Having covered both topics extensively on the podcast this year, I’m very much of the opinion that the move towards skills-based thinking will be more disruptive to recruiting norms than the rapid adoption of generative AI.
The adoption of skills-based hiring and the move towards skills-based organizations is still happening slowly. However, as more organizations question blanket requirements for college degrees, new upskilling and reskilling initiatives are emerging that could help move the needle quicker.
My guest this week is Michelle Westfort, Chief University Officer at InStride. InStride works with businesses to use skill-based hiring to expand talent pools by partnering with employers to construct career education paths to provide employees with the skills they need to do their jobs.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Why some employers are moving away from degrees
• Do employers understand skills-based hiring?
• Diversifying talent pools with more equitable hiring processes
• Understanding the skills needed for specific roles
• Just in time, skills development
• Evolving the relationship between Universities and employers
• Deconstructing the degree
• Strategies for long-term professional development
• Mapping education to skills requirements
• What does the future look like?
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt: Hi, there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 561 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. Having covered both topics extensively on the podcast this year, I’m very much of the opinion that the move towards skills-based thinking will be more disruptive to recruiting norms than the rapid adoption of generative AI.
The adoption of skills-based hiring and the move towards skills-based organizations is still happening slowly. However, as more organizations question blanket requirements for college degrees, new upskilling and reskilling initiatives are emerging that could help move the needle quicker.
My guest this week is Michelle Westfort, Chief University Officer at InStride. InStride works with businesses to use skill-based hiring to expand talent pools by partnering with employers to construct career education paths to provide employees with the skills they need to do their jobs.
Hi, Michelle, and welcome to the podcast.
Michelle: Hi, Matt.
Matt: An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Michelle: Sure, I would love to, and thanks for having me. So, introduce myself. I’m a mother, I’m a wife, I’m a colleague, I’m a leader, an entrepreneur, problem solver, and sometimes get called the igniter of ideas. But I’m also a first generation American, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who did not have the privilege of attending school. And that shapes a lot of my thinking and why I’m a collector of learning, and have devoted the last 20 years of my career to access to education. And that drives a lot of the vision for my work at InStride.
InStride is a tech enabled services company that delivers workforce education solutions. InStride drives meaningful social and business outcomes by unlocking access to life changing education. I’m the Chief University Officer, and my team is responsible for developing innovative learning solutions by consulting with employers and developing a network of academic partners and universities which drive enrollments into schools and engage employees in a way that their employer actually values and funds.
Matt: This is such an interesting area for me because there is so much going on in this space, so I’m delighted to be talking to you about it. So, I suppose to set the scene on all of this and the conversation that we’re having. Talking about employers and college degrees, why are some employers moving away from college degrees and how widespread is this? Is it a trend? Is it a movement? What’s going on?
Michelle: So, back in 2019, when we first launched InStride, we saw that there was tremendous success at employers who wanted to help their employees reach their dreams of earning a college degree, but also the opportunity to advance their careers. And so, our origin story is something that you’ve likely heard about Starbucks funding bachelor’s degrees at ASU for Baristas. But when the pandemic hit us all, many organizations went remote, and there was an even greater emphasis on skills. That coupled with the fact that we have really reached a moment in time where finding talent who can perform the requirements of the jobs that we have today is harder than ever.
So, the case for tech talent manufacturing, finance, project management, allied health, careers, you name it, no vertical or employer is telling us, “Oh yeah, we’ve got this.” In fact, it’s just the opposite. They’re saying things like, “We want a skilled workforce, and we want to continue to drive business outcomes and growth, and we also want to help employees and families and the communities in which we operate.” So, that’s a bit more complex than moving away from college degrees.
So, I’d say it’s not as much about moving away from degrees, but rather this trend towards we actually want to have it all. We don’t want to overextend on the social impact goals or focus our efforts entirely on skills-based hiring. We actually want a plan and a path to making both of those things or all of those things a priority. So, it’s not surprising to me. I’m a mother of teenagers, so the Gen Z population is really pushing us to see things in that way and that’s it. It’s an inspiring part of being a part of making that possible in the future as well.
Matt: There’s a huge discussion and narrative about skills-based hiring at the moment. I’ve had a number of episodes over the last year where we talked about this. Do you think that employers really understand it, and what are the barriers to mass adoption at the moment?
Michelle: I think that employers understand the relevance and the importance of skills-based hiring. Anyone in HR or L&D today has sat through countless podcasts or panels and internal discussions, external discussions. So, it’s not a matter of understanding as it is about being able to execute within massive global organizations that have competing priorities, being short staffed in HR, having the tools that they need to quickly take action, and then, of course, seeing tangible results, and then, of course, not to mention the things like measuring or assessing skill. That stuff is really hard.
So, what we found was that HR leaders and even managers actually face some real similar challenges when it comes to barriers, but also really understanding this skills based hiring movement. But it’s really about the decisions that they have to make deciding things like what criteria should be used when evaluating an employee for a promotion, or aligning expectations for employees at the same level of an organization, but perhaps, in different functions or different departments, accounting for things like diversity in the workforce.
Then lastly, I would say ensuring that employees have access to the educational programming that they need to take the next step in their career. And that’s where InStride comes in. So, we work with partners. We focus on the end goal in mind when it comes to skills-based hiring. We [unintelligible [00:08:58] know it’s rarely a quick fix for hiring. It’s really about developing pipelines and scalable ways to ensure that education and skills are being infused into this culture of learning that organizations thirst for. We start that by looking at the data about the workforce and how we can accelerate the motion of folks getting skills.
We recently launched a product at InStride called InSkilling, which has been tested in the market for the past couple of years. It came from the need for companies to diversify their candidate pools. And of course, you probably have heard of the work by 110 whereby we can drive towards a more equitable hiring process. And the problem was that degree requirements for underserved populations in the 110 mission, it’s to recognize black Americans who have historically had the lowest degree completion rates. That requirement was holding diverse candidates back from getting promoted.
So, the task at hand was actually really straightforward. It’s like, “Matt, change the policy.” It’s not as simple as that. When we start to unpack this for this client, we recognize that the implications are truly about change management across the organization. And so, hence, launched a product around it and recognized that our corporate partner clients really needed this help in making that shift happen.
Matt: Absolutely. We’ll get into the kind of education and upskilling part of this in a second. Before we do, just another question about the skills aspect of all of this. What would your advice to employers be in terms of understanding what skills are required for specific roles, particularly at a time where work is changing so quickly?
Michelle: [giggles] Matt, don’t laugh at me, but I’m going to sound facetious for a second to answer that, but the answer is super simple. Just ask. We learned, however, that the process of asking and getting the answer that meets the needs of a broader range of stakeholders actually is the harder part of it. So, I joke around with that. It’s like, how do you understand the skills? You just [unintelligible [00:11:14]. So, one of the tactics we used to help companies is really thinking about how you align your internal skills taxonomy that you can use across job families, and then extracting the skills required from a position by analyzing the job descriptions. And then what we’ve often seen is that these aren’t necessarily consistent from one region to another or one function to another. So, we do this exercise where we interview business leaders for their ideas on things like what does a successful employee in your unit look like, and then we really listen.
So, what we found is it’s a combination of traits and skills. One of those common traits being an open mindset to try new things and to learn. What we found is that our programs actually foster this because it combines that motivation for career mobility with the safety of knowing that leaders within their organization actually have vetted and selected this education for me. So, that’s a really powerful thing for any level employee. When we launched a product called SkillPath, which is curated learning offerings that enable a company to career path in a focused way, it’s 5 courses to 15 courses that provide just in time skill development in themes like first time manager or customer service or DEI.
Generally, learners complete those within six months to up to two years, but they really help folks prepare for their next role. And so, when we partner with universities on the other side, we think about that seriously like, what could that really mean? Arizona State University developed its universal learning courses, which we see more emphasis on skills from the hiring manager, but also looking for ease of entry and the possibility to eventually stack these learning skills, courses to degrees. And our partners, University of Memphis and The City University of New York and several others really deeply committed to this work.
Matt: Absolutely. So, it’s like deconstructing the degree and making it very relevant to the job and the employer, isn’t it?
Michelle: Exactly.
Matt: So, going, I suppose, a bit deeper into this upskilling, how important are these upskilling programs for entry level roles, and also existing employees?
Michelle: I can’t help, but immediately think about my first job as an entry level folk. Looking back at how undeveloped my skills were, and that was despite having a college degree. Though I worked while I went to school, in that process, I learned how to prepare and study. I was clearly a committed employee and had the experience of regrouping from failures and what a taste of achievement looked like. Those things really count to accelerate a career. But when it showed up that I needed to write a memo for the CEO or respond to a client that was frustrated, well, I may or may not have done that really well to be completely transparent.
Then my first promotion to a manager is really about fighting the urge to tell the answer rather than ask the right questions. And so, we still find that these things are hard for individuals, but they’re also hard for organizations. So, finding a great manager is really hard, but we’ve also known the stats that getting a job with career advancement is actually really, really hard. All of that to say that upskilling programs are really important for entry level and midlevel employees, no matter what your educational background has been.
When it comes to skills, you can never stop improving. So, it’s not a surprise to me that at InStride, more than half my team, despite many with advanced degrees, continue to upskill. And that’s what we’ve seen in companies who put value on this. Then it’s these companies that actually see an ROI on their investments. And so, that just makes it even sweeter. It becomes a win-win-win scenario. It works for entry level, it works for midlevel, and it even works for executive level employees.
Matt: You mentioned the ROI of the investment there. Talk us through the advantages for employers for having this approach.
Michelle: When it comes to career advancement, it’s one of the motivators for our populations. We know this. It’s more so than ever. So, when companies think about wanting to be an employer of choice, wanting to be recognized as the leader in their industry, being able to have a program that puts this work to action is one of the advantages. It’s wonderful. But another advantage is actually, really solving some of the important societal problems as well.
So, I recently read an article that said that only 30% of women, compared to almost 60% of men, actually used their company paid skills training, and they say things like lack of time and family obligations were obstacles in them pursuing their upskilling. But when companies think about investing in good and impactful programs, that’s when they see the returns and the needles move. So, they can see that investing in these programs enables us to have real meaningful impact around enhanced recruiting.
For instance, shorter cycles and even higher quality candidates, increased engagement in their populations, but all things that you can measure productivity and service quality. If you’re talking about something like hospitality or a restaurant chain, if you’re talking about manufacturing, you can see those measurable outcomes. Driving increased capability, performance and supply, high retention metrics are improved. Leadership development and turnover rates in leaders, reducing recruitment expenses, brand amplification, like, I could go on and on about the ways in which we can measure.
So, one of the things that we actually do at InStride is we sit down with employers and say, “Here’s our framework for measuring impact and where you can actually start to see results.” Some of those are really easy to see within three months, six months, nine months. Others are really longer-range goals that you may have. Some of our hospital systems are talking about things like solving for immediate workforce job gaps that they have in their allied health spaces and their job families.
However, recognizing that creating a more diverse and inclusive workforce where their employees look like the populations that they serve and then boosting lifetime earnings for employees and providing living wages. And then ultimately those are opportunities that change communities, change states, and impact generations to come. So, it goes from tangible metrics to big societal changes.
Matt: So much interesting stuff there. It was interesting when you were talking about this kind of upskilling education being engaging and relevant and something that people want to do, because I think that so often training development learning is this big bucket that contains things like learning policies, and compliance tests, and all those sorts of things that people have to do. How can companies really develop and deploy strategies in this area for the genuine long-term professional development of their workforce?
Michelle: Well, so, if I could start with what doesn’t work telling employees what skills they need, because that’s just not enough. But when it comes to building a really great education program and deploying a strategy that works, we need to complement skill requirements for roles with educational programs that allow employees to gain the skills that they need to take their next step in their career. So, empowering employees to take charge of their own career and seek out positions that align with their skills and interests is one. And enabling companies to address their key staffing needs and also promoting higher employee engagement is just an outcome of that.
Though we map education programs to skill requirements for various roles, and we consider the needs of all employees. So, if you think about it from a broader perspective, this is really where the magic happens. So, a great program should include various forms of learning. It should include short form professional certificates. It should include boot camps. It should include associate’s degree programming for entry level roles. For instance, bachelor’s degrees, graduate degrees for midlevel and senior executives, ways to improve conversational fluency. For instance, language improvement. Employees should be able to choose a program that best suits them, where they currently are at in their journey.
Then also, we think about things like academic advisory and tutoring policies that you mentioned, but things like credit for prior learning and then flexibility in scheduling, because I mentioned before, but time is really one of the barriers. And so, not having to drive to a campus, find parking, sit there from four to 09:00 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So, we’ve seen real benefits from online education as well, and that has been an important part of deploying a really good strategy that’s scalable.
Then I can tell you from some of the in skilling and career education path work that we’ve done. I’ll give you an example. At one large global manufacturing company, we removed the degree requirements for 31 roles across five job families. We included HR and IT roles. We designed career education paths to improve and provide employees with a glimpse of what a day in the life of future roles within targeted job families could look like. And then we provided an overview of the skills that are required to perform those roles. And then finally, an educational program that they could access through the InStride platform that was free to the employees to develop those required skills. And so, all those pieces together are the way to deploy one of these programs.
So, the company’s career education path for cybersecurity, for example, included associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees from various universities, prep courses, and then eventually, certifications in CSM and CSE, which are certified Information Security Manager certifications. And then the work that this entailed was bringing together all of the parts of the organization that wanted to make a move in professional development for its workforce, but also to create meaningful, lasting, sustainable change for the company.
So, I would say that even companies that have a deep bench in L&D and even companies that have launched skills libraries, they still could benefit from testing that strategy with us. Matt, I often take calls with folks to just validate ideas to say, “Could this work? What would this look like? How does this integrate with what we’re currently doing? Where could we be in three to five years?” And so, I would say I encourage all of your listeners, if you’ve heard something that’s interesting on the call, don’t be shy. Clearly, I love to chat about this stuff.
Matt: [chuckles] Absolutely. No, that’s really interesting. As a final question, I always like to finish with a question about the future. We’ve obviously had a very disruptive few years. With the developments in AI and technology, it looks like that’s set to continue. What does the future look like in this area? What are the implications of the AI technology that’s coming on stream and developing at the moment?
Michelle: So, this is where the AI version of me swaps out, finishes the interview, collects feedback, and generates responses, and then here’s how you get in touch. Now, it’s funny to think about all that AI can actually do to help us in our jobs. I guess, that will get really good and faster at higher quality outputs in the future. We’ve already been seeing companies post for newish roles like prompt engineer, but that’s really just one way that we’re seeing this manifest in our work. What’s bigger and more exciting for me is actually back to where we started, which is access. What has historically held folks back, AI can be really impactful.
So, when it comes to supporting the understandings of what offerings are available or how to navigate the admissions process and getting real time recommendations about what is out there. Schools are even able to use AI to improve those experiences for prospective learners. Similarly, if we think about it from the education standpoint, improving faculty experiences where things like where can I find my syllabus, or what are the dates of exams, or the final deadline for submitting my paper, that sort of thing can really help faculty focus more on teaching rather than time on policy related queries. And so, that gets you to your final goal of skill a lot faster and a lot better.
Then lastly, I would say, when it comes to actual learning, the way in which AI is leveraged, you get a study partner that listens, responds, can clarify when you don’t understand something. It doesn’t actually judge you either. That’s probably the best part of it. And so, digital natives find this kind of stuff useful, but also fun. And so, I think that’s really what the future looks like. We can all do better. Life can be just a bit easier, and of course, having fun with some of it too as we continue to learn and see where AI takes us. So, doesn’t that sound fun?
Matt: It certainly does. Michelle, thank you very much for talking to me.
Michelle: Thank you, Matt.
Matt: My thanks to Michelle. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes @recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
