L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Longer Life and Smarter Tech: Educating A Workforce For An Unknown Future

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

In this episode of L&D in Action, we’re joined by Michelle Weise, author and founder of Rise and Design. Michelle describes how learning leaders will need to adapt their systems to equip workers for unpredictable technology and multifarious careers.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by GetAbstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. With an eye on the future and a preference for the practical, learning in your organization. With an eye on the future and a preference for the practical, we address the most important developments in edtech, leadership strategy, and workflow learning. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Michelle Weiss. She is a consultant at Rise in Design and also the author of Long Life

Learning. Michelle, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me, Tyler. I want to jump in by discussing the central point of your book, Long Life Learning, which I think is summed up well by the 100-year work life. Can you describe what that means? Yeah, I've found sort of as all these kind of future of work conversations have been trending that it actually helps to, rather than kind of thinking about job obsolescence and automation and increased digitization of the workforce, to me, it's more helpful to kind of spur us into action by thinking about how this affects us and what this means for us is in terms of the future of workers.

And some of the most compelling sort of mental models I've found are these ideas that we're already kind of extending our lifespans as is. And there's some futurists and experts on aging and longevity who are projecting that we may end up seeing people live beyond 100 years well into maybe 150 years. And when we think about just that mental exercise of extending our lifespans, suddenly we're sort of struck with this idea of, oh my God, what does that mean for our work lives? Does that mean we're going to be working 60, 80, or 100 years long? And if so, how in the world are we going to navigate all the job changes that come along with kind of contending with this uncertain world

of work we're already facing. And so that's the idea of long life learning, that continuous returns to learning will become the new normal. And how do we actually make those changes and those switches more seamless for the future? As you point out in your work, there are scientists out there and medical professionals who believe that the first person to live to 150 years may in fact have already been born. It's possible that the first person to work 100 years, if that hasn't already happened in some respect, has already been born. What do you think the chance that somebody listening to this podcast right now will end up having a 80 or 100 year career?

Yeah, what's fascinating is actually if you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even our early baby boomers are experiencing 12 job changes by the time they retire. So although they may not be facing a 60, 80 or 100 year work life, they're already making so many job changes, more than we ever anticipated. So for the rest of us who might be in the workforce for even 5, 10, 15, 20 years longer, we can extrapolate pretty easily from that number of 12 and think, oh my goodness, we might have to think about navigating through 20 or 30 job changes to come. It's this idea that if we think about how hard it is just to navigate a single job change,

right? How we kind of have to fumble our way through. There's no set way we do it. We're referring to our networks. We're getting referrals, right? We're asking for help, but there's no kind of easily navigable way of making our way through these job changes. So as we think about this longer work life ahead, how do we begin to sort of soften those pain points for all of us in the future? Navigable is one of the five, I guess, traits of a successful ecosystem, as you describe it, a successful learning ecosystem. And I want to jump into those points a little bit later as well. But for now, I'd like to address sort of the super massive elephant in the room that everybody can't help but talk about all over LinkedIn and on social media.

AI is, you know, it's huge lately. ChatGPT really seems to have brought things to the forefront. And now I listened to a podcast last week about what Bing is doing and Google competition. Every big tech company has their hands in AI and chatbots in some way, shape, or form. And I believe you wrote this book actually before those things were released. It was at this point almost a couple of years ago. I'm curious how you think things have changed since then. But first of all, I want to talk about this idea of human plus that you described. So while everybody is talking about what is going to happen to the workforce and workers individually and mass, of course, you discuss the importance of adopting a human plus set of capabilities, which is, you know, those sort of soft human skills plus technical capacity, technical understanding. And I think right now, more than ever, that really refers to AI, which you also

discuss in the book. Can you explain what you mean by human plus? Yeah. So it's this idea that while all of us need to be able to display sophisticated kind of generalist skills, right? We all have to kind of be better communicators. We have to collaborate. We have to be good team players, right? We have to be able to engage in systems thinking and critical thinking and demonstrate our creativity and curiosity. All of those things are deeply powerful, especially when we compare and think about complementing the work of robots and machines and AI. So there's that piece. But at the same time, we have to have enough technical depth to be able to interrogate those machines and ask questions and know when to intervene.

So what's kind of wonderful about ChatGPT is I think a lot of the discussions about AI were hard for most kind of lay people to grasp because we know that the data on which machine learning is trained matters greatly. But I think what's helpful about the interface of a chatbot like ChatGPT is it immediately becomes evident the sorts of challenges we have as we contend with biases within data, right? Because we're seeing the strange answers that Bing or, you know, Google's version or just the chat GPT bot is giving to us, right? And we know that then it matters what kinds of data is being leveraged in order to train these large language models.

I think it's helpful because it sort of surfaces the challenge that we face. I think people have been talking about artificial intelligence and how it skews the way maybe black offenders are sentenced versus white offenders, right? But it's still hard to kind of grasp what is going on because it still feels like it's in this black box. At least now we can kind of see, oh my goodness, that black box needs to be interrogated, right? We need to start trying to think through why is the model behaving in this way? And this is that kind of little bit of sort of technical or technological or domain understanding all of us are going to need to have. We're going to all need to know a little bit about cyber, right? A

little bit about cloud computing, maybe just enough to be dangerous in data analytics or big data visualization or Lean Six Sigma. There are these kinds of emerging technical skills that are just kind of pervasive in any form of work going on today. And it's not necessarily that we're going to all need to be super deep in knowledge in some of these domains, but we're going to need to know be super deep in knowledge in some of these domains, but we're going to need to know enough to be able to exercise those human skills like judgment, like ethics, right? Like those system thinking skills. Is that what you mean by dangerous? That's sort of the ability to intervene when it's most critical. I heard you say the word dangerous and use that

in the book too. Yeah. I like to use the term just enough to be dangerous, right? For some folks, that means knowing enough to be able to speak the jargon of the entity that you're working with, right? To be able to get a foot in the door to get that next job. I think what we're seeing as technology evolves and again, sort of imbues itself in every possible domain of work, we all have to play this really interesting function of liaising between not only that business function, but also the sort of tech functions that we're dealing with within a company. And that translation process is really critical.

But for some of the people who play that role, they don't need to be the experts in cybersecurity or cloud, but they need to know enough to be able to liaise between those two sides. That's such a challenge, though. How do we know when we know enough is sort of my big question when I don't know what I don't know. For instance, you know, I recently did some research on language models when ChatGPT came out. I wanted to learn a little bit more about it, but I really have no background in programming or any of this stuff. And most people don't have background in that sort of thing too. So the big question for me is where does the onus actually fall societally, organizationally,

individually for making sure that people who just don't have the initial language and initial background or access to the tools that can help you learn these things. Where does the onus fall to make sure that education on these really complex topics and tools and technology is equitably distributed? Yeah, I think part of that is governmental societal onus. Right. And I think one really helpful example is to see what the country of Finland was doing, where they were literally trying to teach 1% of their population, just 1% of their population, the basics of artificial intelligence. our own civic engagement, because again, this AI is everywhere. We don't maybe know that it's in, you know, every device we're holding, right? And it's kind of working in the backgrounds. But if we begin to kind of build that in to the ways in which we engage as a society, that's critical. The other piece of this is part of that onus, I think a lot of folks tend to kind

of want to put it on higher education institutions. And for sure, colleges and universities do need to do a better job of beginning to build up these more emerging skills in the workforce. But at the same time, the onus is on employers where, you know, over the last four decades, we've been seriously disinvesting from training our existing workforce. And so if we know that we're a cloud computing company, and that most of our staff need to have some basics and different kind of foundational levels of understanding of cloud, we need to build that into our training environment. And so that onus then becomes a way of rethinking how we build our on-the-job training programs so that they're not

always kind of risk or compliance motivated, but really thinking about what are the skills that are going to be more and more in demand for the future growth of our company. So again, I think it's a look internally as well for companies to really take on some of that onus. Let's stick with higher education for a bit because a big part of your work is talking about how a four-year degree that takes place when you're 18 to 21 or, you know, 18 to 24 years old, it's just simply not going to be sufficient for a 100-year career, let alone 60 or 80-year career. Higher education has been nearly disrupted, but definitely decentralized. It has been altered in many ways over the past couple of decades with different forms of universities, you know, entirely remote and virtual universities coming in, University of Phoenix and different institutions like that. focus on professional training. You talk about how there's a reluctance among higher ed institutions to actually embrace professional training and serious employment-based education

rather than the sort of what they have ingrained in them, which is a different sort of education focused on the social experience and very specific types of degrees and that sort of thing. So how do you think the pandemic and all the changes that have happened with remote learning are impacting higher ed now? It's kind of a mixed bag because I think one of the great things about the pandemic in terms of opening up eyes to online education is that it quickly kind of helped a lot of institutions jump over that hurdle where initially many of them might have sort of disdained the idea or scorned the idea of moving to online or that it was lesser of an education. Suddenly it was sort of this, you got to do it or else. So that was helpful. The downside was a lot of institutions were doing online education just very, very poorly. They were literally just trying to replicate the in-person synchronous classroom experience online. And that's not exactly the role of online education,

right? It's not the role of technology is to enable and to augment what could happen for an individual as they're going through this experience. And that wasn't necessarily how it was deployed during the pandemic. I think what we also see is just sort of a mixed bag of reactions and ways of thinking about strategies for the future. I think there are just definitely, especially some prestigious universities who really don't see the need to change their model and kind of deliberately sort of ignore this idea that somehow education needs to be connected to workforce outcomes. You have a lot of institutions who really do see that, oh my goodness, we do need

to potentially situate ourselves differently for this growing universe of adult working learners who are going to need to continuously return to learning. It's just hard to suddenly pivot your business models. There are those that are kind of stuck in that fashion. And then there are those who are just kind of buying all in that we're going to reimagine and redesign our structures to build this lifelong learning infrastructure and build loyalty with our education customers and consumers so that they will come back for these kinds of on-demand learning experiences. So it's kind of a whole array of responses. But I think one of the things as we talk about this reluctance, it's sometimes it's not necessarily

that there's a lack of awareness of all these changes and tectonic shifts happening. It's more just the business model doesn't allow you to actually shift and pivot. There's just incredible academic business model inertia. And it's not just in higher ed, it's in every single industry. So as a student and a mentee of Clayton Christensen, right, this is the innovator's dilemma. It's not that there is just sort of this willingness to kind of, you know, put your head in the sand and ignore what's going on. It's complete awareness that things are shifting. It's just how in the world do I move this giant barge in a totally different direction? When I was a student, I was very involved with the newspaper at Boston

University. And my best friend at the time was he was the MOOCs guy. He was always reporting on the development of MOOCs at BU, massively open or massive open online courses. I think that's what that stands for. The O's might be swapped there. But it was the slowest process ever. And we used to make fun of the guy who would write the stories because he would have to keep an eye on what was going on. Because if a MOOC ever got released at school, it would have been a huge deal. But it was always this process of trying to overcome that inertia and red tape. And as far as I was aware, nothing ever really got off the ground when I was around. But of course, this was pre-pandemic and things have obviously radically changed since then. But I've also read about cases of MOOCs that were incredibly popular with literally millions of

students. One was called Justice, I believe, and that was super, super popular, had like over a million students, as much as you can count them students. But they're also kind of distributing these things on YouTube. It's almost like what kind of content are we actually creating now? What is the purpose of that? I assume it's really hard to make an employment focused or a workforce related course that would be that popular because it's probably got to have specific sort of trade skills and specific employability related metrics or employability related outcome. That's a very complicated question. But my biggest question about all this is what can organizations, what can companies do to work with higher ed institutions, to work with colleges and

universities to actually push this envelope? Is there any opportunity that already exists for to develop sort of credentialing system that you describe in your book that works between companies and universities? Is that developing at all? Yeah, let me address sort of the first question. And then I would love to talk about that. That's probably the most important question that we can kind of get to. But just one quick thing is I think about the way that you're describing some of those early MOOCs that had millions of learners interested. I think this is the challenge when we think about a term like lifelong learning is that we tend to assume maybe that lifelong learning is for maybe those people over there who are just kind of interested in

pursuing their passions or their curiosities. And so when Michael Sandel is teaching justice, that Harvard course, I want to know what a Harvard course looks like, right? And so maybe I log on and I'm captivated and I'm learning about something I've always wanted to learn about. Then there's this other notion of lifelong learning where as we contend with these huge uncertainties and the way in which technology is changing the nature of work, how do I remain relevant? How do I remain competitive? How do I make sure I can keep progressing? And those require different kinds of skills building opportunities. And that's where I think MOOCs are really kind of shifting their efforts as they're realizing they need to start moving into the space that right now higher ed institutions are not able

or not as nimble to address, which is these emergent demands that are occurring in the workforce. And so we're seeing different kinds of specializations and workforce-aligned programs emerging from all kinds of alternative education providers in this sort of shadow sector of non-accredited learning opportunities. In terms of how higher ed can now sort of think about addressing this maybe in concert with employers, this is where it gets difficult. Part of it is employers are not necessarily always great at articulating the need that they're seeing. When we hear about kind of the challenges that maybe like frontline workers are facing, it becomes kind of these conversations around more of those human skills, but it sounds broad. It's sort of, you know, we're having negotiation or managing conflict or change management

challenges or resistance to feedback, poor communication, bad teamwork, right? Like this kind of description, but really what we're realizing is that's one kind of language that we tend to use. We need to begin to kind of move, sort of walk backwards and almost have kind of like a Rosetta Stone moment between the language of our educators and the language of employers and sort of understand what competencies is it that we're really trying to build here. Because it matters also deeply what domain we're talking about. When we're talking about human resources, the skill of communication manifests very differently, right? We're talking about internet recruiting, onboarding, writing employee handbooks, succession planning,

right? These different kinds of skills that are really critical versus when we're talking about that same skill in something like PR and marketing and advertising, it manifests more as like lead gen or search engine optimization or storytelling or brand management, right? And so we have to start getting a little bit more granular with skills. And so if employers are really kind of able to come to the table and have some of these conversations about maybe those top skills that they're really trying to build, that's huge. Another piece that's kind of missing is that I think employers unfortunately don't have a great understanding of those granular skills of their existing workforce. So while we might have job titles,

names associated with those roles, we don't actually know precisely what skills these are people, our own people bring to the table. And without that, we don't know know precisely what skills these, our people, our own people bring to the table. And without that, we don't know who we can actually skill up into the jobs of the future. A lot of us come to the table with hidden skills, these kinds of hidden credentials from our personal experiences, from our informal learning experiences, from work experience that isn't codified through some sort of credential. So how do we begin to help people surface those skills and understand what gaps they need to fill? Certainly if performance is connected to, you know, if it's tied to revenue, if it's tied to

specific deals, yes, we can connect sort of that kind of one-to-one correspondence, but it's hard for certain kinds of work to be kind of calculated in that way. And that's where I think it's really interesting that we're talking about the role of AI in the workforce. What's really, really exciting is to see these AI-powered platforms emerging in our talent sector that are trying to help people surface their existing skill sets, whether it's kind of by sort of sucking up a resume from LinkedIn or from a Word document, and that is feeding the engine to say, oh, you worked at Target or you worked at this retailer. Did you know a lot of people have these particular skills? And you can begin to kind of say, oh,

yeah, that's actually, I do know how to budget, or I do know how to engage in customer service, right? And we get better at sort of knowing how to talk about these skills. Meanwhile, our managers can look at what we're pointing to as our own skills and say, oh yeah, she's deeply proficient at this, or she's novice at this, she's medium kind of at this, or she's an expert in whatever the field, whatever the thing may be. These kinds of platforms are really exciting to see being deployed in major enterprises to sort of say, okay, if we have people who are exhibiting these kinds of skills, how do we begin to build internal mobility

pathways so that they can actually move to the next role? We don't really do a good job in most companies of saying, here's how you go from this point to this point to this point, and here are the skills you need to build. But what we're seeing is as the labor market gets tighter and tighter, and we're not able to just go out and recruit externally, more companies are realizing they have to build talent within. And the only way you can do that is to begin to really fully understand and flesh out what skills your people bring to the table. Ultimately, how do we do that in an effective and confident manner? I spoke with Robin J. Southasan recently. He talks about marketplaces for skills-based talent development, where the goal is for larger organizations to create a whole slew of opportunities for anybody at an organization

to look at this list of projects or tasks and say, I actually have those skills, even though I'm not involved in the department that might be responsible for this, but I would like to take a crack at whatever that is. And then there's a whole system behind that for actually monitoring performance and testing, you know, is this something that this person could be good at, could even develop their career into? Are you seeing examples like that? Yeah, some of these kinds of platforms that I'm describing have those kinds of marketplaces that they're facilitating within a company to do just that, where it's almost like an internal gig marketplace. And you're saying, oh, I want to try that. And maybe it doesn't pan out. That's okay. At least you tried and you realized, oh, that's not quite

the greatest fit of my capabilities or my knowledge. But yeah, how do we actually offer up these opportunities for people to try to begin to kind of refine their own skill sets. That's hugely important. So what about when it comes to actual serious upskilling and proper reskilling, when somebody might need to re-educate themselves in a more serious way? You talk about on and off ramps for potentially leaving an organization and, you know, coming back with a new career. And there aren't enough of those opportunities right now, those on and off ramps.

Part of the challenge is that we don't have a ton of kind of integrated earning and learning opportunities, right? I was talking earlier about this massive disinvestment from on-the-job training that's really kind of shifted away from talent development more to kind of this risk mitigation channel. And if we kind of try to return to the roots of what on-the-job training was meant to be, which was to kind of build our existing employees' skill sets, we can begin to kind of think about how we might carve out time in the workday so that people aren't forced to necessarily weigh this impossible option of, do I stop earning a living in order to continue learning and reskill or upskill myself? But how do I do both at the same time? And how do I not let this also take over my life where

I have to do work in these set eight or nine hours? And then on top of juggling the responsibilities of sustaining a family and being with a family, I have to then kind of figure out how do I navigate night school or online education? The onus has kind of always been on the individual. And so how do we instead think about bringing this kind of new education into the workplace where the workplace actually becomes that classroom of the future. I think that is the key to this. And it doesn't necessarily

require, you know, a huge chunk of time. It can be 30 minutes a day or an hour a week that we are setting aside for learners to actually carve out that space and begin to kind of think about building these new skills. But we just don't do this well within, we kind of cast it off as this is a private matter. You have to go figure this out on your own. But how do we bring this back into the workplace setting and think about ways to reflect on our work? because all of these skills that we're building, if we actually reflect on what we're doing, this is another version of competency-based education where you're saying, in this experience, I've managed to demonstrate proficiency by doing X, right? And these are the way that some schools are even thinking about delivering competency-based education is how do

you reflect on your day-to-day work experience and give some kind of credit to all of this learning you're doing on the job? We just have to kind of make, again, that translation into what that actually means. What is it that skill is that you're acquiring? It's so surprising to me that we don't have an effective learning ecosystem,

as you call it, to achieve this because there are so many industries dedicated to components of this. We have recruiters and headhunters and those types of resources. We have a whole massive lifelong education industry, info products and that sort of thing, and all kinds of just general independent education resources. We have platforms that are dedicated to connecting freelancers and contractors to projects and tasks and potentially jobs as well. But it seems like they're just, we haven't gotten the sinews to connect all these things and really make that ecosystem for an effective learning ecosystem that can help people do what you're describing.

Yeah. I love that you use the word sinew. I talk about it as interstitial tissue. There's no data infrastructure to connect any of these silos. Everything is siloed. And so even if you think about any kind of particular HR leader in an organization, they probably have at least anywhere from 20 to 100 different systems at play, right? Cloud-based systems. But none of these systems actually speak to one another in a way that you're actually leveraging insights about whether these tools or and learning and development and known so little about what works. And I think we're at that place where if we can think about knitting together more of this data across systems within an internal organization, but also

across boundaries, so across company boundaries or employer boundaries, across state boundaries, across institutional boundaries. When a learner graduates from a school and makes their way through the workforce and maybe comes back to learning or acquires this skill set, we have no one single continuous learner employment record, right? We don't have that kind of, we still don't have it in healthcare, right? We don't have that kind of, we still don't have it in healthcare, right? We don't have one electronic medical record. That's the kind of ideal that we need to sort of be moving toward is how do we have that holistic understanding of everything this person has done and engaged in and learned along the way? How do we capture that? And how do we get smarter and deliver to that person what they need right then? It's again, like, imagine an Amazon ecosystem, right, where Amazon is watching everything we're doing on their platform. They're doing RCTs and A-B testing on us to sort of understand how we click through and how we purchase and when we rebuy or repurchase certain things, we need to think about that kind of closed

loop of data to understand learning learners or working learners, right? And what it is that we can build in service of them. That ecosystem requires just a better data infrastructure. And right now we have sort of K-12, higher ed, workforce, and then we have all of these kinds of workforce tech providers. None of it is connected. automation. And that means that a lot of these decisions as to what one might need to learn to progress to a certain career or where one goes could end up being automated. You're told where your path could potentially lead based on your existing skills by some sort of algorithm, and then you're given a series of courses or learning opportunities, whatever it is, and then you move on and you end up in a new position. The ideal world, it's that simple.

But in your five principles that I mentioned earlier, one of those is supportive, which strongly recommends the presence of humans to push you along that path. Is that true? Yeah. I mean, wraparound support services are kind of crucial at this point for any working learner to experience some sort of successful job change. And part of that is, you know, this future you're imagining, Tyler, of kind of automation and kind of all of this becoming seamless. Think about how hard it

is for most of us to understand what it is that we're capable of doing, whether it's when we're younger, we're only exposed to the things that maybe our family and friends know about. You know, when I was growing up, it was four, four areas that I could go into. I could maybe become a doctor, a lawyer, a business person, or a teacher, right? Those were the kind of four sort of archetypes that were shared with me. Today, we have jobs that we weren't able to even fathom 10 years ago. And these are sort of our top jobs of today. And so people only know what they know. And so how do we expose them to more pathways and help them dream of other kinds of experiences that

they might want to pursue? So I think that's one way of maybe flipping your question is, we're not good as humans of envisioning pathways for ourselves or taking some of our skills that we already have and porting them over to an adjacent domain. So how do we leverage some of this information to begin to say, oh my gosh, even though I've maybe been in teaching for the last 10 years, I have 65% of what it takes to go into human resources or talent acquisition, or I have 75% of what it takes to become a systems network analyst. I think those kinds of just sort of ways of opening our eyes are super helpful because

other ways we're just sort of fumbling our way through. And then how do we bring greater exposure, especially to younger working learners to help them understand what these jobs entail. I think we sometimes potentially go into areas idealizing what we think these jobs entail, but how do we bring some of that work-based learning opportunity further down the chain? So even as a sixth grader or as a high schooler or as a young college student, you're getting some of that access to understanding what kind of problems are these different kinds of people in these roles trying to solve. And I think that kind of exposure is critical to help us find the right fit for ourselves too. When I was a child, my options

for careers felt like they were professional football, basketball, or baseball player. And that was, my parents are both super athletes. And I always thought, oh, that's obviously where I'm going to go. But naturally, that's not as easy as it seems when you're an idealistic child. So I would have appreciated even as early or as late as sixth grade or even high school, more career presentations than I had. I had very little knowledge of what I wanted to do until college really hit me. And then I said, oh, wow, it's time to make decisions here. I want to talk about the five principles that we have been mentioning periodically here. So navigable, we've addressed a little bit.

Supportive, targeted is a really important principle for a learning ecosystem. So can you explain what you mean by targeted? Yes. Targeted education, especially if we think about folks who might already have degrees who are in the workforce, they might not necessarily be in the market for another degree or an advanced degree. So how do we give them the targeted educational experience they need to make progress in their lives? And for folks who are not thriving in the labor market, that's especially critical where they don't need sort of a big bundle of education also mixed in with sort of the social

networking aspect of what we today kind of associate with a college going experience. They might just be looking for these project management tools or this way of being able to use Tableau. It's sometimes some of these more emergent needs where there's a clear kind of need for how do I know what the right size learning experience is? And how do I know that an employer or a prospective hiring manager will be able to validate and endorse that means something? This is huge because right now we have over 975,000 credentials flooding our education and labor markets. And for just any person who's seeking to upskill, how do I know which one out of those nearly 1 million credentials is going to actually launch me into that better opportunity?

We don't have a way of understanding what's the right targeted learning experience to take and how will an employer actually make sense of that. While we're talking about later in life learners, this means a ton of things. Long life learning means a ton of really important things. Older workers, you know, people with careers later in their lives, workers that are engaged in more caretaking. So those who have relatives that are living longer, you know, they're going to be doing more at-home caretaking. You talk about this in the book as well. And naturally, there will be less manual labor as well. I believe this will call for a pretty serious review of workplace

ethics and how HR institutions and large companies handle this new normal. For sure. I mean, we all know that as much as we don't want to think about it, age discrimination occurs. There have been some massive studies that show that we definitely tend to work with this bias toward a younger and often cheaper working population. And so, you know, the more senior you get, how do we make sense of this longer work life and making space for the right kinds of relationships that exist to leverage that expertise and also build up maybe that younger workforce? I think we're going to have to start getting a whole lot more flexible about the kinds of workplace engagements we offer. kinds of workplace engagements we offer. Right now, we have just this very kind of black and white distinction between kind of part-time and full-time, right? And who gets the benefits and we don't get to kind of port them over individually. We're always kind of connected to an employer for

that. So there are different groups that are working on portable benefits structures, which is fascinating as we think about more flexible forms of work. But there's also this kind of idea of how do we think about different kinds of consultative engagements where we're bringing in that expertise and maybe our older workforce doesn't want to work full time. So how do we give them that kind of flexibility to be able to engage and share that institutional knowledge with the incumbent workforce? In some cases, we're talking about the potential to have 20 to 30 or even more career changes for those who are living longer and working longer. Do you think this will result in even more competent workers? Will it result in just greater stress? What is the ultimate outcome going to be of those who are changing careers so

much? And how do organizations handle that? If we keep moving down the route we are on, yes, it's inevitable that this is just going to be a more stressful experience for all of us. And this is the point of the book is in order to begin building this better functioning, healthier learning ecosystem, where we begin to pull together these five elements around, you know around really trying to understand how we help people navigate to the next career, how we support them and kind of wrap them with 360 degree support services and give them just what they need or integrate it into their earning experience. And then how that manifests in kind of more fair, transparent hiring practices. What I've tried to do with this book is to articulate,

these are the major pain points we're seeing for people who are currently not thriving in the labor market. But if we can solve for these pieces and begin to stitch this together so that anyone that we pull off the sidewalk and we ask them, hey, how are you gonna navigate your next job change?

They're gonna know exactly who to call, where to go for that trusted advice, which learning provider will launch them into that better economic opportunity, and which employers are really thinking about internal mobility pathways and are going to give me a fair shot to prove that I can do the work ahead. If we can start to begin to pull these pieces together, it basically opens up this better functioning ecosystem for all of us, because all of us are going to have to depend on this kind of system working more, less dysfunctionally, right? Even if we have deeply fulfilling jobs right now, even if we have multiple degrees, advanced degrees today, it's not going to matter because

we've already seen it. I think all of us, when we're in the workforce, we see the gaps suddenly that we need to fill. We're seeing, oh my goodness, I better start learning a little bit about data analysis, or I need to understand how AWS works, right? Or I need to understand what's involved in this Salesforce implementation, or wow, I'm realizing I'm not great at giving feedback to my direct reports, right? We're learning that we have these gaps to fill. So how are we going to actually begin to build those skills? Because it's going to happen more and more often, and we're going to be thrown more strange things like chat GPT, right? That's just sort of the beginning of what we're going to

see. And so how do we contend with that? If we actually begin to sort of unlock these five pain points that most people are kind of bumping into today, we will unlock it for the rest of us and it will be a little bit less stressful in the future. But if we just kind of try to ignore what's going on and keep fumbling our way through and just sort of praying and hoping that we're going to be able to get that next job, this isn't going to bode well for our future of work. There's a pretty clear trend, especially among certain larger organizations, to no longer require a four-year college degree to apply to certain positions that historically might have demanded that sort of credential. This sounds like a great way to get more people into more positions that properly suit their

skill set. However, do you see this as an effective way to get people who don't have access to higher education into strong positions? Or does it end up favoring those who probably have access to higher education but were able to find really strong learning pathways that weren't a college or a university. I think what you're pointing to is there are opportunities for people to maybe make their way and sort of prove that they have the skills. Especially works well when we're talking about information technology fields. It works less well for certain fuzzier areas, right?

fields, it works less well for certain fuzzier areas, right? What we're seeing, though, is the emergence of these different kinds of on-ramp programs that exist that are trying to help people who are traditionally overlooked in the applicant tracking systems because they don't have a two or a four-year degree. And they're trying to build those folks' skills in order to give them that kind of fair shot. So what they're doing is these interesting kinds of outsourced apprenticeship models where maybe they're training a certain population to learn some front-end web development skills or learn some advanced manufacturing skills, whatever the thing may be, or data quality assurance. They're building these specific skills and they're hiring them internally and sourcing them out to different employers. So the employers get this opportunity to have this kind of less risky version of testing out these people that they would have traditionally not accepted as a potential hire. And what they're seeing is, oh my goodness, they definitely have

the skills that we need in this kind of medical assistant, medical coding job, right? And it facilitates this really interesting kind of connection between supply and demand. Unfortunately, those kinds of on-ramp programs are sort of few and far between. And even if we think about more traditional apprenticeship programs, those are also just sort of a small niche of when you compare it to kind of more traditional four-year degree programs. And so the opportunity ahead is how do we begin to widen the funnel and produce more of these kinds or develop more of these kinds of programs that give folks a fair shot who may not have necessarily those formal credentials to prove that they can do those jobs. One of the interesting things about removing something like test or a GPA from a

hiring process is that we're realizing that our standardized testing is not necessarily measuring what truly matters, right? And I think one of the things we're realizing is that our ability to learn deeply and understand deeper structures of understanding is limited in terms of what those typical kinds of proxies for skills tend to show. And I think as we think about the need for curiosity and collaboration, these kinds of critical thinking skills, we have to get a whole lot better at beginning to understand how we measure those skills. I think we don't have a ton of basic learning science around what makes someone a better team leader, right? What makes them more empathetic or more emotionally intelligent or more of a systems

thinker? How do we build those skills for people who want to develop those skills? That kind of learning may look like failure on a normal exam, right? It's not testing that kind of short-term memory or the ability to spit out an answer that sounds coherent. But how do we get at someone's kind of ways of making sense of the world? Because we need ultimately in our workforce, people who can think nimbly and exercise judgment in these really difficult circumstances where they're contending with this particular dilemma or this priority? And how do we know that the person that we're hiring can kind of do all of that important work inside their head to begin to sort of say, first, I'm going to tackle this and use this kind of research to solve this problem.

How do we build those amazing problem solvers of the future? I think that is a different kind of assessment process than the one that we've really relied on for centuries. Not just the assessment process, but I think the continued education decisions that they have to make. So for HR leaders and recruiters and those who are developing learning programs for organizations, how can they stay ahead of the curve such that the long life education that they're giving is actually relevant and key to the things that people need to be learning to stay relevant? Moore's law, you know, AI is developing so rapidly right now, like I don't even know what to expect in the next five years, how radically the workforce is going to change and how radically technology is going to change. radically technology is going to change. How do you recommend that learning and development leaders and those who are developing these education programs know what to do, know what to teach,

know how to take care of their employees? I mean, I think part of it is being clear about roadmaps internally, just articulating what some of those ways to advance are. Because once you begin to sort of backwards map from the senior leadership on down and sort of think about emerging or strategic initiatives you're building for the future, you can then begin to understand how you might make this clear for your workforce and that there are these ways of building toward these new jobs of the future. None of that is clear and none of that is easily navigable today. I think a lot of the early work is going to be on rather than focusing our efforts on our middle managers and our senior

managers, how do we think about different kinds of ways of bringing this idea of executive coaching down to our frontline workers? And a lot of that is going to basically center initially on some of those more human skills that we need to develop. And I think a lot of that can be done with different kinds of scenario-based learning. I think we're seeing really interesting evolutions occurring with VR and AR to begin to facilitate these kinds of skills building practices around giving and receiving feedback and how to negotiate or how to manage conflict, we can see how these different kinds of technologies are helping us actually build those skills in low stakes, formative environments so that once we actually do have to exercise those skills in real life, we're not doing it as if it's the first time, right? And where we practice, we've begun to kind of cultivate these skills. And again, as we begin to sort of do a better job of showing the gaps in our current workforce connected to the jobs that we are foreseeing as critical to a company's future,

we can then begin to start mapping out some of those technical or technological skills as well that need to be developed to bring some of those frontline workers into that sort of middle management area. One of the most telling examples was with one of these AI companies that I was talking with, where they had laid off maybe 10,000 workers. And when this company actually looked at the profiles of those 10,000 workers, they were able to suss out that actually a good portion, maybe about 30% of them could have been molded into those jobs of the future because they were able to get at more of that kind of set of granular skills that people actually carried with

them that weren't necessarily articulated. And so I think that's where when we think about making decisions for the future, our instinct is always to go out and buy to post for the job that we think we need and post these specific skills and hire someone externally who says they have those skills versus kind of looking internally at this kind of pot of talent gold and thinking, how do I take a good chunk of these people and build them into the workforce of the future? But one of the biggest questions in L&D is how to teach and train folks without disrupting their day and the work that they're doing on a regular basis, learning in the flow of work. And when it comes to AI and hardcore technology like this, most workers, 99.99% of people are just doing nothing with this technology. So how can learning leaders create programs that don't disrupt but still teach those really

complicated things that just have nothing to do with what those workers are doing? Yeah, again, it sometimes can be baby steps with 20 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day, an hour. Walmart is doing this with their warehouse workers, with their folks who are on the floor, right? They're pulling them out for an hour, giving them a 20 minute sort of training on an Oculus set, and then pushing them out into the floor to begin practicing those skills, right? Immediately taking those concepts and putting them into play in their daily work. So again, like how do we think about making this more seamless within the work day? How do we just give someone that bite-sized piece of learning, give them the opportunity,

ways to practice those skills, and then an opportunity also to importantly reflect on those skills? Because it's only in that reflection process that we begin to understand the lessons that we're learning along the way. So how do we do that, especially with these kinds of human skills that are so critical? You can't build these skills in a 20-minute training, right? You can't suddenly become more empathetic as a human being in 20 minutes. But how do you understand the ways in which emotional intelligence comes into play every single day when you're at work that requires some constant kind of reflection process. Ultimately, you do think, though, that it's imperative that

we actually carve out time to learn these things. Like it's no longer something that we should just kind of leave to our own devices as individuals outside of work. But organizations now have the responsibility to invest the time and the resources needed to quite literally pull somebody out from the job they're doing and teach them about technology that's coming. 100%. 44% of employers today say they offer zero upskilling opportunities for their current workforce. And that just has to change.

It has to be that every single company offers a way for someone to build new skills for the future. Great. Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up, Michelle. So thank you so much for joining us. Can you give us a just a quick overview as to how we can learn more about you? Sure. I have an advisory consulting group called Rise and Design, and you can just type in riseanddesign.io. And you can always find me on LinkedIn. It's RWMichelle with two L's. Great. Well, thank you so much once again. And to all those listening at home, thank you for joining us. We'll see you on the next episode. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and

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