Learning and development are essential to remaining relevant in the future of work. Recently, Sonia Malik, Global Program Director, IBM SkillsBuild, Corporate Social Responsibility, recently shared her thoughts on the link between education and longevity in a career. Malik, a leader in learning and development, will open the HR and Future of Work event, where she will focus on skills-based hiring and share her enthusiasm for helping people better themselves by providing greater access to learning.
HREN: IBM is upskilling 30 million external people by 2030. So, tell me about this project.
SM: IBM is making a significant investment in the future of work. We're not trying to get at this by ourselves, we're trying to do it as part of an ecosystem system, as global citizens of the world. We're committed to our ESG (Environmental, social, and corporate governance) framework, and the work with education sets very well in the ethical pillar of the ESG framework. We're trying to get at it from a lot of different ways. One is through skilling, where we've made this commitment of skilling 30 million people by 2030. We’re doing this through partnerships across the globe in 155 different countries.
What do high school students need for scaling so that they're ready for the future of work? What does academia need? We know that our higher education system does not adequately prepare college students for work once they come out. So, how do we address that? Of course, for job seekers, the pandemic highlighted the disparity and work and the fact that people who weren't at the frontline had a hard time being able to find the living wage.
How do we adequately skill and upskill people? There's a focus around the skilling initiative. So, that's one piece of it. How can we influence policies? How can we work with governments to try and really make a difference? IBM was a huge proponent of the Chips Act, which really drives STEM education for people.
Also, IBM Consulting has a talent transformation team that really goes out and works with organizations to try and see how can we look at trends, helping other organizations make that skills transfer. Skills are the constant currency right now. We need to be able to put our people at the center of an organization and figure out how to make an investment in them, so that the business benefits and they benefit personally.
Finally, what we're really focusing on is the whole skills-based hiring initiatives. In the United States alone, more than 50% of our entry-level jobs do not require a college degree anymore. So, how do we drive that dialogue? It's about your skills now and not degrees. We made a commitment to invest $250 million in apprenticeships.
Skills-Based Hiring Vs. Hiring College Grads
HREN: Why do you think there's still pushback about not requiring the college degree? What motivated IBM to take this other approach?
SM: I think the push back is fear more than anything else. I think the challenge that we have is the fact that our systems are not set up to recognize skills. We all use college degrees as proxies for some kind of skills that we think an individual acquires, during the course of that four-year degree or two-year degree program.
The biggest deterrent that we have is that we don't have a skilled ontology that everybody can recognize and everybody understands. The biggest challenge we have at IBM is how to compare someone who has a college degree with someone who doesn't necessarily have a college degree, but has completed a bunch of professional certificates or may have participated in a cybersecurity bootcamp. They both applied for an entry-level cybersecurity analyst’s job. How do we compare these skills?
All organizations, especially in the United States, recognize the fact that access to higher education is limited. It's the very few privileged people who get access to higher education. It's creating a barrier to talent. Unfortunately, we don't have the systems that can translate and recognize skills that have been acquired through alternate routes. We're all grappling with that and trying to solve for it.
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Why Should You Tune into HR and Future of Work?
HREN: What will be the highlights of your session? Why should people tune in?
SM: The highlight will be the conversation around skills-based hiring. It’s also about how to upskill ourselves and our organizations because coming out of COVID the social contract that employees have with organizations has changed. Access to education and education benefits are now among the highest ranking benefits that a potential employee wants when considering a job. They ask, ‘Does my value and mission align with the company that I'm working for?’
There’s a renewed focus on talent development. As an organization, we need to have the infrastructure and systems that provide a learning culture and drive that growth mindset of employees, but also enable the conversations between first-line managers and employees so that they can understand what skills they need to develop for them to be productive and aligns with their general interests and how they want to grow personally.
What's really important is the fact that our skills development is our responsibility. The organization can provide you with the culture and infrastructure. Your manager can provide you with the guidance, but at the end of the day, whether you want to follow it or not is totally up to you.
Lifelong employability is going to come only if you are a lifelong learner. That's it. Period. Your career and education are not linear journeys. The world is changing. The kinds of roles that we talked about five years ago don't exist today.
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In the last week, I have seen so many articles about a prompt engineer. Who is a prompt engineer? I had not heard about a prompt engineer two weeks ago. With the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, there is this new need for a prompt engineer. That spoke to me.
What we really need to do is think about a stock portfolio. We have a diverse mix of investments. Some give us short-term gains. Some are going to take us through retirement. Some are stable and will give us a good return on investment continuously. We must think about our skills like a diversified stock portfolio. We must keep balancing it as the market changes. You must figure out what are some of those durable skills that are going to hold true to you forever? What are some of those short-term skills that you need to complete today's project? What are the skills you need to start developing for your next to next job? It’s not a one-and-done thing. It's a continuous thing.
Don't miss your chance to see Malik's session and others at the HR and Future of Work conversation. It's free to register. Bring your questions and interact with HR Exchange Network.
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