2023 Round Up: Embracing Upskilling

Transcript

Karen Kirton  00:20

This year our focus for the podcast was on the importance of upskilling and why it's important to you, your team and your business to thrive. And we've had a lot of great conversations, including with some special guests who are specialists in their field. So we thought today we would break the episode down into themes of what we've actually learned this year. So a couple that lucky I pulled out were upskilling so the definition practicalities ideas within creative learning culture, what it is how, why to build it? Ai, which is a big one, you know that the rise and the rise? Not sure we're gonna see the form of AI leadership, what is the role of leaders in upskilling and also looking at smaller businesses. So how do we develop career paths, unlock team based learning and pay equity. So today, we're going to briefly touch back on these themes to provide our highlights for the year. So should we start with upskilling as a theme looking?

Lachy Gray  01:26

Hmm, sounds good. I think. Yeah, we started the year focused on upskilling and rescaling and the skills businesses we thought should focus on and I think we talked to a bunch of different categories. And I think Gennai certainly jumped to the top for me in terms of dominance of media and thoughts as to what is it and how are we going to use it in business? And I think we'll come to that when we start to talk about AI some of the impacts for me, sorry, upskilling highlights for me. In episode one. We talked to the point that repetitive tasks, who could be or likely will be automated with AI yet non repetitive tasks will require humans working in cross functional teams. And to do that, they'll need a variety of human skills. And Kristiana in episode four, talk to different categories of training when we're talking about how do we upskill and I thought that was quite interesting. Chris described it as his training for compliance, which is your typical tip, tick a box, training for HR policies and so on. Then second is learning for enhanced performance. And then third, learning for growth. And Chris made the point that training is often focused on that first area, so compliance and often doesn't touch performance or growth learning. Yet something that we've spoken about is studies show that that's actually want employees want they want to grow and want to develop. So there is a mismatch there. And I think that is still true, I would say at the end of of the year, and in Episode 10 With talk with Amal about creativity and seeing it something that's in all areas of life, rather than something that we do or don't have or a good or not so good at and also doing things for enjoyment, rather than for an outcome, which I think is something I had concept that is challenging for me in such an emphasis, I think on optimizing our time. And I think the emphasis on generative AI and the benefits plays into this as well. you automate all these repetitive tasks, and there's a certain pressure there to be optimizing the work day and all of our time and be more productive. How about you?

Karen Kirton  04:23

Yeah, no, I think that's an important thing to reflect on as well because you know, I'm someone that in the past would have said that I'm not creative. I've learned to change my mind on that. Through conversations with people like of all because I think we can all be creative in different ways. And I think we do need to create space for that in our lives, particularly like you say, when we're trying to constantly optimize, be more effective, be more productive. And creativity is a innate human skill that we can bring to the table that AI will at this point, quite replicate. Yeah, and I loved Chris tan in Episode Four as well. And actually, that was our most downloaded episode for the year talking about those different categories of training. Anyway, and I think back to episode one. Yeah, that was in February 2023. And chat GPT at the time had been the top of every Christmas party. You know, and we've just crossed over a year since it was launched. And a lot has happened in that year. And of course, you know, as you mentioned, AI is now a massive topic when it comes to the future of work and you know, I've started playing around a lot more with check GPT plus, you know, testing out creating my own GP Ts

05:51

and you know, also just, you know, doing continual research and, and learning about AI and what that might mean and I think that, you know, I've had some successes with things so I created a, a GPT. Well, I just uploaded the 20 most commonly used employment policy templates, and then you basically gave it instructions that when you're asked a question, you're you're to go to the policies first to find the answer. And only if you can't find it, then you can go on to the internet to have a look, but you must tell the user that that's what you've done.

Karen Kirton  06:30

And it's actually it's been really interesting to see its responses. So, the team and I got together yesterday for an interview catch up, and uh, yeah, and we were all kind of asking different questions and playing around with it. Some of it's amazing and some of it's a bit frightening

06:48

because it does make stuff up. But But I think that's really the point is that we all have to start playing around with this and understanding it. We it has come a long way and in 12 months, it'll just keep, you know, accelerating in its abilities. So, you know, when I reflect back, it's a very different year before all the ones before running my business, you know, I started at five HR and in 2016, and I can kind of put these groups of time you know, the pre COVID, the COVID years and now the AI years so and I think that that leads us to AI as a theme. So how has it changed your work this year looking?

Lachy Gray  07:27

Yeah, very similar to you, I think, a lot of experimentation and discussion. You know, started out using it to write content, both sort of marketing content and this experiment writing emails. And some fun stuff as well. Like wraps written a few wraps and songs, which I think is very good

Karen Kirton  07:53

and you put them on tick tock. We'd like to see you doing

Lachy Gray  07:58

not on tick tock and I've used to summarize reports and white papers. I haven't found it as useful for that. And I realized that there's this me doing my own summarizing has its own benefits. In that I'm skimming through a document and calling out the main points and what I called out as the key points were often sort of different to what I would and I thought that was interesting. And I guess it's down to the prompt as well. I found it most useful using it for market research. So telling it that it was a prospective customer of ours and giving it all the demographic info and and so on and then asking questions like What are your pain points? How do you select a learning platform? How do you determine ROI? What are the common barriers internally, to onboard a platform or what do you hear from the learners? That was really interesting, and I'm still experimenting with that. And that kind of highlighted to me the importance of the language and even down to specific words used in the prompt. How much of an impact that can have on the output? Ready with image creation to that has been a bit weird. Yeah. We we had a Christmas. We have an online Christmas party every year for the team. And we had it yesterday and we did a Secret Santa and each person had to use one of the AI tools in Canva to create a Christmas card for this for their recipient. It was did some weird stuff. So you try and tell it about an Aussie Christmas and one of them tried to incorporate like prawns and it didn't know about porns so he wanted to know about and it created a shrimp with two heads. And one of the shrimp spices was like looks like sad. And then sometimes it really did include writing that kind of looked like English, but actually was it was kind of really interesting. Yeah. We've done that a couple of times where we've incorporated using Gen AI into activities. So with our recent off site we did a scavenger hunt together, we gave everyone five locations, and I had to write clues to the other team using chat TBT or whatever Jenai they wanted to and make it fun and also include some of our differentiators that are in our 2024 strategy. That was really cool. It was really fun. And to see how different teams approach to so kind of combining the fun exploration element, but also getting experience using it and And I think we spoke about AI in recruitment to one of the episodes, calendars and opportunities. And I actually saw an article yesterday talking about it was based on a survey in Australia, of employees and trust their trust in AI and that there was greater trust in AI for process. socio automating things as opposed to making decisions. And that's what they were saying with recruitment that some companies are using it to make more hiring decisions or to qualify candidates so perhaps you are asked a question you have to record a video and that is reviewed and ranked all by AI and how does that make people feel there's less confidence and comfortability with that approach. So you knew and I read machines behaving badly for episode 11. That was quite interesting. To sort of that that author has technical expertise, but also has a philosophical perspective on the kind of moral considerations of AI and how great all this. I think, one of the things that really stood out to me and I've been thinking about this this year, as a quote from Neil Postman in the book, talking about technological revolutions, saying there's always winners and losers, and that the advantages and disadvantages are never distributed evenly among the population. So, the technology benefits some and harms others. And I think that's a really important conversation to have. And I think part of that for me is this sort of asking, Well, why like why are we using AI? And what will we do so if it's automating all these repetitive tasks, what are we doing with that extra time? Is the assumption that we do more work? Yeah. You know, and I hope that there is more conversation about that. So there are actually some real tangible societal benefits, rather than just more productivity and more work.

Karen Kirton  14:07

Yeah, maybe we can interview Elon Musk and Larry Page and ask for their views. Yeah. But yeah, it's a huge topic, right? Like there's just there's really competing and opposing views on what this looks like and what it means But, you know, moving on, because we could spend all of our time on that. One of our other things was learning culture, which we also, you know, mentioned quite a bit this year. And with your business, Yano, you know, that's right in that lnd space, so how would you describe a learning culture lucky?

Lachy Gray  15:03

Yeah. I think about the outcome, I guess, which for me, is hard for me, engaged team. And I think part of the way to get there is to invest in And I think by doing that, I all contribute to a culture, of alignment and of being open minded, which I think is really important. To help us adapt to change and uncertainty and to be resilient, which are skills that I think as we've seen, like coming out of COVID I thought things might quieten down a little bit, but we just got different, different challenges. So I think that's as important as it as it ever has been. And Linda Marie and Episode Six talks about the shift from technical to human skills. I guess in the past, they've been referred to as soft skills but as Brene Brown says, you know, there's nothing soft about them. And we're talking about empathy, giving and receiving feedback, being curious, embracing diversity, inclusion. All those things are really important, and yes, Think learning from reflection, on experience rather than just learning from experience. And somebody else I think Linda Linda spoke to that resonated with me. Especially challenging experience something that didn't go as I wanted it to something that made me frustrated, disappointed. Easy to put it behind me. Yeah. Oh, that's so I'm just going to forget about it. It's feels safer that way. I guess from a mental point of view, but there's an opportunity lost there, I think, to learn on it. So and that might just be writing some things down about what I thought would happen, what actually happened, why I feel the way I do, just so I can return to that in the future. Try and learn from that. And I think too, seeing learning as a continuous event, rather than a bunch of tick a box exercise rather than just training for compliance. Something that we're all doing all the time at work outside of work. We do it with different mediums you know, we might, we might learn off a 15 minute video in Instagram. There's so many different ways to learn now, and just acknowledging that that's okay. And just being clear about what we want the outcomes to be and then say, Okay, well, how can we achieve them? Yeah, about you? Yeah, I

Karen Kirton  18:36

think the reflection piece is really important. And it's something I've tried to do and I had to do it this week. I someone gave me some feedback that the way that they perceived an email that I sent was very different to my intention. And, you know, your initial response is to try and go, Well, that isn't what I meant, then, you know, try to explain yourself, you know, this is actually what I was trying to do. But I did it because I thought no, I need to learn from this. It actually just kind of sat and just sounds ridiculous but you just talk to yourself like you're talking to someone else and say, okay, you know, given that situation again, what could I do differently without saying, well, it was that person's fault because of blah. And I think that type of learning people don't necessarily think about as learning, but it is. And I think that's really important for those human skills to do that. And I think the, the other way that we can really embed that learning culture is to talk about what we've learned. So if I'm taking myself through that process, and I'm actually talking to the team about that as well, or if someone is doing a training course for example, they're coming back into to the rest of the team about it, because not only would that help to embed their learning because they have to talk about it to other people. But also, you know that they're just going to enable everyone else to go, oh, that's a good idea. Maybe I can follow that through. So I think a lot of those seemingly small things actually, really are what builds a learning culture versus let's all go and sit in a workshop for a day every month.

Lachy Gray  20:37

For sure. Yeah.

Karen Kirton  20:41

You know, and I think one of the other things that I enjoyed this year is that it we talked about how small businesses can get into this space as well. You know, in our business with our play HR, we work with small, medium sized businesses. And, you know, it's always difficult, you know, for those business owners to know how to build a learning culture, how to have career paths to focus on pay equity, so it was really great to include those this year. I enjoyed speaking to mark Eggers, from Jana and episode 15

21:16

And also back in episode two, we spoke with pre Sarkar from switch recruitment of careers about how you can hire for behaviors, and then train for skills. And I think to your point earlier, particularly with you know, the growth of AI this recruitment space, hiring for behaviors and values is so important. And you know, once you have those people in your business, then how do you help to keep them and create those career paths and you know, you gave some great ideas about having those types of conversations in Episode 12.

Karen Kirton  21:47

We've spoken a lot about risks of discrimination and bias with the rise of AI so it's also good to discuss that gender pay gap and pay equity in Episode 16 And what smaller businesses can practically help to do to bridge these gaps.

Lachy Gray  22:25

for lots of reasons that they've got a lot of resources, whether that's any people time reputation that smaller businesses don't have. So, I acknowledge that but I've also tried to reframe that to say there's a lot of opportunities and benefits in small business. And one of them is having the freedom to experiment and try things. Yes, and

Karen Kirton  23:02

You're forced to be more creative in smaller businesses because you don't necessarily have those resources. Exactly.

Lachy Gray  23:10

We've been hiring recently for a developer and those conversations. We had some candidates who apply it because they specifically want to work for a smaller business because they want to have more autonomy. And the role has more breadth, and they can see what's happening across the business. And they're the kind of people that we want. Yeah, it's not better or worse than working for a big business just different. Yeah. But I think I need to remind myself that I can't You can't really compare small business and large business. So I hope this year that we the topics that we've spoken about, but there are some practical takeaways that people can can implement straightaway and try it It's much easier to do in a larger business.

Karen Kirton  24:03

Yeah, absolutely. And finally, leadership. So this is required in every part of upscaling within a business from selling through the idea that there needs to be a focus on upscaling to supporting employees, having career conversations, hiring for behaviors, retaining our key people. So our conversations this year, they really reflect on what I do within my business and how we can do things differently. How about you looking on

Lachy Gray  24:31

the side? I think it's one of the reasons I do the podcast. You know, I learned a lot from you, from our guests about different ways to do things. And that could be one idea. One thing to try Yeah, and I know you're you're very big on that

Karen Kirton  24:47

the one thing Yep. I agree. I was actually

26:09

reading it's called the gap in the game by Dan Sullivan. And he just reminded me of it because he talks about how you should measure yourself in the game, which is what have I done differently? What have I learned? What have I gotten out of whatever it is, since the start versus measuring yourself against our ideal which is always going to give us a gap.

Karen Kirton  26:32

And I really liked that concept because your ideal is always your head tail and you never might get there. So instead, it's about okay, you know, what do I need to set out to achieve and then let me measure that backwards. Not forwards, so. So takeaways from this year as a whole, you know, I think for me, as we said at the start of the year, the future of work, if we ignore the constant need for upskilling, we're going to be left with a business of employees that have skills that are becoming redundant and therefore we have products and services that might not be needed by the market. So it'll be just a business isn't going to keep running for long in that position. So if we haven't already, it's time to think about how do we get upskilling on the agenda. And I think the other thing is going to get across generative AI. And if you have a quarterly cadence of conversations happening with your people, you know, around their goals, their projects, their personal development, that I think that's going to take any business a long way over the next 12 months. And I'm just fascinated to see what software and what different productivity tools are going to be available. 12 months from now. How about you?

Lachy Gray  27:55

Yeah, I agree. I think we we have to be part of the change. Even if we are fearful of it or unsure how it's going to impact us. It's going to happen, the change is going to happen, whether we are actively involved or not. And I think the upscaling part is, is perhaps even more important than when we started the year because there is so much change. So no one really knows what the impacts are going to be. So we may as well find them out for ourselves. And that might be reading a book about it or having a way with chat JpT and doing the fun way and have some conversations about it. And I think that's really powerful because each of us have a different perspective of things, of course, and we're all using these tools differently. And when we share those perspectives, we can feel connected, and also learn a whole bunch of stuff. And I like the idea of incorporating just going into business rhythms as he suggested. We'll probably start to do this in our teammates. We might just pick a topic or as you suggested, someone goes away as AP skills and something, learn something read something comes back, later conversation about it. Right? Like that's learning. It doesn't need to be a big structured time heavy cost. Heavy initiative. That is the reality of how we're learning now and I think it actually needs to be that way. Because of the speed of change. Yeah. So that's okay. But we just we adapt to it.

Karen Kirton  29:58

I think that's important because just thinking, imagine if you finished a university course on, you know, data science and computer engineering, etc, you know, five years ago, well, you know, what's that going to give you now? Like, it's just, it's just, you know, moved on so much so I think those Not that I'm saying University is not important. Don't Don't kill me but but but I think that just iterative learning has now become super important. So thank you for the year Lachy I’ve really enjoyed it.

Lachy Gray  31:24

Thanks to you, Karen. I've enjoyed co hosting with you. I've learned a lot and I just want to wish everyone a happy holidays and see you in 2024.