The shelf life of skills is getting ever shorter, which has significant implications for talent acquisition. It is essential that TA leaders take an active role in developing the overall skills strategy for their business. If employers want to be effective skills-based organizations, it is clear that talent acquisition, talent management, L&D and strategic workforce planning must be closely aligned.
My guest this week is Malcolm Taylor, Head of Capability at the UK Health Security Agency. In the last few years, Malcolm has led a highly effective initiative to use data to drive upskilling, talent development and talent acquisition. In our conversation, he shares valuable insights on skills strategy and some interesting perspectives on the likely role AI will play in L&D in the future.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Why upskilling is so essential in 2024
• The shortening life cycle of skills
• Engagement and retention
• Teaching people how to learn
• Mapping skills within the organization
• Can AI create a common skills language across professions?
• Data-driven decision making
• Community-based learning
• The role of TA in skills-based organizations
• The importance of removing silos in the people function.
• What does the future look like?
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Transcript:
Matt: Support for this podcast comes from Transform. Recruiting Future is excited to announce a partnership with Transform. Transform brings together people-driven leaders, investors, and innovators across industries and backgrounds with a shared passion for people innovation and transforming the world of work. Transform 2024 promises to be the best yet. You can expect three days of powerful content, innovation showcases, probing conversations, hands on learning experiences, over 300 speakers, and energizing after hours networking Las Vegas style. So, come and meet me in Vegas on March the 11th through the 13th. Register now and save $200 by going to mattalder.me/transform. That’s mattalder.me/transform.
[Recruiting Future theme]
Matt: Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 592 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. The shelf life of skills is getting ever shorter, which has significant implications for talent acquisition. It’s essential that TA leaders take an active role in developing the overall skill strategy for their business. If employers want to be effective skills-based organizations, it’s clear that talent acquisition, talent management, L&D, and strategic workforce planning must be closely aligned. My guest this week is Malcolm Taylor, Head of Capability at the UK Health Security Agency. Over the last few years, Malcolm has led a highly effective initiative to use data to drive upskilling, talent development and talent acquisition. In our conversation, he shares valuable insights on skill strategy and some interesting perspectives on the likely role AI will play in L&D in the future.
Hi Malcolm, and welcome to the podcast.
Malcolm: Hi Matt, how you doing?
Matt: I’m very well, thank you, and it’s a pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Malcolm: Sure, yeah. My name is Malcolm Taylor. I am the Head of Capability at the UK Health Security Agency, which all sounds very grandiose. It’s working for what was Test and Trace and Public Health England, and my job basically involves developing professional maturity, enabling skill development within the organization that supports our future workforce planning.
Matt: Fantastic stuff. And I want to dive into a lot about what you’re doing, what you’ve done in your previous roles, because there’s some really interesting insights in there. Before we do though, I suppose just to set the context, why is learning and upskilling so important right now at this point in 2024?
Malcolm: Sure. And I think, how long have you got, really? But I think in terms of the short, abbreviated, abridged version of the answer to that, I think learning and upskilling, particularly in this current landscape, I think super important for a variety of reasons, but for me, it’s that kind of linked to the competitive job market that we’re in at the moment. I think it’s highly competitive out there around people having the relevant skill sets for the kind of ever-changing jobs. So jobs that were really relevant a few years ago are becoming outdated. The span of life skills, lifecycle is ever shortening. And then obviously the rapid technological advancements with AI and everything else is really impacting the need for constant development of people skills.
And then alongside that, I think on the flipside of the recruitment aspect, I think we’ve got the challenge of employee engagement and satisfaction and various researches showing us that people with clear career pathways and career development opportunities are more likely to stay and retain in the organization. So at a job level, I think they’re so important. But also, when you start to think broader in terms of the globalization and the dynamics that’s going on in the world at the moment, I think keeping people agile and at the forefront of skill development is becoming ever more important for organizations and businesses.
Matt: I suppose this is a very generic question that’s very difficult to answer, but I’m just really interested about, you’re talking about there about the lifespan of a skill is getting much shorter. How much shorter? How much has that sort of changed in the last few years?
Malcolm: I think we’re seeing things turning around rapidly in terms of months as opposed to years if I’m honest, Matt. I think I’ve got to a place now where I’m no longer really focusing on developing content for what people need to learn rather than equipping them with the skills in how to learn. Because I just think that trying to keep pace with content creation to match the demand for skills is depending on the size of your team and the kind of resources at your hand. I just don’t think you’ll ever keep pace with that content creation. So yeah, really, really short term, I think in terms of months rather than years nowadays for skills.
Matt: Wow. I think that’s really interesting and I think that’s really interesting as well for everyone who’s listening in talent acquisition in terms of the skills that they’re recruiting for, dive into all of this in a bit more detail as we sort of go through our conversation. I suppose to give some context to all of this, tell us about the previous role that you had, because I know that you kind of addressed some of the business challenges there. You addressed the business challenge that you had with some of the things you did with skills and talent. Tell us about that.
Malcolm: Yeah, sure. So previously to moving over to where I am now, I work for the Met Office, the weather people, not the police. And I was basically set a challenge by my previous chief people officer around the skills picture of the organization. We knew what jobs we had, but whether people were competent and had the right skills to do those jobs in the organization, we had very little evidence or data to give us that picture. So with that business challenge, I set out to develop some processes in terms of being able to, A, provide employees with some empowerment around their own development, but also the ability to capture some of the skills data that we needed. And so, we stood up 18 professions across the organization. And within those professions, they were aligned to either civil service frameworks or industry frameworks. And using those frameworks, we created a self-assessment tool for individuals.
And basically, this self-assessment tool enabled employees to look at where they were on their skills development journey against what was required for that role and whether they were meeting expectations or there were gaps in the picture. But what was really good for us is we took the data and collated that come out of the back of that, and we were able to start creating a really rich and varied picture of the skills within the organization, not just at a skill level, but at a grade level, at a location level. And as you can imagine, creating those kind of heat maps of skills across the nation and our various sites across the globe, we were able to start really doing some either targeted focused L&D or focused recruitment. It started to influence our future demand management. So the data that we’re able to capture from that really started to address some of that, not just only that skills picture, but some of those workforce planning challenges we had around talent and succession planning and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, just from that one business challenge around identifying your skills picture, we were able to use that data in various ways to support workforce planning.
Matt: And how long did that take? Because I think sometimes people look at the whole talk about skills and they look at their organization and they think, “Oh, we’re never going to be able to get that level of understanding in any kind of constructive way very quickly. How long did that take, and what was the kind of the resources that you had to put behind it to make it work?”
Malcolm: I would say from the initial business problem being challenged to me, I would say we probably went on about a three-year journey with it all. What I would say private sector, you’d probably do it a little bit quicker than kind of we took– civil service does have levels of bureaucracy and red tape that has to be overcome. But I would say three years, fairly consistent, focused hard work got us to a really good place in terms of A, building the maturity within professions and setting up the governance and structures around that. Two, delivering that kind of endpoint, user assessment, self-assessment, whereby we were able to start capturing data. In terms of the data, we started capturing probably about 12 months ago at the Met Office, and it started to then be filtered into some really usable dashboards for kind of those involved in talent and business planning. So yeah, about three-year journey in terms of the resources, I had a team of about five working on it fairly consistently, but probably I would say 2 FTE, two full-time equivalents over that three-year period in terms of effort.
Matt: And do you think that some of the technology, the AI that’s coming onto the market at the moment, would be able to speed up that kind of a process?
Malcolm: Most definitely, yeah. I think there is quite a lot of heavy lifting at the front end to identify all of those skills and map your job through to relevant skills for that particular job. But what I see AI being able to do really well in the future. So with our professions, we really created that vertical view of career pathways. But AI should in theory be able to start to create much more of a common language across professions, because one of the things I identified is that profession A might describe a particular competency or a skill in one way, and profession B, might describe that very same competency or skill in a very different way. So I think AI should be able to start helping some commonality in language so that you can actually look at your careers both horizontally and vertically, which then creates a world of opportunities for employees and future recruitment. So, I think AI is going to fast track and automate a hell of a lot of that front loading work that went on. But beyond that, who knows? I think in terms of augmenting someone’s learning journey, I think AI, I think the opportunities are endless, if I’m honest, Matt. And the more cover and pick at that particular problem, the more I realize how much is going to benefit individuals.
Matt: Absolutely, absolutely. We’ll talk about that a little bit more, a bit later, actually. So I suppose coming back to this kind of project, this kind of approach, what were the benefits and drawbacks of doing it this way?
Malcolm: I think the benefits around getting that real rich tapestry of data and that tells the whole skills recruitment, talent, succession planning picture was a hell of a benefit for us. Enabling data driven decision making, which if you’re trying to ask for money and you’re building business cases around that, if you’ve got the data to back it up, it tells a very compelling story. I think the drawbacks for me was the amount of manual intervention at the start because we were basically creating spreadsheet after spreadsheet, as I mentioned earlier about skills and the lifecycle of those skills, you’re then wedded to a maintenance regime of those spreadsheets to make sure that the skills are relevant and upkept. So I think some of the drawbacks is around the ongoing maintenance of it for sure.
Matt: You’ve recently moved into this new role. What are you kind of carrying over? What are you sort of doing the same? What are you doing differently? What are you not doing?
Malcolm: I think what I’ve come into my new role, I think there’s lots of things that I bring in terms of the final outcomes with that data picture empowering individuals to [unintelligible 00:14:16] more of their development and treating people more like adults as opposed to parent-child type relationships. But I think what I’m actually looking at now is professions themselves owning more of these processes. So, you know many hands make like work, as they say, really focusing on me being a specialist partner to the organization rather than someone that’s a center of expertise. That’s where we’re really focusing our attention. So creating more of the transactional stuff out in the business as opposed to kind of within my team.
Matt: That makes a lot of sense. I suppose that comes back to something you’ve mentioned a couple of times as we’ve been talking, which is the whole way that people learn and the whole way that technology is changing that, particularly AI, particularly all the information that’s out there. Talk us through that. How is that changing learning in the corporate space, and how do people need to think about it?
Malcolm: There’s a couple of things here for me, and I think one of the phrases I heard a while back, and I can’t remember who it was attributed to, was this idea that one of the biggest risks of AI is making us very [unintelligible 00:15:26] ineffective practices, right? So, I’m very, very keen to avoid those pitfalls of just automating bad practices. And I think when I look at learning pedagogy in this country, it’s not really changed much since Victorian times. It’s very much chalk and talk, testing people on what they can remember rather than what they can do. And I think at the moment, if you pointed AI at the Internet and asked it to create some learning for you, it would come up with your standard eLearning with a multiple-choice questionnaire at the end of it. And for me, that’s not the way to benefit from AI in the learning sphere. I think what often happens when you create a piece of learning, it gets created for the lowest common denominator in the audience that it’s potentially being displayed at. Whereas I think the opportunities that AI brings us, given the access it will have to information, is augmenting that learning journey and really personalizing it to the person that’s kind of the person’s ability.
So even you can add a little bit of stretch in there as well, but giving them for me, and I mentioned it earlier about teaching people how to learn. There’s a university in the States called Minerva University that ripped up its curriculum a while back, and they’re very much focused on that building curiosity and critical thinking-type elements into people’s skill set and then giving them the tools to then go and find ways in which they learn. And for me, it’s really about moving away from that knowledge retention more to problem solving and action theory and action learning and really focusing actually in community-based learning. I think that’s where the future exists in terms of building skills within an organization. So, yeah, really, really challenging the status quo, really. I think that’s what learning should be at the forefront and the innovation of kind of people development. And I think [unintelligible 00:17:25] that status quo will come with AI.
Matt: Yeah. A couple of follow-up questions on that. First of all, tell us a bit more about community-based learning.
Malcolm: Yes, so real passion of mine, it all started off with [unintelligible 00:17:34] many, many moons ago around the concept of the collective mind. And we actually, a good example of this in the workplace was within our technology team at the Met Office. There was this real challenge around our IT practitioners consistently failing to be successful at interview for senior IT practitioners. And one of the things we identified within that process by doing some discovery work was technically, in terms of coding skills and all of that, the IT practitioners were more than competent, but they weren’t being exposed to the sorts of things that our senior IT practitioners would be. So things like managing budgets, project management, finance, all the sorts of things that you’d have the further up the food chain you go.
So, we created this thing called the technology and learning pathway, which is very much based around community-based learning. So, you had to apply to come onto this project. And within the cohort, they would all take turns at playing different roles within the project. They would work on a real-world business problem. So came with the real-world stresses and strains and responsibilities of delivering a work project. And through that period of a six-month project, they would all gain exposure to the elements that were required of the senior IT practitioner. We ended up with something like a 98% success rate of those going through that program into achieving that future progression. And I think just working on programs and projects and problems with a community of similar interested people, really does help share that.
And I think if you indulge me a little bit, it draws really on really tried and tested things from back in pre-industrial revolution days, where so and so would set up a green grocer or a butcher in a village, they would take on an apprentice, they would learn the skills, and then they would move to the next village or town and they would set up their own and the chain would continue. And I think that peer-to-peer, community-based learning approaches, whilst we can modernize it with the use of technology as an enabler. The theory behind that for me, really does resonate with me in today’s workforce, because you’re learning at the point that you can apply theory. It’s learning in the flow of work. It’s no longer taking someone out of the workplace to do a training course and bringing them back in, where potentially some of the knowledge is forgotten on that journey between the point of learning and the point of application. And I think it has real merit in today’s society and it’s a lot cheaper as well, which also tells a very compelling story to your chief finance officer when you’re asking for more support in this area.
Matt: Of course. And my other sort of second question around that was people’s attitudes to it, because there are obviously lots of people in the workforce who are used to learning and development being delivered in a very structured way, as you say, through external training courses and just learning lots of information. And we now live in a world where you can do all kinds of different qualifications and things using the Internet. You could learn all day, every day, if you wanted to. What are people’s attitudes like to changing the way that they kind of learn and develop within organizations? Are people stuck in that the way that they’ve always done it or open to doing things differently?
Malcolm: I think it varies, if I’m honest, and it probably varies across sector as well. I would say that some of the kind of more academic industries and sectors tend to really struggle with the concept of moving away from what I would class as formal training, because that’s pretty much founded in the 70:20:10 approach to development. And I think for me there will always be a place for training sitting in a classroom or sitting online. I wouldn’t want to get on a plane if someone hadn’t had any practical training. But it’s kind of showing them that the 70:20 experiential-type learning, that community-based learning is part of can support that formal training in a much more agile and adaptive way. And I think the hearts and minds piece, people will react, they see it’s learning on the [unintelligible 00:21:53] but it’s really trying to explain and tell that what’s in it for me story, and that this is access to learning at your fingertips, whereas booking on a training course might be months away.
And I often use the example, Matt, of if you’re at home and your boiler breaks, you’re not going to book yourself on a course to be able to learn how to fix boilers, or you’re potentially not even going to book an engineer to come and out. You might just go on YouTube to see if you can fix it yourself. And for me, it’s that kind of YouTube-type learning where we try and find the solutions ourselves first before we go down that more formal route.
Matt: You mentioned sort of talent acquisition a couple of times in the conversation. What’s the role for talent acquisition in all of this? In this whole skills-based way of thinking?
Malcolm: I think it’s front and center, Matt. So we’ve got a structure within the civil service around functions and professions. And within that professions, there’s quite a really well-established structure in terms of heads of profession, and they are seen as your kind of standard bearer within the organization around what good looks like in the profession. And one of their key priorities is ensuring that the standards that are within the organization around the skills are at the forefront of their industry. And I think that talent acquisition and future skills is very much driven through our professions and our professional standards who are benchmarked against industry. Then that obviously links into the kind of the reward and recognition mechanisms that come alongside that. So, yeah, I think talent for me, front and center map. Without knowing what the skills pitch are like, you do not know what your future talent looks like either.
Matt: Absolutely. And as a final question, I suppose to sum up everything that we’ve been talking about, what do you hope the future looks like for talent and skills and work?
Malcolm: I think for me, if I was to crystal ball time, if I was to fast forward three years, I would love to see us so much more integrated in the way we work across the organizations that we all work for. I think these things are seen so separate and disparate from each other. And I just think learning and development, talent acquisition, recruitment, retention, employee value proposition, they are so all intrinsically linked that working together to develop a more holistic solution to what the future of organization needs has to be the key. And I think sometimes we forget that we all work for one employer rather than I work for L&D or I work for resourcing. And I think that greater collaboration for me would just be an absolute dream.
Matt: Malcolm, thank you very much for talking to me.
Malcolm: Thank you, Matt.
Matt: My thanks to Malcolm. You can follow 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 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.
