Talent & Economic Mobility for 50M Frontline Workers (Pt 2)
Read Part 1 of This Series here.
This is Part 2 of our deep dive into talent mobility solutions for frontline workers. In Part 1, my colleague Joanne defined the frontline workforce and provided a landscape analysis for tech solutions to support their advancement. In this piece, I’ll synthesize the insights from a roundtable we convened including L&D, HR & DEI enterprise leaders as well as our portfolio companies who serve these workers.
The roundtable started as you’d expect. Participants shared statistics and facts on what the data has revealed to be the shortcomings of solutions in the market while others provided anecdotal experiences of initiatives they have tested to support this workforce. However, the most unique perspective was that of Rodney Ellison. Rodney started his career at Kohler as a gym attendant at Sports Core, the company’s fitness club, upskilled to become a personal trainer, reskilled to work in the ranks of corporate security, made the leap to become a customer service agent, and is now a learning and development specialist at the company.
When asked about the catalyst to his success, he didn’t quote training programs or formal support, but that you have to “Give A Damn” to do it. As I listened to his story, I learned that his secret sauce lies in his charisma, curiosity and expectation that he would receive no assistance at all. Since there was no formal career path from fitness to corporate roles, his career exploration was limited only to the constraints of his imagination. He built relationships in the organization working across roles. He described building a relationship with a Director of Customer Service at Kohler by simply walking by his desk everyday and saying hello while working in his customer service role. Once the barriers of unfamiliarity were breached, that Director began to visit Rodney to say hi and get to know him more organically. Rodney would ask this Director and other leaders about their respective career journeys and the skills needed to get there. He participated in stretch assignments and projects outside of his regular position and was hand selected for his current role in the L&D department.
Rodney’s story is a shining example of outstanding initiative and great employee support/development, but for workers within a company but outside of corporate career tracks this story shouldn’t be such an outlier. Especially when corporate employees aren’t held to the same standards with clear pathways, sponsorship and training at every step. During the hour-long roundtable we didn’t figure out how to bottle Rodney’s secret sauce at scale, but a few actionable recommendations surfaced.
Skills evaluation needs to evolve beyond traditional proxies
Companies currently qualify skills by formal learning — college, certificates, professional job experiences. But what about the learning that people experience outside of these experiences? The empathy built being a caregiver. The task management and level of “Give A Damn” it takes to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. For a lot of entry-level positions, skills are taught post-hire and acquired through doing the work. In Part 1, we discussed some of the companies that are mapping skills (SkyHive, Faethm, Burning Glass, Emsi). As employers use these tools to break down the myriad of tasks and skills needed for roles, they can also be more flexible in evaluating what types of experiences qualify for skills proficiency. If a role requires high interpersonal skills and balancing multiple projects, don’t overlook the compatible skills acquired in hourly jobs that might also fit that description, including hospitality & retail.
When transitioning jobs, skills development is not always linear and employers should prioritize mapping paths for high priority roles.
Employers are used to upskilling talent internally in clear paths from A to B, but it is much more challenging to think about reskilling someone from A to T. Brian Kropp, Group Vice President and Chief of HR Research noted, “If you ask employees the best way to find a new job at their company — most say it is easier to quit and get hired again from the outside versus moving internally because of lack of common understanding within company and especially between HR and managers.” It would take too long for this person to take a linear path to make this move and employers are challenged with trying to map and classify all the skills needed for every role within their organization to determine aligned competencies. Matthew Daniel, a Guild Education employee and former L&D specialist at Capital One, had this recommendation for employers: “Focus first on the five to ten roles in your organization that are most likely to be eliminated and the five to ten roles that are most difficult to recruit for. Think about what those adjacencies are and how to map each. Then get the right programs within weeks or months to qualified employees.”
Designing these initiatives should include the voice of those who have first hand experience.
We realized during our discussion that the group had a perspective that was very detached from the experience of a frontline employee. Someone noted, “It is ironic that a bunch of people with college degrees are thinking about how to eliminate college degrees and focus on skills instead.” It is incredibly hard for employers to develop solutions for frontline employees if they can’t empathize and identify with their problems. It is a great idea for employers to include frontline employees in the development of training and support programs that will help them be successful. This could include a frontline taskforce, advisory committee, or dedicated full-time role on the teams that are developing the career support for these workers.
If you are a founder building something for the frontline, drop us a line!
If you are an L&D, HR or DEI leader at a company interested in engaging in these conversations or exploring innovative tools, please reach out!
We hope to spark new discussions around how to better support frontline workers and keep engaging in these important and meaningful conversations. Email: ebrown@rteducation.com
Thanks to everyone who joined the roundtable and contributed to these findings:
Brian Kropp, Group Vice President and Chief of HR Research, Gartner
Carol Cooley, Chief People Officer, HSS
Rodney Ellison, Learning & Development Specialist, Kohler
Meg Lafave, SVP People and Gov Relations, Envision Health
Wagner Denuzzo, Head of Capabilities For Future of Work, Prudential
Lisa Jiang, Head of Remote Learning, Facebook
Pamela Harvey Brown, HR Leader, BCG
Dan Restuccia, Chief Product & Analytics Officer, Burning Glass
Sham Mustafa, Co-CEO, Correlation One
Matthew Daniel, Principal, Guild Education
Eleanor Cooper, CEO, Pathstream
Helen Adeosun, CEO, CareAcademy
Katie Nielson, Founder & Chief Education Officer, Voxy EnGen
