The Changing State of Talent Acquisition
The Changing State of Talent Acquisition cuts through the noise in the crowded world of recruitment marketing, employer branding, workforce intelligence, and AI.
Hosted by Graham Thornton, President of Consulting & Growth at Talivity, this podcast brings you unfiltered conversations with industry founders, practitioners, and the occasional contrarian who's actually doing the work – not just selling you on it.
We're not here to hype the next big thing. We're here to help you separate signal from noise, understand what's actually working (and what's just well-marketed), and make smarter, data-backed decisions about your talent strategy.
You'll hear from TA leaders navigating real hiring challenges, founders building solutions worth paying attention to, and experts who see around corners before the rest of us catch up.
Whether you're navigating the AI arms race, trying to figure out your tech stack, or just trying to hire better people faster – this is the podcast for people who care more about ROI than buzzwords.
The Changing State of Talent Acquisition
#64: Rethinking Upskilling: On Building Resilient Careers in an AI-Driven World
In this episode of the Changing State of Talent Acquisition, hosts Graham Thornton and Martin Predd are joined by Matthew J. Daniel, Senior Principal of Talent Strategy at Guild, for a deep dive into the evolving nature of skills and career development. Matthew shares insights from his diverse background in learning, talent development, and in-house strategy, challenging the notion of a rapid "half-life" for skills and advocating for a more nuanced approach to skill-building in today’s fast-changing market.
Topics include:
- The Durable Skillset vs. the Half-Life Myth: Rethinking the idea that all skills quickly become obsolete and emphasizing the enduring value of fundamental abilities like communication and problem-solving.
- Building a Skill Portfolio: How to strategically invest in skills as long-term career assets rather than viewing them as fleeting data points.
- AI’s Role in Upskilling: Exploring where organizations are on the Gartner hype cycle for AI and practical approaches to integrating AI into talent development without over-reliance on outdated models.
- Practical Strategies for Talent Development: From auditing current AI usage among employees to designing learning strategies that address both immediate needs and future capabilities.
Join us for a candid conversation that bridges the gap between HR strategy and real-world application in the era of AI, and discover actionable insights to help your organization and employees stay ahead of the curve.
Matthew J. Daniel, Senior Principal of Talent Strategy, Guild
Welcome to the Changing State of Talent Acquisition, where your hosts, graham Thornton and Martin Cred, share their unfiltered takes on what's happening in the world of talent acquisition today. Each week brings new guests who share their stories on the tools, trends and technologies currently impacting the changing state of talent acquisition. Have feedback or want to join the show? Head on over to changestateio. And now on to this week's episode.
Speaker 2:All right and we're back with another episode of the Changing State of Talent Acquisition podcast. Super excited for our next guest. I think a logical next step in our conversation flow to start the year. Happy to welcome Matthew Daniel, senior Principal of Talent Strategy at Guild. Matthew, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3:Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, I'd love to set the stage here by having you tell us a little bit more about yourself. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about your career journey, Matthew, and what led you to your current role at Guild, and maybe what professional topics and interests really occupy most of your time currently?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I come from the world of learning and talent development. It's literally the first job right out of college that I had was in that space, and I worked for a fantastic company, gp Strategies, that did a ton of learning, outsourcing and programs like that, and it gave me a chance the first six or seven years of my career to just float around to public sector and private sector, oil and gas and healthcare, tech and lots of different organizations, what they were doing, how they were doing it. It felt like a six or seven year rotation program, internship of like getting to see and do it in so many places. And then I think that you know, hot take here is that consultants who've actually never lived inside the business sometimes the advice they give doesn't always connect with reality, and so I had a couple of those moments I remember in particular. Nike was a customer of mine and I said something one day and across the table they looked at me like I had five eyes and I thought, oh, okay, they're never going to go do this, like I just stumbled into something I shouldn't have said and I decided I wanted to go in-house and learn what it was like to actually be the person who has to get initiatives over that hill and get people to buy into it. And so I went in-house at Capital One, had just crossed into the Fortune 100 and spent six years there, which is where I really learned. If the audience that you have is mostly talent acquisition, then those are the people I really started to work with.
Speaker 3:When I was there, I started to think cross-functional. I got outside of the bubble of learning and did that for six years. It was great, did some of my own consulting, where I was learning like go to market in addition to building up those proficiencies and understanding of HR, and then finally, five years ago, landed at Guild, which has been the journey of a lifetime. I've been here from the really early days. Just a handful of customers back then, and now a really large number of partners was what we call them employee partners or customers that we work with and getting to experience a real focus. I built out our career, mobility, coe, and so this is where I feel like I really intersected with your world, which is, essentially, if we're building talent, if that's the goal of what we're trying to do, but we haven't built the connection into our folks in talent acquisition, then it all falls apart, then we don't get to recognize the impact, we don't get to change lives, we don't get to take those skills and apply them into the business, and so it really starts spending a lot of time on how does this look? How do we do it in an equitable way? How do we have real impact? How do we think about frontline employees as a talent pool for more advanced roles inside the organization that we're struggling to recruit, those kinds of things? And so really started. I found myself a talent acquisition mentor who I just asked, barraged with questions day after day, and started working with TA teams inside the customers.
Speaker 3:And anyway, what I spend my time on right now, my role at Guild is essentially to almost do professional advisory work like professional services and advisory work to Guild's perspective and existing employer partners and really do research Right now guild's perspective and existing employer partners and really do research. Right now we're in the middle of a body of research around roi. Uh feels like there's so much pressure on finances. Folks want to know this investment that I'm making is it worth it? How am I going to account for it? And so we're doing a bunch of research on that that will start to formulate into some papers and uh articles and podcasts and that kind of stuff. So so that's my job is essentially to research what's happening in the market for Guild, make sure Guild understands that, learn deeply about it. I'm at a conference for CLOs right now whether they care about what's working and then take that back to Guild and formulate frameworks and research that really meets the needs of the market. That's my job. That's why I spend so much of my time on here.
Speaker 4:Wow. Well, I'm also thrilled to have you. I know Graham mentioned that. Quite a backstory.
Speaker 4:We have a lot of folks on the podcast, matthew, but not all of them come to us through the route that you took. I was kind of laughing when you were talking about consultants, because that's sort of the hat I've worn most of my career and I can definitely relate to the feeling of, as is so often the case, a strength can also have sort of the opposite polarity or an Achilles heel. So consultants can be valuable because they're, for the same reason that they can be, limiting, because they have an outside perspective. But yes, I've definitely sat in board meetings and said something that sounded really stupid, just because I'm not in the organization living and breathing it. So I definitely could relate to that.
Speaker 4:Well, there's a lot we want to talk about and you know AI is, I think, everyone's topic favorite topic these days.
Speaker 4:But before we get into that, I thought we could kind of ease into it by way of a conversation about this idea of skills having a half-life. I'm not really sure where that originated. You could probably tell us who first sort of coined that term or this idea, but the idea is that we live in a new economy, a new labor market. In our parents' generation or even 20 years ago, you might get a college degree and it would last you most of your career, if not all of your career, with those same skills. And now we're in a new normal where you might learn something and I think the stat is irrelevant or outdated in two to five years, which is really just terrifying, I think. If you're an employee, so maybe you can help us unpack that. Where did that come from? I know you don't quite agree with it. I think you notoriously called this a half lie and I wonder if you could just tell us more about your perspective on that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm happy to. Let me start with where I find complete alignment, which is that the pace of change is high. We all feel that If you've been in the workforce I've been in the workforce for 20 years and certainly it feels in the perspective of today like things are changing very quickly. That data point actually comes from a misquote of someone who gave congressional testimony in like 1982, right before I was even born. That's actually where it comes from, but it makes for really good marketing. That's actually where it comes from, but it makes for really good marketing. And so there are lots of folks, especially on the learning content side, who've taken that, grabbed hold of it and reprinted it over and over and over again, but you just have Lightcast on. Those folks did a really good report not too long ago. That's a lot more concrete about how many of the skills in job postings have changed based on what they were a couple of years ago. Here's why it matters to me.
Speaker 3:I don't much care about talking about the fact of the origins. I find it amusing. I think the real challenge that I have is that you end up in a world if you believe that the half-life of skills is two and a half years if it's technical, or five if it's longer then you start to believe you have to live in this perpetual state, especially if you're in the HR space of like generating content and getting it in front of people and micro-learning. And the fact is, one of the most critical skills you ever built was communication and if you learned how to do that really good, learned how to do it really well when you're 20, 21, 22, that thing sticks with you. Now you may learn new modalities for that to go into. Those do change. Right, it's Slack and before it was Slack you were using DMs at work and whatever that was. But ultimately it matters because also the way that I invest skills, the way I think about skills and hopefully my talent acquisition friends will get this too is that there are skills that are more valuable than others. And this is where I think it gets scary is if you imagine that all skills are just dissipating in value perpetually all the time, then you will treat every skill development as if it's the same.
Speaker 3:But whether you're acquiring a skill or building a skill, if you're making an investment in something that's a really durable skill, it's not falling off a resume in three years. It's not falling off a job posting in five, like the ability to communicate matters, being a really good problem solver when you're 25 years old and investing the time and energy into building that skill. It's worth it. And the way I think about that is like there are programs that you are or skills that you built in college. They actually matter.
Speaker 3:There's a reason we can all argue about the cost of college right now because it's crazy, but also we know that there are fundamental skills of writing, presenting an idea, defending an idea that we developed in school that are critical for the future, and so some of that money was definitely worth it. Did we learn how to use Slack? No Like. Did we learn how to use the latest AI in a TA platform, an ATS? No Like. That's not what we learned, but also we learned these like super fundamental, durable skills that do matter.
Speaker 3:And then the other side of that is, yes, there are skills that are constantly changing your processes and systems around you, and so in that way, yes, you do have to keep the right flow of constantly learning, refreshing, making sure that you're ready, but we have to think about those skills, the precision of how we know who has what skill and how we build skill.
Speaker 3:It has to have more nuance than just oh, all the skills are falling apart. Right, we have to think about it as in building a portfolio, building a 401k, building an investment. You have financial advisors who tell you build long-term in this mutual fund and keep this much money in checking and savings, and here's what you can have in different formats. And, you know, do these investments in international and it's riskier. Right, you need that same thing from a skill portfolio. You need things that are really solid, worth the investment, sit on the shelf and accrue value. And then you got to also keep some skills that are constantly in the bank, changing all the time, and just think in a little more complicated way about what skills mean to us.
Speaker 4:Thanks for unpacking that a bit. I think that I had no idea about the backstory and I know that's probably not the most interesting part here, but I would never have guessed that that originated based on a misquote from 1982. So it's a good reminder to read headlines and click-baity kind of titles with caution. I think there's a lot you said that I found interesting. But I love this idea of a skill portfolio because I do think when you see these stats whether we're talking about skills, half-life or some other sensationalist take it can kind of seem like fear-mongering or panic-inducing.
Speaker 4:If you're just a regular employee, you know, and you're like boy I just I might have $100,000 in student loan debt to acquire these skills.
Speaker 4:You're telling me, in five years it's gonna be worthless, and so I just think that it's refreshing to see some nuance to the conversation.
Speaker 4:And you know, anecdote is not data, of course, but you know, as a counterpoint to this idea that skills dissipate in value so quickly were relevant, and I took a job when I was in my early 20s and this is the story that's common for a lot of people they take an initial job because they have a certain set of skills and then somehow they build a career on it, because it's just much easier to iterate on those skills than it is to try to acquire completely different or new skills. And I think that just speaks to you know and again it's just an anecdote, but I think it speaks to this idea that what you were saying, that skills some skills do are durable. And, yes, maybe some of the little bells and whistles that ornament the skills, if you will change over time, but a lot of people have skills that are durable that will serve them for their entire careers in some format. Is that a fair way of describing?
Speaker 3:it. It is, and actually you said a word a couple of times that I want to key in on. You said the word career and one of the things that's really interesting. Again, I work in a company that is focused on how do we talk to employers. Guild's business model is essentially B2B2C right, we are connecting and building relationships with employers, and that unlocks a relationship directly with consumers or learners, and in that we know that there are messages that are different that we need to give to the business.
Speaker 3:The business is hyper-focused on skills, but look, normal human beings, the people who work at your company, aren't going home sitting around the table and talking about skills. Right, in the world of marketing, sometimes what we do is latch onto language that's already there. Sometimes we try to incept a new term into the market. I think this is one of those areas where HR, frankly, has been trying to convince the world that skills mean a thing. But that's not the way normal humans talk.
Speaker 3:When they go home and sit at the dinner table, they talk about careers, they talk about how much they make, they talk about where they want to go and, marnie, what you were saying like, we think in terms of our careers, we don't think in terms of skills and sometimes we just over-index on this level of precision that, frankly, doesn't resonate with our employees and their employee experience. They feel absolutely lost and overwhelmed, and so do we need to build skills, 100% Everything that we're doing. We should do that way, we should acquire the right skills, but the way that we talk about that is in terms of the career that you're getting if you come work here, the career that you're getting if you enroll in these programs and develop yourself, and so we have to learn the difference between talking to each other as HR professionals and the science behind what we do and, ultimately, how we talk to our employees and the language that resonates with them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's interesting. It makes me a little bit worried about how I want to phrase this next question Matthew, right?
Speaker 3:Never a good thing to do to a host on a podcast. My bad my bad, I take it all back.
Speaker 2:Great, all right. So we've talked a lot about the half-life and skills. We're talking a lot more about employee development, career development. I wanted to get us to you know a conversation about, you know, ai and its impact on skills and upskilling the workforce. You know, but, however, however, like I wonder how I want to phrase this now.
Speaker 3:So you know, let me let me yeah, you're going to take a stab at it, but I'm going to say it. For us in HR, skills is a great way to talk about it, right? Skills in this format, skills are data points. They're ones and zeros. They actually don't mean much and we should talk about it. We should just quit freaking talking to employees about it as if it's normal to them, because they're just what the hell? But I'm sorry, go with your question. It's a great topic for us.
Speaker 2:I think that's great. Well, fair enough, so I'm going to use it anyway. So, all right, we're talking a lot about AI. There are past guests in here too, and I think you've written a lot about upskilling workforces for an AI future, right, and so I think there's probably a case to be made that we are in what Gartner you know what Gartner, or you know any any of these folks would call you know a trough of.
Speaker 2:You know the hype cycle, right. So when you know new technology kind of loses its, you know initial, you know excitement, and so you know, I guess, a couple things. You know we've seen the cycle repeat a lot, like, maybe more recently with, you know, digital transformation in our space. Maybe a good place to start is, like you know. Can you kind of give a little bit of an overview of you know what is? You know what do we mean by a hype cycle, gartner's hype cycle, and you know. Then I'd love to just, you know, dive in a little bit more about, like, if AI is entering this trough period, what can we learn or how should we be thinking about like AI and upscaling, you know, through that lens of a Gartner hype cycle, for example?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, all right. So the Gartner hype cycle it's been around a number of years. It essentially it's a graph left to right and a new technology or new idea comes on the scene. Josh Burson has a great one on skills-based organization that he shares. The hype cycle and where we are and what provides value, I think in this AI, we are, I think, starting to come down into what they call the trough of disillusionment, which I think is, you know, sounds really sad, and I think it is a little sad because you just think, oh, this is going to change everything. And I think what's interesting is AI, more than other things, like the trough isn't quite as deep, honestly, it does.
Speaker 3:If you're an AI adopter, if you're using Gemini or GPT or your internal, you know whatever that looks like that's behind the firewall, like you've probably started on a daily basis. You've got that tab open all the time and you're like using it to help you write, to synthesize, to summarize, right. So it has changed things, but also you got some things to learn about how to use it. It has pretty significant limitations and it doesn't get as smart as you want it. My own experience is like oh, you're telling me it learns as it goes, but it sure doesn't feel like it's getting that much smarter in the responses that it's giving me. I have to continually prompt and push and prompt and push to get the answer that I need, and so that's what we call that trough of disillusionment, where folks start to feel like, yeah, this is not changing everything quite the way that I expected, and then from there it kind of goes back up into they call it the slope of enlightenment and that's kind of where solutions are found and ecosystems start to expand things, start to really talk to each other, work together, and then it levels off into the plateau of productivity where that technology or innovation becomes mainstream. If you haven't looked at it, you should.
Speaker 3:The question that you asked, which is essentially what do we do in this moment? And I'm of the persuasion that organizations who actually are doing the right amount of skill building and infrastructure building and laying the groundwork, I think those are the folks that, as the technology actually does get better, as AI is built into more of our platforms, or as we have the ability, you know, the engineers that we have behind the scenes are building AI even deeper into homegrown products, etc. I think the organizations who hide from it. And literally there was somebody on a stage yesterday who had just come from one organization to another and she said you know, we ran away in the organization I just came from, you weren't allowed to touch it. Now everybody was touching it on their personal devices, but we weren't allowed to touch it from the company perspective. And then she goes to the next company and that company says no, you know, explore it, see what happens.
Speaker 3:I think the difference between those two companies is that they're both going to find that it has its limitations for day-to-day use, but one group is going to be in the process of finding ways to use it that make the world better and get talent that actually builds those skills, and the other is going to get absolutely caught flat-footed by competitors in the market whenever it really comes out.
Speaker 3:And I think that is the difference between one and the other.
Speaker 3:Our CEO at Capital One used to talk about this concept of a loaded spring and he would say look, I know what we're doing building this infrastructure and digital and all of these things. It doesn't feel like it's having that much of an impact yet, but I promise what we're doing is we are storing energy in a loaded spring and at some point, the trigger is going to come along and this energy is going to be released into the market, and you're going to see it in our stock price. You're going to see it in the products that we build, you're going to see it in the customer experience, and I really think, in this AI moment, what we're doing should be building skills. Even if we're disappointed, even if it doesn't work the way we thought, even if those product companies that told us all those HR platforms were going to revolutionize our world and they don't it's still good to build the skills right now, because when it does get better, you're going to have talent that's ready to build for the future. That's truly what I believe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I, I, uh, you know, I feel like, you know terms like trough, of uh, disillusionment, you know, you remind me of, uh, something that you'd hear on a severance episode. Uh, you know, one of the basement of a piece, but, um, no, I mean, I, I think that's great and, like you know, I'm kind of reminded. I think there's an interview with, you know, jeff Bezos. You know, and you know, talking about how, like hey, like, when we invented you know, electricity it was, you know, the initial goal was, like hey, we just wanted to put a light bulb, you know, on in the house. And so, like hey, electricity was, like you know, quite literally invented. So, you know, we could, you know, turn on a light bulb.
Speaker 2:And you know, you think about the impact of electricity today, you know it's gone far beyond turning on a light. And, you know, I think, when we think about AI, you know, yeah, sure, you know we might be in a little bit of a lull. You know you get frustrated that you pop something into an algorithm, but I think you know he's comparing AI to, you know, the advent of electricity, right, and like hey, like we're, you know, so, you know, so early on that you know the companies that are, you know, embracing AI with more of a, you know future-focused. You know mindset recognize that there's a pretty big shift coming. You know that we're all bracing for right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, this is where my brain goes to. You know, I'm not advocating for anybody to create risk in their organization by layering AI on you know, social security numbers or customer data that shouldn't be exposed. There have to be rules, there has to be a sandbox, there has to be governance Like let's not be stupid. You know, certainly we have those kind of things at Guild. We're making sure we protect data, but ultimately I think you do have to create a sandbox, otherwise that data is going outside of enterprise, right, and folks are going to play with that data, no matter how many times you tell them not to. They're going to go pull up Gemini or chat GPT and they're going to try and figure out just how far they can go playing with that tool and how it can help them, but ultimately, you know, create risk to your organization.
Speaker 3:I think I have a stat here that folks say see, this was a JFF study last year 88% of employees aren't confident their employer will support them in understanding AI. You've got the trust survey that comes out every year from Edelman and what it says is like I am nervous in this world about whether or not I get support, and what it says is like I am nervous in this world about whether or not I get support. So I think this is where employers have an opportunity to say no, we're committed to you learning, even if we're not fully committed to baking it into every part of the way our business functions. Yet.
Speaker 4:Yeah, well said. I think you've made an interesting point in a few different ways here, which is that so often we're thinking from the lens of employers. I mean, we are talent acquisition folks after all, so that's not surprising. But I think one of the knockout effects of that is that we can be speaking to our employees and to prospective talent in language that just does not apply to what their experience is at all.
Speaker 4:You made the point earlier about this idea of skills versus career and here, specific to AI, I think there's something similar going on. If you're an employer that takes this posture of well, we got to find the people the employees have already figured out AI and hire those people, rather than taking an approach of it's. Actually the onus is on us as the employer or even bigger than employer, as an industry, to cultivate the skills and lead the way for all these great people and all the great talent that currently exists that may not have all of the skills that they need. So I think that's a breath of fresh air in an industry where sometimes it can feel like we're putting too much of the weight on the employee. And then the other thing that I think is interesting, that I'd love to get your perspective on is. I mean, I don't remember where this came from either, but there's a lot of folks employees that are already using generative AI in some fashion.
Speaker 4:I think we've kind of hinted at that in passing here, but I think that raises interesting questions. It's sort of you know, as TA leaders, we can be so future focused, like we're all waiting, we're in this trough or loaded spring or however you want to talk about it, waiting for some big moment to happen, and then you see stats that say it's kind of already here in some way. A lot of employees are using a chat, gpt or another generative AI engine to assist them in their jobs, and often without employer knowledge, oversight, guidance structure or any of that. I just wonder if you could expand on that a bit and help us understand. If you are an organization where that may be the case, where do you begin? I mean, do you have to start by just auditing how the tools are already being used, despite your knowledge, or where would you start?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the stats are really fascinating in how AI is getting used. You have greater than 40, 50, 60 percent, depending on who's asking what's happening. And I think, if I am an employer right now and Guild actually did this with our own employees, which I appreciated they went out to the population, they gave us an anonymous survey you didn't have to like there was none of our data on the back end and they said how are you using it today? Like, in what ways? What are the platforms that you're using? How often are you using it? What are the ways that you're using it? Because I think, as humans, we all have a little bit of agency and we all all know our jobs and we all know what we're interested in, and so, for those of us who are kind of going to lead in this, we're going to find a way to do it, no matter what, and so actually asking your employees where they're using it, what they find interesting in it, and giving that anonymity to them so that you can get honest answers, is a great way to start. Ask your talent, what's happening right now.
Speaker 3:I think the second piece is you've got to work on a learning strategy for your existing talent. This is where I think all of us over-index. Your job in talent acquisition is to buy talent. My job in talent development is to build it, and I think the truth is it's a little bit of both. Right, we need those, we need that bot talent from the market that can serve as some leaders. But, honestly, if what you're trying to do is acquire AI talent on the market, that's some freaking expensive talent right now Hard to find. That posting is going to be open for a while. You're going to be disappointed when they get behind the firewall anyway, because it's fairly limited how far they could have gone right now, and so I think this is a lot of a building, and so we worked on a bit of a framework to say, ok, how do I subdivide the employees that I have and the kinds of programs that I'm building?
Speaker 3:You know one category we talk about AI fundamentals, and this is really, you know, focusing on AI literacy, ethics, the implications of AI, and this is essentially something you know everybody should have frontline employees or lead career leaders and executives. And then you have AI practice, and this is really about how do I apply AI to my job, no matter where it is, and that's really everybody, up and down the spectrum of the organization. And then you have this next category, which is like AI expertise, builders of AI, those who are figuring out how to apply it within the technologies in the business environment. And then you have this fourth category we talked about is like AI for leaders, and this is where you're thinking of I've got to make decisions about our business strategy and how AI bakes into that, and so if you start to think about the learning that you're creating, the skills that you're building in your organization, and you thoughtfully engage those audiences, you can build out a whole range of you know.
Speaker 3:Is it just an AI literacy program you put in front of folks, or are you doing you know MIT has implications for business strategy certificate in AI, and so you can start to map some of the programs that you need to make available for your own employees and then those places where you can let them explore. But whatever you do, ask the question of what they're thinking about already. Don't try and build a fire. Follow the smoke is the way that I would think about it and support your employees in applying that creativity and ideas exactly where they are right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, matthew. So I think this is a great piece and I'm going to ask you to unpack a little bit more. So personas is something that's near and dear to Marty's heart. We talk about an employer brand side too, and I think there's probably some public facing aspects of you know what you just described. I think you know you'd probably agree that you know, adopting AI and building out these personas, as you kind of just described them, is probably not a one size fits all. You know proposition. You know, proposition, you know. But I'm curious, like in the personas that you kind of just described, you know, do you think those same buckets exist at most organizations? Or, you know, does it tend to be more? You know highly specific, you know, at each organization. You know, just in general, like help, you know, help us kind of unpack this persona construct and like you know how you'd say, you know, you know you recommend HR leaders get started with identifying. You know you recommend HR leaders get started with identifying. You know, and sort of you know operationalizing. You know these personas.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think you do have to start if I'm saying where do I focus my energy? Let me start with the first question you asked. Yes, I think we intentionally built that framework so that it could apply across as many organizations as possible, and so those are broad enough. You could, within your organization, really start to segment up in more detail who those folks are and what programs apply to them. I think this is also where I would encourage people to be really thoughtful about where you try and build content versus where you get good stuff off the market, because building for all of those audiences, frankly, you're probably not going to have that expertise and that new talent you just hired in off the market. You don't want them building learning assets for others. You really want them doing the job so that they're bringing AI into your products and solutions. But yeah, so hopefully those buckets make sense to a lot of people. The second part of your question is within these, maybe. Where do I focus? Where do I start? I think that this is you heard me say it, but I believe in.
Speaker 3:There are times that I like to build a fire and get everybody excited. There are also times where I'm just smart enough to follow the smoke, and I think this is a place where you follow the smoke. And I think this is a place where you follow the smoke. You figure out where the business need is most likely to drive adoption of AI tools and you go to that place. You don't focus on skilling up the entire tech org on AI. You figure out who's orientated around products. You figure out who your leader and executive is, who's going to be on that bleeding edge, who your leader and executive is, who's going to be on that bleeding edge. You start with them as your audience.
Speaker 3:You look at, you know, one of the ones that I just feel pretty strongly about is we're going to tend because this is what employers do in general is not always build the skills that we need in our frontline employees. To imagine you know what does a retail associate mean with like understanding how to use a chat, gpt, and yet, at the same time, what I'd say is God, wouldn't it be amazing if you went to your local hardware store and they could, for the questions that they don't know how to answer, they could turn around and pull up this tool with an employee and show the value that they add to say hey look, my local big box hardware store is a place that I can trust to help me solve this problem, even if they don't know the answer. So, and here's another stat for you Only 14% of frontline employees say they've received any type of training on AI skills. That comes from BCG last year, and so I think there is intentionality we need to put behind it.
Speaker 3:Here's the danger Don't stop where you start, right, so start somewhere. Get some wins, start to build those skills, but also figure out how you're going to transition beyond that first set of personas, that first audience that you're going to build with, so that you're expanding access as much as possible. So you have a talent pool to pull from in lots of different ways.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I think that's just what we're short on in the industry often is practical knowledge about where to begin, and I think you've given people some really great pointers. So thanks for that, matthew. I mean I feel like we could chat with you all day. I know we're a little bit short on time. Maybe to sort of close here, we could zoom out a bit.
Speaker 4:One of the questions that I have for a lot of folks at this moment, as we think about AI, is it's very natural to want to look back and use old models, old constructs, old frameworks for understanding this moment. We talked about Gartner's hype cycle. It's not a new concept. We've seen it in different places, but there is a sense and I'm no expert that AI is fundamentally different than some of the other technological advancements that have occurred, and I think the only thing that we know for certain is that no one knows for certain how this is going to play out. So if someone tells you that all the knowledge workers are going to be obsolete in five years, it's a pretty good sign that you're talking to a liar.
Speaker 4:No one has a crystal ball right. Nonetheless, it's an important question. I think it's a question that's on employers' minds. It's a question that's on employees' minds, and I guess I'll ask you to look into your crystal ball. I mean, what probability maybe is the way of getting at it, rather than yes or no? But what probability do you think you would assign to the possibility that we're going to see some kind of exponential sea change curve in terms of some kind of super intelligence that really could obliterate knowledge work in a big way that would not be overcomable. Is that a thing?
Speaker 2:that could happen.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't love the term obliterate knowledge work.
Speaker 2:I think that's the scariest thing.
Speaker 3:I feel like this makes me want to do severance right, like let's cut the in from the out.
Speaker 4:No.
Speaker 3:I think what do I put the odds at? Here's my bottom line. I'm hopeful. I do think that the staffing models that we have right now are going to fundamentally change. I just think the companies who are further along in this journey with AI what they're telling us is this is not a technology that you essentially layer on to your existing processes. This is something that you actually have to go back to the whiteboard and redesign the way that you work, when you do it, y'all.
Speaker 3:If we don't think that's going to fundamentally shift jobs, responsibilities, tasks, that it's not going to impact like shaving off work, I think you're foolish, right? I think you're not paying attention if that's what you're saying. So what is the chance that it has a pretty significant impact on roles in the knowledge economy? I'm putting it at like 40, 45%, I guess, if I were going to put a number to it. So it feels real enough to me that we need to prepare for it. I think this is a moment where we need to be as clear with the employees who work for us and who are coming to work for us as we can right now, and we need to say look, things are changing, they're going to change, and if you are not willing to learn right. The quote that's going around everywhere is you know you're not going to be replaced with AI, but you are going to be replaced by somebody who uses AI, and I think that is the sentiment that we need to communicate clearly, which is don't live in fear that your job is going to change or the AI is going to take things away. Be the designer of your destiny. Where it's possible, take agency and figure out some of the ways that AI comes into your work and or how your work can be designed, so that you're not sitting there surprised when somebody shows up and says you know, it turns out this was a series of tasks. 60% of your job is actually really easy to do with agentic AI and so we're going to turn loose on that and we don't need you anymore. I think there are some folks who are definitely going to get that message. The folks who aren't going to be surprised are the ones who are actually figuring out ways, trying to influence AI, using it in their personal life and, frankly, more than anything else, just willing to learn as it comes, willing to sit down and wrestle with it. That's what we get paid for and I do think work is going to be. This makes things more challenging. I mean, I'll bring up like one other interesting fact. I don't know if you all saw the press release Maybe it was last week, week before where Workday is adding the capability of tracking agents in the same way that you would like track employees.
Speaker 3:They are, and I was wondering who was going to be out first on this right. Were we going to do that from HR? Were we going to do that from IT? You know we should think about our jobs as maybe hiring and training agents, tracking agents, making sure the agents play well in the HR space. So look, it's coming, it's going to have a real impact and the question is not, you know, should I prepare it's? What are you doing today to get ready for it? Are you learning, investing in yourself, building your own talent, helping the people that you lead? Build those skills, creating a sandbox so they can play, so you can lead on the future, instead of getting run over by?
Speaker 4:it, love it, love it. Thanks for bringing us back towards the light. I was laughing with Graham in our backroom conversation because on our previous episode I closed it with a question about whether the American dream is dead, which really took us into a dark place, and then today I tried to close it with whether AI is going to obliterate all knowledge work. So I appreciate you ending us with a message of hope, and I guess I got to do some work personally here to figure out why I'm in such a dark place. Grant, do you have anything to say?
Speaker 2:to close yeah, be the change you want to see in the world, marty. You know, I think I think you know. The easiest question, I think, is this one Matthew, so loved our conversation. Where can people find you online? Yeah, loved our conversation.
Speaker 3:Where can people find you online? Yeah, linkedincom, slash in slash. Matthew J Daniel, that's where to find me, and you will find me at Guild, at events, at podcasts. You'll see all that posted up there and I would love to connect with you directly there and teach me something about talent acquisition.
Speaker 2:I love it, love it. Well, thank you, matthew. We'll link everything in the show notes, of course, and I know you write a lot of content too, so you know some great articles. If you just Google, matthew, you'll see them all over the internet. So thanks again for joining us, matthew. It's been a great conversation, all right. Thanks for tuning in. As always, head on over to changestateio or shoot us a note on all the social media. We'd love to hear from you and we'll check you guys next week.