The DisruptED World of Upskilling for Frontline Workers – Part 1

Hello, everyone. Listeners and viewers. This is Ron Stefanski with yet another episode of disrupt ed. And we've got a great show in store for you today. So buckle up. You're gonna we're gonna have a lot of fun. But we're gonna be talking about some things that are really near and dear to me, and this ginormously disrupted world of work and learning. And so this is kind of, you know, with full transparency, this is gonna be interesting because Jonathan Lau, the co founder and chief operating officer for in stride, an upskilling platform and company, is joining us today, along with his c o o, Michelle, and chief university officer, Michelle Westport, and, this is kinda like a little bit of a, of a reunion for Jonathan and I full transparency we work together. And, I spent, you know, probably five years working very diligently to get the best out of Jonathan. And if and if I couldn't get the best out of him, I at least made him laugh in every one of our interactions. So I'm hoping that that's the case here today. But truly, in stride is doing some extraordinary work that I want you to hear about, but also these two thought leaders I really have their hand on the pulse of what's happening with frontline workers. And so we wanna jump right into this. So Jonathan. Welcome to the show. I'm so glad to finally have you back. No, actually. Thank you. Thank you, Ron, so much for having us. And as you said, it was so exciting to get a reach out from you. Also just to see how active you are in LinkedIn because I saw some of your other podcasts and I was very jealous. And I said, why is Ron not coming coming to me for her podcast? So I'm excited when we finally got it. But I know the one that in all fairness, you reached out to Michelle first. So I will feel that a little bit of that pain, but I've but I'm very excited about this then. And in my friend, for you, Michelle Michelle is the veteran wiser of the two of us. So You are very smart reaching out to her for this. So Michelle, chief university officer, welcome to the show as well, Michelle. Thanks, Ron. It's all roads lead to Jonathan. And I've now taken your place of making sure we, get Jonathan to do what he needs to do. Well, you know, it's funny because, a lot of the work that Jonathan and I do did almost ten years ago now, kinda parallel some of the things you're doing I did find it gratifying. I had to be honest off camera to talk to Jonathan and to hear him say, you know, all those things we were asking you to do as one person all at once like, complete the student experience, recruit the business, bring it all in, and then manage the enrollments. You know, You know how we ask you to do all that? Well, actually, I've now built a company that does all of those things, and I don't have just one person doing it. So with, with hats off to Cengage. They got into the upskilling arena, ten years ago at a at an you know, in an epic time, and we were able to make a huge difference, with the high school offering that we had and some of the upskilling programs that we had. So I wanna turn our attention, Jonathan, and Michelle, to where we're at today. So today these platforms between you and, Gild and, Ed Assist, represent over seven million frontline workers. I think that's just incredible. And I'd like to hear your thoughts about the what looks to the rest of us is just, I mean, explosive growth You know, when we first started talking, when we first launched our own initiative through Clinton Global, we were having know, we were going at this a number of different ways with employees who were reluctant. And then we thought when McDonald's demonstrated their pioneering spirit and started the whole process of of developing meaningful robust upskilling programs. She thought, okay. All of them are, you know, they're gonna build it. The rest are gonna come. And that wasn't the case. And so it's only been recently that we're seeing this uptick, but it's been a big uptick. So love for I'd love for you to share some of that with with us. I'll turn it to our wonderful Chief Wisdom Officer here. Hello, Michelle. Okay. Sure. So, Ron, I think you're exactly right when you say where are we now, but also thinking about where have we come from. So if you sort of look to the right and look to the left and you see all of the disruption, that's happening across higher ed in general, as we shifted to the, you know, really going remote when the pandemic hit to Corporations leaning in to say we actually need specific skills. And, you know, how do we come together at the same time and be a part of this solution. So I'm regularly inspired by the way that Jonathan actually thinks. Which is very systems driven. And as we think of engineering these programs, they not only have to work for our stakeholders, like our university partners, and obviously that's something that I'm near and dear to, but also what happens to that front line as you mentioned, run. How do we create opportunities that really push the boundaries of access? How do we push our corporate partners and our academic partners to make the right policy decisions that help us to, not only accelerate these programs from a launch perspective, but helping them get through the programs to actually complete. So I would say when I think about how we not only structurally set up, in stride, but also the way we think about it more broadly from a social good perspective, and also thinking about where we're going in the future. We're right now in a time and a place whereas a mother of two teenage children, I'm constantly thinking about what happens next when they go to college, what will they be set up for or jobs? Like, will those jobs even be the jobs that we knew when we went to college? But thinking about it from a process perspective, thinking about a pharma systems person, you can actually start to dramatically transform how these programs work, simply because of the way they're set up. So I'll pass it over to Jonathan maybe share with us more about how we thought about, the original structure and what was important to instruct. That would be great, Jonathan. You know, I I I'm not being obsequious now because I no longer report to you, but I think I think Michelle's right. You've been a thought leader for a long time in the space, and you've really thought about it critically in a way that helped build out, the apparatus and the infrastructure to support what employers are trying to do. So when we first started working with employers, it was a one off kind of thing. We're gonna offer this program. You're gonna hire a coordinator. You're gonna handle the enrollments. We're gonna deliver the instruction. But that gets really complicated when you start looking at tuition reimbursement versus, education as a benefit and all that complexity Bags for infrastructure, it begs for technology. Right? And so to your credit, Jonathan, you are preaching this sermon, you know, at Cengage Learning, you know, ten years ago, five years ago. And I think that if you look at the big you know, ed tech companies like Cengage Now, they're really turning their attention to this emerging growing explosively developing world of upskilling. So, yeah, I'd like to hear a little bit about how you're seeing this evolve. Yeah. Well, so first off, I must say, I think, my ego has now ballooned. I think in the past five minutes, I probably got more I need to tell my tea I need to get my team to watch this because I think they want to know to tell me the truth. We're really off the car. And I know Ron used to used to tell me all that, that also all the time. So I actually appreciated that. You were always, and you actually honestly helped educate me and many others around the challenges of the space, right? I think back then, Ron, when we started this, right? We were all quite naive. Right? We -- We were all -- we saw on that. Well, and to be fair, so were the employers? I mean, You know, I remember the conversation we had with Rob Blauber and and Lisa Schumacher at McDonald's. And they said, you know, I said, what what kinda KPIs are you using to measure your retention of employees? And they said, we're not. And then I said, what are you, doing to stratify and and segment out your worker population so you know who has a college degree, who has stackable credentials, who has a who even has a high school diploma. They said we're not. And suddenly, it was like, remember that conversation, we said, how is that? Well, for many, many years, QSRs, in particular, the quick service restaurant industry, they looked at high turnover simply as the cost doing business. And it did take some radical pioneers like Rob and like Lisa to say, you know what? We're spending a hundred and seventy million upwards to educate an onboard employees, and we're not getting ahead of it. You know, we still have a hundred percent turnover. We've gotta be giving them not just onboarding on how to use the equipment in our restaurants, but how do we help educate people for their next job? And I think that's, you know, that's where it's starting to be, to be clear that that employers are much more focused on that in a way they want. So It wasn't just us ideating. I think they they had to come to the table as well. Would you like Absolutely. And I think, you know, what we saw back then, right, as you said, right, many companies were experimenting. Many people thought many companies thought they could do it themselves. Right? And depending on the size, right? Of course, there's always hamburger university and things like that. Right? Even back then. And we just said, you know, and we said, you know what? It's a sales problem. Right? Rongo sell more. Right? And that's what we would cover right now. You mean to say, right? Cause, you know, we were used to a B2C business, where you just sold, right, and you know, learners came. And so as we kind of had the opportunity to kind of live through, obviously, what we tried to do Sengage, but also as we, as we started running the, the skills business at Zengage, which were on you, as you recall, right, which is really the business that was very close to, you know, building up skills that were very employable. So trade, health care, right, cosmetology, and kind of computing and technology, we started seeing more and more of that linkage with the employer. And we kind of rethought around, like, who is the to ultimate customer for an educated person, right, for somebody that's a skilled person. And we started seeing that that is really the employer Right? The employer at the other day is really hiring. Like, I'm hired by in stride, right? I'm employed by in stride, right? Because of the skills that I have, Right? And so part of what we think about is what we think about this is that, you know, as a company, your job, like your people right, are your our actual assets that you have, right? And that as your job as a company is to invest in your assets for your assets to grow, Right? But the disconnect today is that many of that, that linkage doesn't exist. Right? You have As you said, a bunch of a lot of companies that think about people as a cost. Recruiting HR benefits are all costs Right? That you need to pass the method, then you cut, and then you go invest in, like, oh, let me build a new building, or let me build a new factory or let me build this investment technology, and they forget oftentimes that, again, the most important piece that you have in your company is the people that are making the decisions day to day. And so when we think about, you know, when we took a step back and said, why weren't we able to do some of the things that we were trying to do back when we're, you know, brought in by law, when we're trying to do this? And we started thinking about this, you know, notion of Instride. We said, well, there's really kind of four or five things that corporations are really need in order to really rethink how they consider workforce education. One is really being able to go tie investing in people and the business. Right, helping people break that mold. And today, we spend a lot of time talking to a lot of folks in HR, and, you know, you have a lot of folks in HR that are amazing people. But because they have been in a mold of running certain programs or doing certain things, that they don't it's very difficult for them to think about it differently. And that's also very difficult for them to actually be able to elevate and think about kind of that actually there's a cultural change aspect to it. There's actually about a very different approach to doing this. And so how do we tie that? The second thing is they have a very corporations have a very specific approach to buying. And then it'll run reran into us a lot of times. Right? You might get that early conversation and you're starting there, and then it's like, oh my gosh. Like, you have an R. Then suddenly it goes to an RFP, then you gotta do a bake off, then you go into the We have to, you know, business proposal on the business case to be made, and that case could be made. You know, in the case of some way, I've made the business case six times before. You know, to bring them into the the mix and that's because people change and direction changed along with it. So you're absolutely right. How much let me ask you this. I'm gonna stop you there and ask you how much of this do you think has to do with the fact that the talent equation has been completely turned upside down over the last ten years. In other words, you know, for many, many years, it was a selective process. Where where employers had the upper hand and could say, I want this person with these skills and this. And it's really, really been disrupted by the fact that we have a huge challenge, shortage, and we have a huge skills gap there. And that's not a expected based on the research to go away anytime soon. So it seems to me there are a lot of consequences to that. One of which is that Employees are gonna be more empowered. There's gonna be more stuff coming their way. Why? Because companies wanna entice them to stay longer. That that is important because it's harder to get good It's harder to keep good people. But how much of that change in the formula for talent do you think has impacted this whole upskilling and education a benefit movement. I think Michelle was great though. That answered that. Yeah. I mean, look, Ron, when we and I think about what corporations and also what people want is they actually want some level of stability and some level of comfort that what they bring to the table is going to matter. So when we think about it from an employer's side, they wanna know that they they have some sort of progress towards their business outcomes. And If we think about it from an employee's perspective, they wanna know that their company cares about them. They wanna know that There is some ability to continuously learn and evolve and adapt not only your skills, but what the skills of the future actually may be. So when we think about certain themes of learning, it's not necessarily around let me solve problem x, but it's more around How do I learn how to problem solve? What are the things that are necessary to actually perform my job today, but also as that job changes as I get new information as we think about, you know, data as as, you know, an input as we think about those things more broadly, you know, that's really the part of the skills gap that I think will not only continue to grow, until we actually realize that we're not trying to learn new skills, per se that are technical, but we're actually trying to learn how to, learn or how to grow or how to evolve and how to be agile, and that's on both sides of, the table. Right. Well, you were mentioning your teenagers and and where they would end up as they're getting ready to contemplate college or post, secondary pathways And it's interesting because my children are both, have both launched and they're in the workforce. And yet I look back ten years to when they graduated from college, and they both got into jobs that didn't exist when they started college. And I think that's going to be more the case And so I think you're right. It's not necessarily, oh, we're gonna teach you this skill. We're gonna teach you, Java, or we're gonna teach you HTML five or we're gonna teach you these technical skill. I think it's more about the process of how do we teach you to be, a motivated learner and how do we teach you to be adaptive and how do we teach you to understand that as the business changes, you have to change with it, or your utility and your value added to the organization that's gonna diminish over time. And I think that's a big that's for our listening and viewing audience. One of the critical questions, you know. No problem. When I think about it, when I think about that, and I don't know if your children chose the traditional higher education route. Yes. So when we think about a bachelor's degree, for instance, that's fundamentally what a degree is supposed to set you to do is to really holistically think about how to learn in that way. So all of the talk around you know, skills being more important than degrees and, you know, devout, it's really not about how you can generate that skill. It's really more broadly, which is why I didn't stride. We really think about the, the way in which you can actually attain that degree because we do believe that it's still, one of the critical pieces to, you know, social progress. And so you know, when we think about it from a degree perspective and thinking about how to think, that that certainly is an an important part of the way I remembered my, you know, college education and also the way that I share with my children how they should, you know, think about not only incorporating skills that are future leaning towards jobs in the industry. But but to remain, conscious that that a degree is still important. Right. Well, the, you know, the workforce is not monolithic, and there are a lot of different needs. And I think one of the things that has also changed over the last ten years is that many, you know, you have the plagiarism and a bribery scandal in college with the elites. You have all these other things happening, and you now have tuition that in many cases is over the sixty and seventy thousand dollar mark per year. And so you're looking at parents spending a lot of, you know, non taxable dollars to, you know, to support their, children's education. I mean, I'm an old guy. Right? So when I went to school and I went to the University of Michigan, I could get worth twenty hours a week during the school year and full time with overtime in the summer and pay for my tuition. That is no longer even within the realm of possibility. And so what we've done over time is we've we, you know, states have put less money into, public universities. And so we've, you know, they've derisked themselves at the expensive of of students because now students are carrying more the risk of that investment. Right? And so what's interesting now is that employers are, taking over some of that risk and saying, you know, because we covet these skills so much and because we know it's part of our growth strategy, it's it's really a requirement for doing business and and growing. We're gonna make those investments. And ten years ago, companies were not looking at that. They had an inverted pyramid, right, where most of the L and D dollars were going to a very few number of high potential employees that they were going to spring for with an MBA or with an advanced degree. And there was very, very little other than some initial training for anyone else. And so I I think that's a bright spot. Certainly for a lot of employees, but I wanna go back to something you said, Jonathan, and you were talking about how you're focused on the employer and solving their problems. But here's a question, and I'm just gonna play devil's advocate for a bit, but when you guys come in and you're working with the employer. How is the employer assured that they're going to be getting, employee feedback directly? When you come into the mix, when an, you know, an intermediaries in the mix. How do they get feedback from the employee? Yes. This is what I want. Yes. This was helpful. And how does that information in turn, come back to you guys so that the the offerings you have in the portfolio of, programs you have is responsive to their needs. I I guess I'm, you know, that's the one potential area that could be short circuited in this is that we listen to employers at the expense of the employees And just as a cautionary tale, I think of the college textbook industry as a perfect example of that. For many, many years, the big textbook publishers listened to believe their customer was the professor, not the student. And then what happened over time, the cost elevated so much that students started having a voice, and it wasn't a supportive of Publishers voice by any means It was, how do you bring these costs down? Because I don't see the value, and I'm not gonna use a textbook because I don't see that it's worth the money anymore. So I see that as a potential cloud here and help me helping light me about how, and Stride and others are looking at that part So I love that Ron. I also feel like you forgot who I was. Because, you, as you recall, when I joined Zengage, that literally was what we did. We shifted, you know, we actually the only reason I joined Cengage was we were willing to shift from selling to the instructor to the student. Because your point, I fundamentally believe that, you know, we should we should make sure that we are always putting the end user or the beneficiary front and center. And I think you could call the things that we did at Cengage was to do exactly that, right, whether it was to our Cengage unlimited, whether it was to go actually go make sure that we actually took this got the students to pressure their instructors as opposed to having the instructors force the students. Right? And I think that's exactly what we we try to do here as well at Insight is we always wanna make sure that we're keeping, Lavera from the center. But a couple of different, also things that just think about. Right? Just from a first principle standpoint, when we started in stride and when we thought about, as you said, an intermediary, we actually never think of ourselves as an intermediary. We are an enabler. Right? We have always said one of our core values is actually that we are an enabler. And what would one of the things that we enable is the relationship between the employer and the employee. Right? So it is actually not Like, we don't think of these learners as my gosh. These are our learners. These are in strike people. These are no. These are the company's employees. The relationship is between the employee and the employer because it is the employer that is making the strategic decision to invest in their employees to drive, as you said, drive higher engagement, to bring them in, to become career paths, to have them actually grow within the company because that will help the company grow. And part of that is we wanna make sure that that is very aligned. So as a company, when you think about these programs, you're not sitting there going, why am I doing this? I should go cut this. This is a call. They should be thinking, oh my gosh, I have five things on the CEO's priority list. This is one of the five because this is an actual strategic lever that I am pulling. And therefore, this is, like, their the relationship is that they are directly working with and hearing from their employees. Now we are there to make it easy to make it work because we know most of employers aren't aren't experts in this. Right? They aren't here having an engine to actually explain to, you know, build all the materials, the cadence to actually go explain to their employees. What is the program? Why they should go do it? Don't have the expertise to map back what are the skills that adopts certain needs, and how does that link to quality academic programs? Who are all these academic partners? Oh my gosh. So many schools, so many right? And every day a new startup pops up of like, I got a cool learning program, right? They don't have expertise and time to go manage all of that. Right? So what we've done, right, is very specifically stood up and enabling function to allow companies and help companies create and set up these strategic workforce education programs to build that relationship with their employees. So ultimately, the employees are grateful, excited and thankful to the employer, not to in stride, but to the employer And that's how we get, you know, our learners have, and look, we survey our learners all the time. We have a eighty plus percent NPS or eighty plus score on m p NPS score from our corporate partners, and a seventy five, eighty percent or eighty score, from MPS from our learners. Right? So both our learners, we are constantly asking them what can we do, what can we do more, and that part of the value, right, part of the enablement is to go say, our learners get them what they want. And we bring it on up, and we talk to the corporation say, hey, company organization. This is what your learners are saying you need. Do we adjust the program? How do we optimize this? And this is an iterative process. Right? It's every day in, day out, week in, week out month in, month out. We are going through this. We're understanding the data, understanding what learners want, understanding the outcomes, reporting that, and working with our corporate partners to ensure that they have the best program that they can have. Well, I'm curious, you know, in that I've been outside of this whole, ecosystem for some time now. And I'm kinda curious how it looks for the employees. So You know, a lot of times, a lot of workforce development entities and educational entities were going after employers and employees to provide programming, to provide additional education. The one barrier ultimately was always employee. I don't know if I wanna get into this. I don't know if I wanna do that. And I think that's still, probably one of the barriers to, to adoption, you know, to to going into a class. But what are some of the things that are being done now to help foster an appreciation and an appetite for learning? Because I think of education in really stark terms. I think that when we first started talking to corporations like McDonald's and Walmart and all those guys, we were talking to them about, you know, corporate social responsibility. And what we found is that that didn't necessarily track with them. That the that they were really looking for an ROI. And now that these programs are out and about, they're saying an ROI, and they're and they're finding better tools to measure that so that someone's coming through the program, and they're more apt to stay. You know, so McDonald's, people are staying two and a half times longer when they're involved in archway's opportunity. And I'm I'm sure you're saying that too, but how do you how do you take it further? How do you get more employees that may have been arrested in their educational journey? And how do you How do you jump start them and what's the employer doing and what are you guys doing on that on that front? I'll tell you how to work. So Yeah. So one of the things that, you know, we've seen from a motivation side, when we think about learners is The question that they often ask is what will my next job be, or can I actually advance into something? And what we've recognized corporations having is scores of open jobs. And so by being able to point to their open jobs through these programs, we're actually able to connect the dots for both parties. But when we thought about things like career education pathways, it's just simply understanding what education is necessary for me to, launch my career in these particular high in demand roles or the roles that are actually open within my company. And that creates that win win scenario where corporations then have the ability to point to their open jobs, and it helps to motivate that employee to know that if they do this, then there's an opportunity towards career mobility. So so that is one area that we have seen really dramatically change, the way that, learners adopt these programs as as you said. The other area that I would say from a motivation standpoint is really around online learning and flexibility. One of the things that has prevented folks besides the financial aspect Obviously, we know that that is, you know, critical. But the flexibility in being able to make this work in my schedule, the things that you know, are scary to know whether or not I can bite this off or whether or not it's gonna leave me in a time to cook dinner or take my kids to childcare. And those are the kinds of things that really, have changed the way that, you know, learning works as we thought about, online education. So it's no longer, a shame to learn online. It's actually recognized as a way to There's a very viable modality. Right? Exactly. To our listening and viewing audience. This is disrupt edit. We've been talking with the c l, o, o, and founder founder of in stride and the chief university officer, Michelle Westford, and Jonathan about upskilling, and the trend line that been happening in this ginormously disrupted world. We're gonna take a quick break. We're gonna ask you to come back. We're gonna ask you to comment. Follow us feedback. In the comments section. Let us know what you like. Let us know what you wanna hear and push back on us about the things you don't agree with at the same time. Get disrupted with us, and we'll be right back with episode two where we're gonna talk more and pick up where Michelle just left off. What is the future of learning look like for people. Thanks so much for joining us. Come right back to us.