs to develop them to become a recruiter. We also have programs for our current recruiters to say, do you just want to feel more successful? Here's options for you. Go pick the one that best suits you. And then we have programs to say, are you ready to upskill a little bit? Here's some options. And you can pick these programs and continue to move across this before you start to consider leadership. Because there is a whole lot of experience and exposure and knowledge you need to gain before you're really ready to be a leader. And those programs also create some coaching opportunities, mentoring opportunities, so that our talent can start to learn how to speak with others about performance prior to entering leadership. And so that's where we can start to build some of those soft skills for leaders before they're saying, I want to just lead people and they don't actually know what that means.

If a listener is listening to this and she or he is thinking, you know, gosh, you know, with all the different folks you have in the organization across so many different regions and countries and different cultures, surely it's very complicated to try and adapt that. You know, what's the reality of building learning programs across so many different countries and regions? Does it mean that everything has to be different? Or do you find that, you know what, despite the country, the culture, a lot of this stuff is quite similar. So how much is, how much is global, how much is local? Do you find?

The general rule I apply is 80% can be general and 20% has to be customized to the learner, to the role, to the experience. So that's a general practice that we apply is let's make it so it's consumable for about 80% and that 20%. Let's figure out how we support that need, how we support that learning style, whatever that may be. But that's where using things like elearnings, other channels of non classroom learning becomes really important as well, because it does support the person who English might not be their first language. So how do we give them more time to sit with the learning? How do we find partners who can deliver in multiple languages just so that there is that ability for someone to meet their needs. But also when you think about having an inclusive workforce that may have neurodiversity, how do we make sure that these programs are delivered in a way that's accessible for someone and that allows them the space and the time to really participate?

We can't finish this podcast without talking about generative AI. And you know, this year, 2023, you know, when you see a lot of the talk about generative AI, education is one of the areas that, and most people tout as being one of the biggest potential areas. What gets you excited when you think about generative AI in education? What are some of the, the use cases are some of even the ideas for education that could evolve out of the correct application generative AI that gets you excited.

Becky I'm super excited about generative AI because one it's this ability to have someone deliver summarized information to you based on what's out on the Internet. So the ability of something like a chatgpt where I can put in a question and say give me some suggestions on how to approach this, that's huge because it's taking some of that administrative burden off of me so I can focus on the quality of the content rather than having to spend so much time on more administrative tasks. So I'm very, very excited about that. I'm also excited about the ability of artificial intelligence to be able to start shape our shaping our capabilities of saying X skill and being able to really take a person and say, well you have this skill and this skill and this skill and it's transferable. So we're going to tell you to go take this skill learning and then here's the opportunities that aren't as linear, aren't based on just what that person's aware of, but really inform me as a learning person to say, well here's how you can get your talent there. So there's so many ways I we're all my team in particular is always talking about how do we start to pull this in and how do we start to move. If my team hears this, they're going to cringe because I keep talking about TikTok learning. Like how do we continue to move ourselves to this really consumable, digestible format of learning? Because we all know that people invest their time in scrolling TikTok and it's because they're consuming something they want to. How do I get that same level of focus and energy into learning? There's something to happen there that I'm really excited about and interested in seeing how we do and that's where not to plug social talent but social talent has been a really great avenue for us because it is two to five minutes, two to three minutes and we know people will participate in that because they'll find time for it. And it's amazing how that two to three minutes turns into an hour. That's the part that gets me really excited is I think the way we deliver learnings is going to change. I think AI will power that and enable us to do that in just ways we can't even imagine yet. And so that's the stuff that keeps me in this field and keeps me really excited about how we're going to see talent grow in the future.

I love that I'm equally excited about the potential and as you said, to be able to take a 30 minute course and say, hey, give me a 45 second version, a five minute version and a 15 minute version and have a tool completely author that for you automatically, I think allows for those multitude of different learning styles and formats in a way that we've never been able to scale before. So I'm equally as excited as you are, Becky, about that future.

It's going to be fun.

So this show is called Work Smart for a reason. At Social Talent, we believe that some people are street smart, some people are book smart, but anyone can be work smart. So right now, Becky, we want to focus on how you make yourself work smart. Are you ready?

I am absolutely up for quiz questions.

So Becky, we've got some Work smart questions from the team at Social Talent behind some of these categories. So I'm going to put these up on screen and read them all for you. Those listening to the podcast, what I need you to do is pick a category you want to answer. So Becky, our categories are Desk Jockey, Workspace Jam, Seesaw, Tool Time, the Chill Zone and Robot Rock. Which of those appeals to you? Which those you want to make a stab at?

I want to take Tool Time.

Tool Time. Let's do this. Okay. Your tool time question is this. So Becky, what tools or apps do you use to help you be more work smart?

I use a variety of apps to keep myself organized. Microsoft has really come a long way in their offerings. So using things like flagging items for follow up, setting up my tasks, being able to respond to an email with just clicking the meeting, create a meeting. So those are some of the ones. But I actually use Instagram and follow a number of people who talk about tips using Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook. And so that has become one of my favorite tools for work to follow others who are sharing all of the tips and tricks that they learn. And I'm often one to message people and say, hey, did you know you can do this in Excel? And I found that out yesterday on Instagram.

Well, I, I've got to ask you if you can remember any accounts that are listed listeners and readers might want to follow. You might gonna dig this, this out in your phone. But what are your top accounts that you consume that our listeners could follow if they're into getting some of that, that Instagram learning action?

Oh, Excel with Grant. He's a great one.

Excel with Grant. Okay.

Yes, Ms. Excel. Ms. Excel is another one.

So M I S S Excel.

Yes. And then Kevin Stravert.

How'd you spell Stravart?

S T R A T V E R T. He's fantastic. He covers all sorts of different tools. I know he's on a couple different platforms, so he's one that whenever I see something pop up in my feed, I'm excited to see what I'm gonna learn today.

I love it. So great tips. Becky. Thanks so much for answering those questions.

Thank you.

That's been awesome. I really want to appreciate you joining us today, Becky. It's important to hear about your journey, what scale are doing around upskilling and rescuing the team, some of your insights on scale projects as well. And if our listeners want to connect with you, reach out to you for more more sage advice or more Instagram followers to follow. Where should they find you?

So I'm definitely on LinkedIn under Becky Chung, but my email address is Becky chang@c cielo c I e l o c talent.com awesome.

Becky, thanks so much for joining us. Let's hopefully get you back on again and we'll get some updates on how phase two and three of the program are working out.

Sounds great. Thank you, Johnny.