Nigel Cassidy (NC): Got yawning skills gaps? Business needs changing faster than your people? It's time to upskill your workforce and here's ideas on how you can do it. I'm Nigel Cassidy and this is the CIPD Podcast. It's been estimated a staggering 9 out of 10 of us will have to reskill in some form by 2030. Not just to keep up with changing tech, but to stay in our jobs as work demands evolve. So, in this podcast we're going to consider what good upskilling looks like. And as things stand, half of all UK employers say they plan to upskill their people. That's according to the Summer 24 CIPD Labour Market Outlook, which only makes you wonder how the other half think they're going to manage. With us, a trio with a real handle on all this. Firstly, from the Government Property Agency and HR Director, currently running a pioneering and ongoing skills raising learning programme. One showing impressive results, it's won a CIPD People Management Award. It's Martin Keeler. Hello.
Martin Keeler (MK): Hello there, lovely to meet you.
NC: From the online learning and educational technology provider Udemy, we have Chief Marketing Officer Genefa Murphy, whose company charts global learning and skills trends. Hi Jennifer.
Genefa Murphy (GM): Great to be here.
NC: And we've the founder and CEO of the Skills Builder Partnership, which brings together 850 plus organisations, and in the last year delivered more than 2.3 million programmes to boost essential skills. Welcome, Tom Ravenscroft. Hi, Tom.
Tom Ravenscroft (TR): Thanks very much.
NC: Well, just for fun, seeing you're all into your skills, I mean, here's a quick question to start with. I just wondered what's the most offbeat or improbable skill you have? And has it ever been of use for you at work?
TR: Well, I'm glad to kick off, Nigel, because I think this is; when I was reflecting on it, I realised I had a very important skill which perhaps will be revolutionary to the world, which is I've developed a method to stop my own hiccups.
NC: Impressive.
TR: Which I'm very modestly calling the Ravenscroft method, and which just requires you to grip your diaphragm very, very hard for five minutes and hiccups stop immediately. And I think it's going to be pretty, pretty revolutionary, actually, when it's out there.
NC: Yeah, I'm not even going to bother to ask you whether that's been of any use at work. Genefa, what about you?
GM: I'm going to say that my skill is artistic doodling. I am no artist by any means, but I would definitely say I have a skill in artistic doodling. And it definitely helps me at work, helps keep me focused.
NC: OK, so that's official permission. It's fine to doodle in your meetings then, Genfa.
GM: 100%. 100%.
NC: Martin, what about you?
MK: So, I think my superpower actually comes from, I was diagnosed as dyslexic when I was 34. And apparently it means my long-term memory is much better than my short-term memory, which, as I get older, is really coming into play at work when I have these moments of sort of, twenty years ago, I'm pretty sure we did this and I can remember it like yesterday. Sadly, I won't be able to remember the next day who I was in the meeting with the previous day. But yeah, it's really been coming to its fore at the moment. Even the unions are looking at me going, how did you remember that?
NC: OK, well, maybe one skill we don't all need, but Tom, I mean, these skills gaps are everywhere, tech skills to do specific tasks and of course, people needing those transferable skills to progress at work and indeed in life itself. I mean, where do we start? But where are the biggest gaps that need plugging, would you say?
TR: I think there's something really fundamental, which is around what we call essential skills at Skills Builder, but which other people call 21st century skills or soft skills or transferable skills. And I think one of the challenges we've got is that it's got all those different labels to it, but actually what people mean underneath the labels is pretty stable, right? So, we're looking for people with communication skills, with interpersonal skills, people able to manage themselves and people who are able to creatively solve problems. And I think what's really interesting is that that set of skills has remained remarkably consistent over a long period of time and employers like to recruit for it. But I think they really underinvest in actually building those skills in their own workforces.
NC: They might, Genefa Murphy, just be worried people will leave if they give them too many skills, it's a terrible thing, but you do hear this.
GM: Yeah, it's a massive fear. Definitely a lot of the customers that we work with, they talk about, OK, well, what are we trying to do? We're trying to retain our employees. But I think at the end of the day, especially with the multigenerational workforce, people want to be able to grow their own careers. They want to be able to shift careers. And, you know, listen, they still want to have loyalty to an organisation where it makes sense. But they want opportunity. And that's really what skills are all about, is giving people opportunity.
NC: And Jennifer, what's actually shown up from the work you've done recently about how we need to tackle this?
GM: Yeah, it definitely supports what Tom was saying. I mean, we've seen especially things like creative thinking. We saw a 103% year over year surge in problem solving and creative thinking skills, adoption and consumption on the platform, because I think especially with the advent of AI and technology, those types of skills are becoming even more prevalent. The ability to add that human in the loop, that human touch piece to it has been really important.
NC: OK, now, Martin, we'll get on to some of the lessons of your particular programme in just a minute. But I wonder, I mean, why are we talking about this now? I mean, people have always needed skills. Is it just that with this AI and everything, the world's just changing too quickly for us? Why are we having to play catch up?
MK: Well, I think we've always talked about people needing skills. And certainly, in my period in HR, which has been quite a period, people always talk of skill shortages as well. So, I don't think I've ever been in a meeting where I say, you know, we have an abundance of skills here and we just don't know. I don't know how we're going to moderate it down. So, I think what's needed changes but you're always working in an area where the skills are required. And particularly for me and the Government Property Agency, this was a civil service organisation. They're really good at setting up public serving organisations. I would say traditionally, we're less good at the delivery operational side of things that you get in the private sector where it's very commercial and very pressured, and in the property industry in particular, you know, some very specific set of skills, technical skills you need. So, you know, our area was actually giving confidence to our clients and our customers that we had those technical skills, and we were able to build those technical skills to get the best of the civil service together with the best of the private sector, which is exactly where we're aiming. But, yeah, I think it's always been a subject. It's just the content changes.
NC: OK, let's just look at the terminology a little bit, Tom. I mean, we've got skills training, re-skilling, up-skilling, lots of concepts. You slightly alarmingly said to me before we started recording that up-skilling is a black box.
TR: Well, I think…
MK: What do you mean by that?
TR: Yeah, I mean, I think I think that's one of the really fundamental challenges around upskilling, right? It’s that I think all too often we don't really have that much awareness of the skills that we have because we take stuff that we can do for granted and often then we get cross that other people can't do stuff that we can do because we sort of presume it's intuitive because we can do it or we call it common sense or whatever. The other side of that, though, of course, is that if we don't know what we're capable of, probably we have a slightly hazy notion of where the frontiers of those capabilities are. And actually, I think it's really important that individuals understand where those frontiers are, both so that they can appreciate what they've got and fill in any gaps, but also so they can keep thinking about what, what progression looks like. And so, one of the things that we've worked very closely with CIPD on developing is this universal framework for essential skills, because we're finding that actually these were really important skills, but people had a very hazy notion of whether they were effective communicators or effective leaders or working with others. And so, actually, by really breaking those skills down into small constituent steps, we're able to help people to better understand which parts of that skill could they do at the moment and which, because everyone has a development area, which of those were the next development areas for them. I think once you've got that sort of that model, that conceptual map, then actually you can take a lot more ownership over your skill set.
NC: OK, and Genefa, while you're kind of mapping skilling issues, I mean, have you come to any sort of clear idea of exactly what we mean by upskilling so organisations can sort of work out what it is they actually need to be doing?
GM: Yeah, and that's the challenge, because it's not just about what skills do people need, but also how do I validate those skills? So, we definitely see that when people and organisations are thinking about that's the biggest challenge. How do I identify what skills we need for the future? How do I understand what skills we have by skills analysis? What are the talent processes and opportunities to fill the skills gaps? And then how do we make this all work with technology as well? Because skills are changing, as Martin said, all of the time. And so, you can't spend, you know, four, six weeks, two months, three months going through a big skill analysis and skill gap piece. You have to make sure that you're able to do that on an iterative basis. And so that's where we see customers spending a lot of time is, OK, what skills do we need for the future? What skills do we already have? What's the gap? How do we close it?
NC: And just still with you, Genefa, briefly, there are traps here, aren't there? Because if you keep firefighting the very obvious skill shortages, I mean, there is a risk, isn't there, that you won't kind of scan the horizon properly. You won't really assess the more profound needs.
GM: Yeah, there definitely is. And also as well, I think. But the interesting thing is, yes, there is new technology coming out all the time. There's new skills coming out all the time that need to be refreshed. But those fundamental skills like leadership, change management, communication, coaching, those are critically important. You know, one of the pieces of research we found that 9 out of 10 employees believe that leadership is actually the most essential skill needed in order to be successful with Gen AI. So, it's not looking at the obvious skill, but the skill behind the skill.
NC: Writing better prompts. That's what I would add. But of course, the leadership comes into it and people need to be on a very different path because so often people become these accidental leaders, don't they? And they've just not got the right background to move forward.
TR: I think that's true. But I think you also have a lot of people who are always overlooked, actually, in terms of their leadership potential. So, we did this piece of research which we found that, you know, if individuals through their career felt that they'd never got any opportunities to build essential skills, actually, their essential skills declined over all that time they're spending in the workplace. But actually, if they were having these repeated opportunities to actually build those types of skills and you saw them on a completely different trajectory. So, I think there's this real challenge, not just about a skills gap, but actually almost a skills trap where you assume too early what people are capable of, you stop giving them the opportunities that other peers might be getting to build their essential skills. And we really can't be surprised at the end that they don't appear to be developing in them.
NC: OK, now, Martin, let's look at how this could start to work in practice. You've had a programme run which certainly the CIPD has been pretty impressed with. I know you could probably talk for half an hour about it, but just give us a sense of what it was you set out to do and what some of the early results have been.
MK: OK, so I think like most private sector business, the question the clients were asking is, why are we paying for this service? And one of the key things that we do is you're buying expertise in the field of property management and facility management. And of course, the next question was, how do you prove your ability because all we see is the delivery and that can be great and it can be not so great, but how do we know? And also internally, I think we were asking the same question and a lot of our workforce were from a confidence viewpoint were kind of saying, I feel like I know what I'm doing, but do I? So, we came up with a mechanism of focusing on four key core skills, we call them. But we also then had those four core skills measured at four different levels, ranging from sort of awareness to expert. And we came up with the idea of self-ranking where you felt you were on that grid. And then also line managers and the individuals agreeing what levels were required for those roles.
Now, the tool I already had in my back pocket was the enormous learning and development catalogue that sits in the civil service that I can just draw upon at any time. So, the one thing I didn't really have to do is develop solutions and it put them in a safe place because we weren't going to, it was done entirely through engagement in the workforce and the consequences were only positive. The consequences wasn't, oh, you've now identified you don't have the skills for the role, therefore you're in trouble. The consequences were, well, look, this isn't a scientific process at the moment. It's identifying a development opportunity. At the same time as doing that, though, we engaged with PwC to get some real thinking and points to say, actually, the next year we want this to be a more objective process where roles are assessed objectively, as are individuals. So, year two, we then introduced a 40-minute which we got down to 30-minute questionnaire, which then sort of spilled out the end what your level of competence was, which you could then compare to the role and then literally instantly puts together a development plan because you've got the metrics to say you need to undertake this development to get to the level you want to be. And I was able to say to the customer and the client exactly what our skills gap was. Now, one of the things that when I was questioning the CIPD, you know, what's the output like? Any company would want to say we have no skills gap whatsoever. We actually reported that we were operating at about 54 percent of our employees having the levels that were ideal for that role.
So, the initial question is, well, that doesn't sound great. And I would turn around and say, tell me anyone else who can tell me that percentage. Everyone else you're dealing with an unknown quantity. I know what the gap is and I've got a solution to fill it. 10% each year is our aim and that's what we're achieving to fill in that gap. But for individuals in a very short period of time, they come up with a selection of development plans that they can go into their performance reviews and say, I want to do this, this, and this to fill these gaps. But also, more importantly, they can then measure themselves against any job in the organisation. So, it's become a really powerful tool for our employees. And it's got rid of, I think, the cynicism. And it's, you know, it's all too difficult to do. It's turned it into quite a mechanical process that's easy.
NC: And Martin, you say cynicism. Do you mean cynicism in the sense that some people might think if they're being asked to take on more jobs, they're being asked to skill up, they're in effect being asked to do other people's work for which they're not going to be paid or rewarded? In other words, are people a bit cynical about the whole point of this?
MK: I think it was the thing I said at the beginning, plus something else, which is the cynicism of are you going to use this as a as something to hit me with? And it being genuinely a development tool that is taken in the right spirit moving forward. And that's why we did the soft year of making it absolutely crystal clear that there's no consequence as a result of doing this. There's still no consequence other than development but we had to really hammer that home. But also, there's that kind of like if it looks too good to be true, I don't believe it. Are you really telling me after 30 minutes that I will have a development plan that you will then deliver upon as an employer and I will commit to and contract to? And then we get up and running. And frankly, not many people believe that. Their past history would suggest that organisations, dare I say it, constantly saying development is really important. But by the way, you can't do that course because we haven't got the money or I can't do that course if we haven't got the time. We had to really put our money where our mouth was and say, look, we're investing all of this. But again, the business case writes itself. We get more business by showing our expertise.
NC: OK, let's turn this straight over to Tom and Genefa then. This was a plan that clearly is working for this organisation, but every organisation is different and of course, then there's the question of all the different potential learning formats, how you skill people up, and how you monitor that and so on. So, Tom and Genefa, can you just sort of take that specific and give us some more general lessons in terms of what organisations can do to deliver more on this?
GM: I was just going to say, Tom, maybe you can add on. I think you mentioned there about learning formats, right? I think that one is really important, and especially as you're looking at, again, things like a multigenerational workforce, looking at how do I create blended learning programmes in the workplace, making sure that you're giving people access to microlearning, you're giving people access to multi-platform learning. You're giving people access also as well. We love micro learning, but also as well, if you can actually learn a skill and you're going to apply it as a capability, especially with a lot of technical skills, you're probably can’t do it in five minutes, like you'll get some understanding. But having that ability to have blended learning formats, blended learning programmes, multimodal, and then thinking about how different generations engage with content as well is really important. One of the interesting things we saw from our research on the multigenerational workforce is that actually Gen Z, who are going to be about 30% of the workforce by 2030, still prefer face to face meetings. Everyone thinks they're the digital natives. You know, it's all about doing things on Zoom, but still bringing in the face to face meeting element. So, I think looking at your learning formats and your learning modes.
NC: You're saying bring back the classroom?
GM: Hey, you know what? Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes, yeah, it really makes a difference. You know, getting that interpersonal connections, you know, yeah, you can see someone's eye roll on Zoom, but having someone sitting next to you and being able to just give you a little whisper in the ear of a hint of something you can do when you're trying to apply a skill, hey, really helpful.
TR: One of the things that's been really interesting about the Skills Builder Universal Framework, which we developed with CIPD, is that actually it was deliberately designed to work in lots of different settings. And so, I think the interesting part about that is that we've been able to see that actually, you know, whether it's Heathrow or Lloyd's Banking Group or Amazon, actually, there are these skills which are remarkably consistent across these different settings, of course they're contextualized and they're used in slightly different ways depending on the content. But, you know, these are the skills which enable people to use that technical skills and knowledge as well. And I think what we found as sort of the key phases on this to doing this really effectively. So, I think there's that point about awareness.
So actually, individuals having that understanding of their own skill set and I should say, you know, lots of this, I'm sure, is equally applicable to technical skills, too. I think then there's a really important place for explicit content. And actually, that's very normal for technical skill development, much less normal for transferable skill development. But there are really important components like, you know, for creative thinking, you know, how do you prototype something? How do you organise your ideas with a mind map? Like these are very teachable elements. And so actually having that explicit content is still really useful. But I think that has to then be accompanied, as Genefa was saying, with the practice, right? These things only become intuitive if actually people are putting them into practice regularly. And then finally, I think having the opportunity to review and reinforce as well. So, where we've seen this work most effectively, you've got the real buy-in of line managers who see their role as helping to coach and develop their teams in building these skills. So, it's not just a one-time thing, but actually there's a really clear view of what the learning objective is and a manager helps to reinforce and to track and sometimes just to encourage and champion a person on that journey of developing that skill, particularly if it's not something that's a quick thing to build, as you're saying.
NC: OK, actually, Martin, something Tom just said there reminded me about something that was in one of our podcasts a couple of editions ago, 211, I think it was, Learning at the Point of Need, which considered the folly of expensively training or retraining people to do things. It would actually be a lot more sensible to redesign the systems, the processes. So, they were actually more intuitive and they don't require so much training. So, there's always, I'm just wondering whether this is coming out of your own work, that when you actually start deconstructing what it is people are doing all day, you might find it's not terribly sensible. And obviously this is relevant, isn't it? Well, take the National Health Service, for example, that, you know, it's got to redesign itself for the future in exchange for being funded. It's a big thing, isn't it? And for a government department to turn itself around and do something differently, it's actually quite different. But that might be the answer, not more technical training.
MK: No, absolutely. And it's one of the things that attracted me to the Government Property Agency. So, we are an agency of the Cabinet Office. So, you can imagine that the Cabinet Office has a number of conflicting priorities, and some of which you can argue you can't plan for because the phone rings and the world can change. Covid being a good example. But the good news about the Government Property Agency is it is more of an operational wing. And we've got, we've set ourselves up right to have a 10 year plan. And the reason I love it so much is it's got a real good social value, but it's actually got a really strong business case as well. So, in very simple terms, it's about saving the tax payer literally billions through having one central place managing its property portfolio for offices. And at the same time, giving a much better working experience to all the civil servants.
NC: Well, when it comes to change for the better, it's certainly good and refreshing maybe to see HR in the driving seat of that process. And it's not some major government initiative or whatever. But Genefa Murphy, this is a good point, isn't it? HR organising this upskilling. I mean, identifying the commercial goals of a business, the skills required is pretty strategic. And I just wonder how HR people do that job properly. I mean, are they even party to the knowledge that's required to make sure the right skilling is put in place?
GM: Yeah, I think we definitely see with our customers who are HR leaders and learning leaders, people leaders like talent leaders, they are getting more of a seat at the table, more of a discussion. And the real key there is, you know, they themselves have to have that key skill of being able to communicate and partner with the rest of the stakeholders, because on one hand, you know, you've got teams who are like, hey, go to a central organisation and I want to know what skills I need to develop for my team. But really, people don't want that, but they want someone to help them with it. They want someone to guide them. They want someone to give them a starter because at the end of the day, the CTO or the head of engineering, they know what skills they need for their organisation best. And so, the skill that we're seeing the HR teams really having and they have in earnest, and it's one of those secret skills, is the ability to communicate, collaborate, and then be able to extract the real needs out of the business and find a way to be able to do skilling at scale, because unless you've got a massive L&D department, there's no way that they can do that all centrally, so they have to create this hub and spoke model. So, scale is one of the biggest things that we see our customers talking about and having that skill to be able to do skill at scale.
TR: I think the key point is that people really respond to measurability, right? So, everybody who has ever started any sort of exercise or routine or anything like that wants to measure if they're getting better at something. So, I think thinking about how we can help people to understand where they're starting from and then to be able to track and celebrate progress on that journey is really important. And I think that's actually even more important with skills which are not easy wins to acquire, actually more sophisticated, complex skills you need to have that pacing so that people stay motivated, stay engaged, know that the effort and the energy and the time that's going into building those skills is so important.
NC: And how, Tom, does that correlate with the organisation's return on investment? Because this is not without cost.
TR: No, absolutely it is. And I think what we've, you know, some of the research that we did, so we did a piece of research a couple of years ago which looked at employees' perceptions around essential skills. And what was really interesting was that, you know, 92% of employees said that they saw these types of transferable skills as being absolutely critical for their future success, but only about a quarter of them felt like they had regular opportunities to build those essential skills. Only 14% could actually name an example in the last 12 months where they'd had an opportunity to build those skills. And interestingly, more than 80% were saying that they would consider the opportunities to build those skills when looking at other roles. So actually, I think all too often employees are seeing the short-term cost of investing in building these skills for their employees. But what they're not thinking about is the long-term cost, which is actually all too often people are looking for roles as an opportunity to build those skills rather than thinking about how they could build those skills in their role and therefore develop and grow within the organisations that they're already in.
NC: So do your programmes reflect that, Genefa
GM: Definitely. And one of the things that Tom talked about right there is setting, and Martin as well, setting the metrics up front. Right. So, what are your business priorities? What are your programme outcomes, your learning outcomes, your engagement metrics? And then also as well, looking at things like internal mobility. I mean, we even see this for ourselves at Udemy. We've set ourselves a goal around internal mobility, looking at the number and the percentage of employees who get to work on a key project outside of their core domain because, again, people are looking for those opportunities to develop skills, but maybe that's not currently in their current job description and they need that opportunity somewhere else. So, we see with customers as well, putting a focus on talent mobility is starting to become more of more of a priority.
NC: OK, so let's just try and draw this together then with a quick contribution from each of you, starting with Martin. Some priority actions then, from what you've learnt so far, what would you suggest people do if they want to make a bigger splash and really get to grips with the skilling?
MK: So, I think it's understand what your business needs are. If you don't know what it is you're trying to achieve, then you're never going to achieve what you don't know. So, a lot of time, the bit that we don't talk about is the work that went into identifying exactly what those needs were. And I've talked a lot about the skills builder and core skills, but it's supplemented with the thing we call Gold Standards, which is specialisms because we are a specialist organisation across all elements of the business, which we then call a Gold Standard. So, for example, my team, CIPD Charter Level is classed as a Gold Standard and we then set ourselves targets. So, we're currently sitting at 40% of our whole organisation hold a gold standard accreditation, which is which is huge. But that was because we recognised as a business that that, again, was our selling point. You are buying in this expertise, you are buying in people who really know what they're talking about. Now, if we were more, you know, some of the organisations I've worked in were construction and it's much more sort of front facing, then you probably wouldn't have a target of that level. You'd probably have a much smaller proportion at that level. And then you'd go much more into the tangible day-to-day skills and making sure that they know the core skills element was 100%.
So, I think, you know, know what you're talking about, know what your business needs. And then put in processes that make it easy for people to participate, engage and shape and own it themselves and have the ability to deliver upon the promises you're making when you set that expectation.
GM: Yeah, I think it builds on that. Right. So, identify the critical skills for your org. Get started. Don't overthink it. Create what you would call a skills framework or a skills tree. Match that to your business need and then scale it, iterate and scale. That's the most important thing, because you need to get started. You need to be agile. People don't want to have to necessarily wait. So, yeah, I would think identify, create, match and scale.
TR: For me, the big thing is to think about looking up just those immediate technical skill needs. So, we, you know, spend too much time, I think, generally thinking about the specific things that people need for the role that's right in front of them right now, and actually thinking more boldly and perhaps a little bit more bravely about how do you support individuals to develop more holistically? And I think for the short-term investment that that looks like above and beyond just solving an immediate problem, I think what you end up with is people who are better able to be adaptable within a business, who have higher levels of ambition and drive. And I think that also supports productivity more generally. So, I think that's a, you know, a well worthwhile investment.
MK: Can I add something to what colleagues have said on there? Because I've made it sound like everything was great. One thing that you said there is, you know, get going. We failed on a number of things, but we learned to fail fast. When we first launched it, the people who were satisfied were satisfied. But there was a lot of people saying, well, what about me? You've not actually captured what I'm doing and we use the success to build the momentum. But actually, when we looked at it, as I said, we had a firm brief as to what to do, we realised there were loads of gaps. It didn't mean everyone got what they wanted. There were some areas we said, no, we actually don't need that in the organisation. That's a tough conversation when someone says, that's who I am. Well, that's not what we need. But fundamentally, we very quickly went back and reviewed. I think we reviewed in like four months and worked out what was right and what we'd missed, what was perhaps not right. So, it wasn't all plain sailing.
NC: Well, let me thank our brilliant trio. I mean, this has been such a refreshing angle on aspects of skills that I'm sure many of us have not even thought about. So, let me thank the Government Property Agency HR Director, Martin Keeler, from the Online Learning and Educational Technology Provider, Udemy, Chief Marketing Officer, Genefa Murphy, and Tom Ravenscroft, founder and CEO of the Skills Builder Partnership. And let me thank you, our listener, all of you for your support in 2024. This autumn, we were really chuffed to win a Best Podcast Award against quite stiff competition from some national organisations. We've certainly had some cracking guests and people topics this year. So, if you have a spare moment over the holiday, do have a look through our recent back catalogue on the CIPD podcast page and subscribe. You'll find a clear guide to the topics covered and full transcripts. We'll be back with you early in 2025. So, until then, from me, Nigel Cassidy, and our fine CIPD podcast team of Christian Adams, Derek Tong, audio wizzes, Joe Hallam, and Nick Minter. Let us all wish you a happy Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous new year.
