As a student at the University of Nebraska, I sold ads for the Daily Nebraskan student newspaper in Lincoln. The paper has been around since the nineteenth century and counts Pulitzer Prize–winning author Willa Cather among its editors. I was proud to be a member of the staff while attending classes. School and work were one.
A local jeweler was one of my accounts, and I would pause my studying for a test or assignment and call on the owners to sell and develop the next ad. It forced me to think about the wider world, the small businesses in our community, and the needs of customers. Working and studying taught me time management and perseverance. I had to balance schoolwork, social life, and work—all good preparation for my future career. But now, having spent my career in the insurance industry, I know how hard it is to forecast the future.
The art and science of prediction is the foundation of our industry. How likely is it that you will get sick, or that your house will flood, or that you will be laid off from your job? At Guardian we have teams of experts working full time to answer these questions. Even though we have access to cutting-edge technology, a vast amount of data, and deep institutional knowledge, predicting the future can still be difficult.
Today’s students face a similar challenge. We live in an increasingly unpredictable world. Skills that were irreplaceable just a few years ago have become irrelevant. Industries that didn’t exist at the beginning of the decade now dominate the global economy.
In the midst of such rapid change, students are struggling to forecast which skills they’ll need in the future. That’s in large part because most formal skill building is front-loaded. Workers spend roughly the first two decades of their lives learning and the next four or five building a career. If the skills they learn in school become obsolete, workers don’t have many opportunities to learn their way back to stability. And with new technologies disrupting the market, this threat isn’t always so far off.
To create a flexible, dynamic workforce of the future, we’ll need to reimagine our education system. We’ll need to break down the artificial barrier between learning and working. We’ll need to bring the classroom into the workplace.
Historically, companies have done much to help accomplish this goal. At the turn of the twentieth century, for example, General Electric invested in in-factory classrooms and training rooms to help young workers gain proficiency in the complex technical trades of the day.1 Moved by a similar impulse, in the 1950s, General Motors built a network of centers across the country to keep its employees up to date on the skills and information necessary to stay competitive in the automotive industry.2
The business leaders at these companies were doing right by their employees and no doubt took some pride in that. But they were not purely philanthropists. They were motivated by business interests, and they became giants in their industries because they understood the immense benefits of equipping workers with new skills in a rapidly shifting economy—of bringing the classroom into the workplace.
But in recent decades, the prevalence of on-the-job training has declined. According to an analysis by Wharton professor Peter Cappelli, in 1979 young workers received an average of one hundred hours of training a year. By 1995 they were getting fewer than eleven. And by 2011, workplace training had all but disappeared: according to a study by Accenture, only 21 percent of American workers had reported receiving any formal training from their employers during the last five years.3
Fortunately, this trend has shown signs of reversing. Companies young and old, from Google and Amazon to AT&T and IBM, have begun to increase their investments in skilling. Spurred by technological advancements that make rigorous training both more feasible and more critical, some companies have begun to build training programs. These companies haven’t undertaken these programs lightly; many have made multiyear, multimillion-dollar investments.4 Nor have they all followed the same path or playbook. But they’ve all discovered the crucial role that the private sector can and should play in designing a twenty-first-century education and training system that works for employers and employees alike.
Ultimately they’ve all been guided by the same realization: investing in employee skilling isn’t just the right thing to do for employees; it’s also the right thing to do for the bottom line.
TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY FISHING
There’s a famous quote we’ve all heard: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Although this saying might show signs of aging in some ways, it holds true in one important way. When you think long term and invest deeply in learning, there are lasting benefits—for individuals and the collective.
I care deeply about the people at Guardian, as well as the global community in which we operate. I think about both of these things every day. But I would not be writing a book—and certainly not a book for CEOs and other leaders—if I did not believe in the business case for investing in your workforce.
The Business Roundtable (BRT) is a nonprofit whose members are exclusively CEOs. At gatherings in Washington, D.C., tax and trade policies have long remained at the top of the group’s agenda, but increasingly workforce development is pushing its way to the forefront. Dane Linn is the BRT’s vice president for immigration, workforce, and education. He notes that it used to be a nice topic to discuss, but now it is front and center. It’s moved from a corporate social responsibility to an essential business imperative. He said,
There has been growing frustration even before the tightening of the labor market because young workers are not coming to work with the technical skills they need. CEOs are very focused. Regardless of the educational path candidates take, the amount of remedial time needed to be work-ready has gone up and up and up.
Guardian helps to fund and support the BRT’s Workforce Partnership Initiative (WPI), an effort that brings together education and community leaders to accelerate and expand best-in-class workforce readiness programs in key regions around the country. These training programs are aligned with the needs of students, workers, and businesses closest to home.5 In New York City, Guardian executives volunteer to work with professors at CUNY and to create internships. In Utah, for example, Boeing and others have built an aerospace pathway for students at Salt Lake Community College to four-year universities and job placement. In the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia region, the BRT has helped to build labs that help students earn a digital certificate, and we’re working to create specialty certificates related to artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.6
An early proponent of this approach was my friend Roger Ferguson, the former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and now CEO of TIAA. Roger co-led the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF), which partnered with the BRT on an initiative seeking to build diversity in New York City’s financial services workforce.7
Through research and consultation with industry leaders, financial services organizations, and higher education institutions, Roger’s work with BHEF and BRT has accomplished the following:
• prepared a diverse workforce well trained in cybersecurity, data science and analytics, risk management, and social and mobile technologies;
• created opportunities for low-income students, underrepresented minorities, women, and veterans; and
• incorporated twenty-first-century competencies into the undergraduate experience, such as critical thinking, problem solving, analytical reasoning, communication, and working in multicultural teams.
These efforts remain very important. According to a Gallup poll, whereas over two-thirds of employers say they prefer candidates with data science and analytics (DSA) skills, educators say that fewer than a quarter of all graduates will possess those skills by 2021.8
Recruiting, hiring, and training new employees is a notoriously time- and resource-intensive process. According to a report from the Society for Human Resource Management, on average it costs $4,129 and takes forty-two days to fill an open position.9 Another study found that the average cost of replacing an employee is 20 percent of their salary.10
Training employees internally can help cut down on these costs. At Guardian we’ve realized that helping existing employees learn new skills and grow in their careers reduces our hiring expenses and strengthens our bottom line. All full-time employees at Guardian are encouraged to enhance their business-related skills and expertise through continuing education. Like a number of companies, we offer a tuition assistance program—$7,250 annually for undergraduate and $10,250 annually for graduate programs—to financially assist eligible employees who wish to take advantage of the courses, degrees, and certificates that will advance their careers.
There are other bottom-line benefits to investing in skill building beyond the reduction of onboarding costs. In a country with one of the worst labor force participation rates for women, Shahi Exports is helping to improve the margins. As the largest privately held garment exporter in India, and one of Gap, Inc.’s largest suppliers, Shahi employs nearly 70,000 women in its factories and offices. Many of these women spend their days working behind humming sewing machines, lining up seams and deftly placing stitches. Speed and accuracy are the dual watchwords on production lines like these.11
In 2013, a group of researchers working with the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development wanted to see if they could help the women at five of Shahi’s factories work more efficiently. But they didn’t reorganize the factory floor or lengthen working hours or even offer new sewing techniques. Instead, they taught soft skills.
Researchers enrolled more than a thousand of Shahi’s women in a program called P.A.C.E. (Personal Advancement and Career Enhancement), designed by Gap. The P.A.C.E. program was an eighty-hour “intensive, workplace-based soft skills training program” that ran for about a year.12 For two hours a week, women took part in group classes designed to teach time and stress management, communication, decision making, and problem solving.
The results were impressive. At the end of the program, the researchers tested worker productivity against a control group and found that the women who went through the P.A.C.E. program were a full 20 percent more productive than those who had not received soft-skills training.13 Not only that, but P.A.C.E. workers also took on more challenging sewing assignments and requested more technical skill training than their untrained counterparts.14
Additionally, after examining the data, researchers discovered that the soft-skills training had actually produced something of a productivity spillover effect. When workers who had enrolled in the P.A.C.E. program were placed on production lines with workers who hadn’t, the untrained workers also saw a marked bump in productivity. The P.A.C.E.–trained women helped those around them become more efficient as well. As a result the P.A.C.E. program brought returns of 258 percent.15
This study is instructive, in part, because these women were not working in white-collar office jobs, where one might expect soft-skills training to have an outsized effect on productivity. Even in a factory environment, where repetitive physical tasks make up the bulk of the workday, improving soft skills has a significant impact on the bottom line.
More important, the study demonstrates the exponential power of an investment in workforce training. The Shahi workers did not just increase their own productivity; they increased the productivity of their neighbors and peers.
When analyzing costs and benefits for such a program, it’s clear that though the cost is paid up front, the benefit is realized more broadly and for a longer period than one might have imagined.
INTERNSHIPS AND MENTORSHIPS AT SCALE
According to Child Trends, a nonprofit research center, developmental research shows that having one or more caring adults in a child’s life increases the likelihood that the child will flourish and become a productive adult. “Results suggest that mentor-like adults outside the home can be a resource in promoting positive well-being for children and adolescents.”16
In an article for Forbes, Columbia University Dean Jason Wingard noted that mentors can display the keys to effective mentoring when they practice empathy, keep an open mind, and demonstrate commitment.
The question becomes, how do you expand youth-adult development opportunities?
The Pinkerton Foundation is the largest private funder of youth employment programs in New York City and one of our funding partners. The foundation is a leader in building career readiness. Laurie Dien is Pinkerton’s champion for work-based learning and a founder of the career internship network in New York City. She has a very simple message for such a complex strategy: “Every New York City high school student should have an internship before they graduate. How do you know how to work until you work?”
By hiring and supporting high school interns, businesses and organizations are building the workforce of the future, she argues. Pinkerton funds more than 5,000 internships each year.
She recalls meeting a young man who was working as an intern in a library. He was part of a computer fellows program, and while he was taking a break from helping patrons, she asked him if the internship was helping him decide what to study in college. His response took her aback.
“This internship is telling me that I need to go to college,” he answered.
At Viacom’s MTV she was told that high school students are often better than college interns because they feel less entitled.
Dien notes, however, that just as high school interns are motivated to work hard, so must the businesses and organizations that hire them. Managers need to be sensitive to their needs. If the team is going out for a $4 cup of coffee, managers need to be aware that the intern cannot afford that. The priority is for the high school students to feel wanted and comfortable.
“The onus cannot be just on the young people in the workplace.”
Her advice to businesses that take on interns includes offering students real work and real training; helping them develop interpersonal communications and skills, including teamwork; helping students prepare market-ready resumes; and checking in with the students periodically to make sure things are going well. Perhaps you can ask your junior managers, those without a lot of management experience, to work with interns as a perk and a means of gaining more experience.
Just across Broadway from the peaceful greenery of City Hall Park in New York, David Fischer, Leah Hebert, and a small team of experts at the Center for Youth Employment are building a framework known as Career Ready NYC. Both have devoted significant portions of their careers to workforce development.
“I got interested in youth workforce development while at the Center for an Urban Future,” David recalls. “By the time you reach people later in life, you can only incrementally increase their earnings. The trajectory is largely set after adulthood.”
David leads the effort, which has outlined a set of milestones and experiences that every student should have from middle school through young adulthood. High school and college students should have career awareness, exploration and planning, preparation and training. This means workplace tours, career fairs, college campus visits, job shadowing, informational interviews, service and experiment learning, internships, financial aid assessments, apprenticeships, work study, and other strategies. All of these experiences are aimed at complementing classroom learning and building a career-ready foundation—including a résumé, demonstrable skills, and workplace competencies such as the ability to self-regulate, navigate the workplace, and network.
Over the summer of 2019, David visited a program Guardian sponsors in the Bronx at Dream Yard Prep School. It’s part of an effort we call CLUE, short for “Community Learning Understanding and Experience.” This particular program fuses two unlikely experiences into one: video game development and journalism. Half of the students signed up for video games and the other half for journalism. In the midst of the experience, those who joined for video games became fascinated with the role of journalism in their community, and those who came for journalism came to realize what graphic design could mean for communications. Leah visited a program in nearby Harlem that focused on environmental sustainability. Students visited work sites, heard guest speakers, and did service-learning projects. From not considering STEM fields at all, about half came to decide that’s what they wanted.
Leah noted,
If you come from a family of means, often you get career preparation at home. You’ve attended a good high school, you have attentive parents, and people to network with. Our job is to try and fulfill that for those kids who may not have those attributes. The system has to become more intentional about focus on the career training you need. We are trying to overcome what has been a siloed approach. We need for institutions to work together or at least not in conflict. We need the public systems to respond to the labor market. Old jobs go away and are replaced by new jobs, but the new jobs require higher and higher levels of education and training.
Few understand this dynamic better than Riley Jones IV, who found his way from the southside of Chicago, to a Guardian internship, to one of Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30 influencers. Riley was the recipient of a Jackie Robinson Foundation scholarship, which helps minority students attend college and effectively navigate their college environments, explore career options, develop leadership skills, and embrace a commitment to service. The Jackie Robinson Foundation matches recipients with a corporation that offers an internship. Coincidentally, Branch Rickey, who signed Jackie Robinson as the first African American to play major league baseball, also served on the Guardian board of directors. Fearing his move would bring criticism to the company, he offered to resign. His resignation was refused.
Guardian was fortunate to be paired with Riley, and Riley felt fortunate to be placed in Tracy Rich’s Legal Department. Tracy had forged a partnership with the Robinson Foundation and became a mentor to Riley.
“One of the first things we spoke of was me being able to see myself as a lawyer and to never question my ability,” Riley recalls. “He offered valuable pointers on how to navigate the road ahead.”
Tracy had been a New York University Law School graduate, and Riley has gone on to complete his law degree at NYU after studying at Columbia University. All the while, he founded Bloc Software, one of the reasons he caught the attention of Forbes magazine. Bloc’s Job Application Assistant program integrates job seeker efforts across leading career sites (Indeed, Github, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics), providing access to all career tools in one place. Bloc provides workforce programs with cloud software to track and optimize job seekers’ outcomes.
“Its web platform, which includes three proprietary tools (smart resume template, resume reviewer and cover letter generator), allows career coaches to be more impactful by using AI,” Forbes wrote.17
Riley has advice for today’s job seekers as a result of his own experience helping hundreds of other students of color prepare for and enter the workforce. “Start early by concentrating on something you are passionate about. Build technical skills, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a coder. You need to understand data, speak the language, and have a versatile skill set. Get help with what you don’t know, and pursue certifications that can get you the knowledge and skills you need.”
He remembers an early experience as an intern in which he turned in a piece of work quickly and reflecting uneven attention paid to the task. A mentor in the group sent it back and helped him understand the importance of doing the work in a way that reflected his best effort. He learned to become meticulous.
DISRUPTING OURSELVES
At Guardian we’ve seen the value of investing in worker training first hand.
There are many ways in which data and AI are upending the insurance industry. And as the CEO of a company with a long legacy, I’ll be the first to tell you: it’s a good thing.
After all, innovation is the only way we’ll survive. That’s why we are constantly searching for ways to disrupt ourselves. We know that we have to develop and harness new technology, proactively and all across our company, if we want to succeed.
CEOs are responsible for articulating and cultivating a vision, but the only way to execute it is to empower employees with a broad set of technical skills. These days it’s no longer enough for an IT Department to stay current while other teams remain in the analog age. In the insurance industry, for example, actuaries must understand data science to properly calculate policy rates, marketers need to be fluent in digital advertising practices, and HR managers who deploy the right algorithms can streamline the search process and find the best candidates. Risk managers must understand and monitor for biases in data. Investment experts use data to anticipate market and investment performance.
Several years ago my leadership team and I realized that our industry was changing too fast for our existing training infrastructure to keep up. We decided that we could invest in recruiting and training a new crop of graduates with the latest technical and workplace skills while our existing workforce also acquired new skills, and then do this again and again. Or we could stay ahead of these challenges by creating our own education infrastructure within our walls.
We had an impressive IT system and plenty of in-house knowledge. But we knew we couldn’t implement a training program of the scale we were envisioning without outside help. Andrew McMahon led an effort to partner with General Assembly, a leader in workforce development that specializes in digital skill building, to co-create a series of courses customized for Guardian employees. General Assembly works with more than 500 global organizations and international governments that are pursuing new approaches to education, including upskilling and re-skilling.18
At the outset we interviewed leaders and team members throughout the company to figure out which skills were most needed. In partnership with General Assembly, we also administered skills assessments in various areas from analytics to digital marketing. We were able to create a proficiency heatmap to identify shortages and surpluses of critical digital skills.
Then, harnessing this information, Guardian and General Assembly worked together to customize a series of courses to address the unique skilling gaps we had identified. These courses enable employees to learn a host of advanced digital skills through online, in-person, and blended classes such as Data Analytics for Leaders and Modern Digital Marketer. Each of these courses is designed to be completed on a flexible schedule by people working full-time jobs. Some courses take place in just a single day, whereas some meet every week for eight months. And to ensure that the skills built in class are applied, many of these courses culminate in a capstone project that enables employees to test their skills against a business challenge faced by the company.
Guardian employees pay nothing to learn. The company funds the entire initiative—and benefits immensely from the skills and innovations that emerge from it. As one leader of the program has said, “If you’ve got the will, Guardian will help you get the skill. As of the writing of this book, hundreds of our colleagues around the enterprise have participated in at least one of our General Assembly programs.”
Yun Wang (Ryan), whom we met in a previous chapter, is one of the actuaries who is learning to code in the Python computer language during intensive three-hour classes two times per week. There are two segments, each held over the course of ten weeks. With lots of hands-on experience, he boasts that he’s already creating computer programs to assist his daily work as an actuary in predictive analytics.
Of course, it is important to build into any skilling program (or, indeed, any program at all) a mechanism for measuring impact. We wanted to make sure that these courses were actually making a difference for our employees. So we created a confidence survey, which we administer at the beginning and end of every course to measure an employee’s confidence in using the skill in question. We selected confidence as our metric for measurement intentionally. If our employees don’t feel confident in using the new skills they’ve learned, chances are they won’t integrate those skills into their daily routine.
Both our initial data gathering and our ongoing confidence surveys serve a similar purpose. Integrating data-gathering check-ins—first to identify which skills are most needed and later to verify that these skills are being learned and applied—is one effective way to design a learning program from the ground up.
MAKING THE FIRST STEP EASY
In the process of researching workforce development programs and rolling out several at Guardian, we’ve learned a great deal. Although we haven’t figured out all the answers, we’ve discovered a number of strategies—through trial, error, and robust conversations with our peers—that make these programs successful. They boil down to a simple piece of advice: make the first step easy.
Easy Is Accessible
Accessibility is the cornerstone of any effective workforce development effort.
Learning a new skill can be difficult. However, by making skilling opportunities easily accessible, business leaders can vastly improve the odds that their employees will find the means, enthusiasm, and encouragement to take on the challenge of skilling.
With our General Assembly platform, we do a lot to make learning accessible at Guardian—making courses available to a broad swath of our workforce, offering them both online and in person and removing all financial barriers.
Although we’re proud of the internal skilling program we’ve built, we recognize that it’s only one tool in the toolbelt. As part of our commitment to workforce development, we’ve taken a number of steps to make it easier for employees to access external resources as well.
Several years ago an employee brought a problem to our attention. We had created a tuition reimbursement policy to encourage all Guardian employees to pursue coursework that would help them grow in their careers. What we didn’t realize was that this policy was snarled with needless complexity—and it was discouraging employees from taking advantage of it. To get reimbursed, employees needed a complicated collection of sign-offs, qualifications, and prerequisites. And our list of approved degrees was overly restrictive. For example, though we employ a robust legal team, our tuition reimbursement policy did not cover law school. These restrictions were limiting our ability to upskill our workforce and contributing to unnecessary turnover.
We want our employees to bring back to Guardian the skills they’ve learned outside our walls—whether at a college, a university, or any other program. So we dramatically simplified our policies, cut red tape, expanded the list of approved degrees, and increased our per-employee tuition funding limit. As noted earlier, Guardian offers tuition reimbursement of $7,250 for undergraduate and certificate programs and $10,250 for graduate programs each calendar year and covers reimbursement for tuition and related registration fees, distance learning fees, books, and lab fees for eligible courses, subject to appropriate documentation. Because of these changes, higher education is more accessible to our employees than ever before.
The same is true for informal learning tools. Recently an employee noticed that because of our stringent compliance policies, a number of social media websites were off limits to employees—and some of these had become, since the time that these policies were put in place, valuable avenues for self-directed learning. By limiting our employees’ exposure to these sites, we weren’t limiting their distractions; we were holding them back from getting the knowledge they needed. So we adjusted our policies, expanding the library of skill-building resources that our employees could access.
Both of these changes significantly improved the accessibility of learning at Guardian. And both, you may have noticed, were suggested by employees through an internal idea-sharing platform called IdeaHUB.
IdeaHUB is a clearinghouse for creative concepts and inventions. Accessible to all Guardian employees, IdeaHUB allows team members at any level to brainstorm and pitch ideas that relate to Guardian’s business, whether it’s an innovative consumer product or a clever solution to an internal challenge. Since we introduced IdeaHUB, more than 6,500 Guardian employees have submitted more than 2,800 ideas to the platform, cast more than 33,000 votes on those ideas, and shared more than 6,600 constructive comments.19
IdeaHUB gives employees the opportunity to do what I call “teaching to the top.” As CEO I have my own opinions—but I know our company works best when employees offer their own ideas about how to make Guardian more effective and efficient. No one has all the answers, the executive team included. And IdeaHUB has helped to make learning and collaboration more accessible for everyone, including leaders and managers. It has not only helped us open up our tuition reimbursement policy and encouraged self-directed learning, it has also helped us to recognize other opportunities for improvement, whether that involves streamlining our onboarding process by eliminating drug testing or increasing productivity by reducing the time spent in meetings.
By giving employees greater access to external skilling resources and building an internal platform for sharing ideas, we have signaled to our workforce that we take professional growth seriously—for employees and for the enterprise. And as a result, we’re more dynamic, more flexible, and more open than ever before.
Easy Is Integrated
Accessibility, however, is only the first step. To make learning truly easy, employers also need to integrate training programs deeply into the workplace.
Some employees will no doubt be more inclined than others to take a course or learn a new skill, but all employees should have the opportunity. The easiest way to undermine an education or training program is to sideline it. Instead, the most successful programs we’ve seen have buy-in from the very top. Employees understand from their managers that this training is not a “nice to have” but a “must have” and that their growth is being prioritized. Even more important, they have the time and support they need to prioritize this growth themselves.
Google has spent years building its reputation as a leader in learning, in large part through its well-known company policy of “20 percent time.” Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin explained the simple rule in a 2004 letter to shareholders on the eve of the company’s IPO: “We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20 percent of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google.”20 During that time Googlers can brainstorm ideas for a flying car, doodle designs for a roll-up tablet, or write a project proposal for a new online shopping service. In short, they can let their imaginations run wild.
Though lopping off a fifth of the workday for creative projects might seem crazy, the idea bore fruit—fruit worth billions of dollars. Several of Google’s blockbuster products and services were dreamed up during 20 percent time, among them Google Maps, Gmail, and AdSense.21
But in its commitment to integrating education into the work environment, Google hasn’t stopped there. One learning initiative, the company’s g2g (Googler-to-Googler) program, offers a compelling example of what happens when education is built directly into a business model.22
Through this program, if an employee wants to learn something, they don’t sign up for a class led by an outside consultant or expert. They sign up for a class taught by one of their colleagues. In fact, 80 percent of the skilling offerings at Google are led by Google employees who have expertise in that specific area. Coding classes are taught by Google advanced coders, and meditation classes are taught by experienced meditators. More than 6,000 Google employees have given time to the g2g teaching program.23
At the core of any peer learning program is the idea that everyone has something to learn and something to teach. By seeding such an idea into the company culture, Google encouraged employees to think of learning not as a power trip (“this person is teaching me because they’re better than me”) but as a power up (“this person is teaching me because they want me to be better than me”).
The beauty of peer learning, even beyond its effectiveness, is its scalability. Any company of any size can build a such a learning program. (In fact, Google has put together a free guide for developing such a program, complete with training slides, facilitator guides, and participant workbooks.) 24
Education can be infused throughout a company culture. In this way a small investment in training can pay big dividends down the line.
YOUR COURSES NEED A CULTURE
Private-sector education and training programs, in whatever form, are a great first step toward creating a lifelong learning system for the twenty-first century. But it’s not enough for companies to invest in coursework and then walk away. Learning—including learning how to learn—takes time, repetition, and institutional muscle memory. To really bring the classroom into the workplace, we also need to lay the groundwork that will enable these programs to thrive. And to lay this groundwork, companies need to build a culture of learning. One company that has built exactly such a culture, and has reaped the rewards of one of the most robust re-skilling programs in the country, is AT&T.
More Courses in More Places
For decades the telephone industry was a hardware industry. Every phone call had to be routed through a switchboard and run through a wire in a network that stretched across the country from coast to coast.
This network employed hundreds of thousands of American workers. And its hardware-centric nature dictated the skills that these workers would need to gain and maintain. After all, if a wire anywhere in this sprawling spiderweb was damaged, someone would need to climb up a pole to fix it.
But with the advent of mobile phone technology, the telephone industry began to shift. The spiderweb network still stretched across the nation, but its importance began to be eclipsed by another network—one of nodes and signals rather than poles and wires.
In the late 2000s, AT&T began a detailed review of its internal skilling situation.25 Leaders of the organization wanted to know how well the company was positioned for the industry’s tectonic shift from hardware to software.
The answer was that it wasn’t. The company employed close to 250,000 workers. But, as its skilling review revealed, only half had the skills in science, technology, engineering, and math that would be critical in the telecommunications workplace of the future.26
AT&T’s employees had the skills to succeed in a hardware world. Unfortunately, this world was disappearing. In the words of Scott Smith of AT&T, “We tend to think of telephone technicians as people with heavy belts ready to climb a telephone pole. The greater need now is for someone in an office who can repair a line of code or program an app for a smartphone.”
So, beginning in 2013, AT&T launched a massive skilling initiative called Workforce 2020 (WF2020), which was designed to address these greater needs.27 The company partnered with online learning giants Udacity and Coursera to enable its employees to learn cutting-edge digital skills and chart their mastery of those skills.28 It also collaborated with schools such as Georgia Tech to design an online master of science in computer science program.29 And it developed “Career Intelligence,” an online clearinghouse designed to connect employees with the information they need to steer their skilling efforts in the most rewarding direction. Powering WF2020 was a $1 billion investment.30
Perhaps the most important investment AT&T made, however, was in its culture. Encouraging employees to participate in a massive re-skilling program, AT&T executives recognized, was important. But getting employees to continue increasing their skills after the initial glamour of the program’s launch wore off was even more important. Technology would continue to advance, and if employees didn’t continue to learn, they—and the company—would be left behind.
AT&T needed to create a culture of learning to ensure that skilling continued.
To start, the company redesigned its organizational chart, condensing 250 positions into just 80.31 By converting a large number of specialized positions into a small number of broad positions, AT&T reduced barriers between similar roles to help enable mobility throughout the company. Mobility is a great learning incentive, and AT&T harnessed it to help create a culture of constant improvement.
The structure of the WF2020 program also contributed to the growth of AT&T’s learning culture. As Scott Smith once told us here at Guardian, the skilling programs of WF2020 are built like a four-layer pyramid. The bottom layer is composed of the most accessible, most broadly necessary skilling programs. (Think typical internal training programs that any major company would run.) On the next layer are targeted skilling offerings, such as courses in project management or IT networking. These are more specific and energy intensive than the first layer of skilling opportunities. On the third layer, employees stretch for mastery of a particular skill by pursuing a credential indicating their accomplishments. Finally, the fourth layer is where employees extend beyond mastery of an individual skill to mastery of a set of interconnected skills. This is where the Georgia Tech MS in computer science program lives.32
All employees start at the bottom of the pyramid and are given the chance to climb up toward increasingly specific and rigorous skilling opportunities.
With its pyramid design, WF2020 helps push its employees to commit not just to the act but to the process of learning. It positions learning not as a box to check but as an approach: a climb up the side of the skilling pyramid toward the goal of greater mastery and future readiness.
The WF2020 program has had a huge impact on AT&T. Employees have completed 2.7 million online courses, and almost five hundred students have enrolled in the Georgia Tech program. All in all, more than half of AT&T’s workforce has engaged with the skilling program since its inception.33 And the company’s culture has undergone a major shift. AT&T employee Jacobie Davis put it well in an article in Harvard Business Review: “We’re moving from being a company where you learn a technology, become a subject-matter expert, and then you’re done,” he explained, “to one where we’re going to be learning something new all the time.”34
That learning culture could prove to be the most meaningful product to emerge from the WF2020 program.
Success Is All in the Head
The work of renowned social scientist Carol Dweck demonstrates just how powerful a learning culture can be.
In her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck laid out two opposing attitudes toward learning: the “fixed” mindset and the “growth” mindset.35 Individuals with fixed mindsets view intelligence as an innate trait, such as height or eye color. Individuals with growth mindsets, on the other hand, view intelligence as a product of hard work and intentional self-improvement.
As Dweck discovered, people with different mindsets respond very differently when faced with a challenge. With a fixed mindset, failure is an intellectual demotion. With a growth mindset, however, failure is an opportunity. To a growth-minded person, setbacks aren’t authoritative reflections on intellectual worth; they are simply chances to improve. Dweck discovered that individuals with growth mindsets are much more likely to succeed than those with fixed mindsets. When learning is sought rather than fought, good things happen.
The same is true when it comes to companies. In 2014, Dweck partnered with a group of researchers to analyze how workplace learning cultures affect performance.36 Over the course of two years, they asked employees and supervisors in a number of Fortune 1000 companies a battery of questions about their companies’ culture. Some firms, these researchers found, were pervaded by a “culture of genius.” In such companies, talent is viewed in binary: you’ve got it or you don’t. This attitude toward skill contrasts sharply with the attitude in a “culture of development” company, where employee skill is treated as something that can be nurtured and improved. And that has a massive impact on morale and performance.
Employees working in a culture of development trusted their organization 47 percent more than those working in a culture of genius. They rated their companies 65 percent higher on measures of risk taking and 49 percent higher on measures of innovation. Workers in a culture of development were significantly more likely to have “ownership and commitment to the future of the company,” while supervisors in those same companies had markedly more positive views of their employees than supervisors in culture of genius companies. All in all, development companies blew genius companies out of the water.37
Dweck’s findings have been echoed in other analyses. When business insights firm Bersin by Deloitte looked into the impact of learning cultures on the bottom line, they discovered that “companies who effectively nurture their workforce’s desire to learn are at least 30 percent more likely to be market leaders in their industries over an extended period of time.” 38 Companies that invest more than their competitors in learning and development (known in the corporate world as “L&D”), according to another report, “outperformed their peers threefold in long-term profitability.” 39
Unfortunately, although workforce training programs are becoming more and more common, learning cultures remain relatively rare. According to CEB research, learning cultures are present in only about one in ten companies.40
Some companies have an “if you build it, they will come” attitude when it comes to learning. They assume that if they offer the classes, their employees will take advantage. But learning opportunities alone are not enough to create a learning culture. If the goal is learning, business leaders must put as much thought into opening minds as they do into launching programs.
This is somewhat of a challenge for Guardian, as a long-standing company in an industry whose sole purpose is to avoid or mitigate risk. A number of external pressures would have us move slower, bet conservatively, and hedge more than we should. But we recognize that thoughtful, purposeful innovation is the only way we’ll become a better company. Over the past few years, we’ve worked hard to build an open culture by adopting a risk-tolerant “test and learn” mindset. When introducing new programs, projects, or policies, we shoot not for perfection but for minimum viability. When it comes to prototypes, good enough is good enough. If an initial launch of a policy or program reveals bugs, we fix them. If it reveals strengths, we enhance them. By iterating—by shifting from tinker and perfect to test and learn—we’re helping our organization stay agile and innovative.
For evidence of the impact of this shift in mindset, one need look no further than Guardian’s Leadership Development Program (LDP).
At Guardian we view leadership development as an existential necessity. If our company can’t train innovative, ethical, effective leaders, we will struggle to keep pace as disruption accelerates. In an unpredictable future, companies that can produce good leaders internally, rather than needing to bring them in from the outside, will have a major competitive advantage.
Several years ago we implemented a series of changes designed to cultivate leadership and encourage growth throughout the company. Under our old system, prospective leaders needed approval to undergo leadership training—and they could complete that training only at certain Guardian offices during certain times of the year.
Now, any team leader throughout our organization can enroll in the LDP and hone their leadership skills—no individual approval needed. And because the majority of LDP learning is online, leaders can complete their training while working remotely.
When designing the LDP, we thought carefully about which skills were most important for twenty-first-century leaders to have. Guided by information from focus groups, brainstorming sessions, and in-depth research, we settled on six core skill clusters that we felt would be critical in the era of automation (each of which would be built into a learning module for the LDP): emotional intelligence, trust and credibility, relationships, peer feedback, unconscious bias, and navigating a new role.
In the past we likely would have built and refined each of these six modules before allowing any Guardian employees to enroll. But with our new outlook, we’ve taken a different approach. As of 2020, we have several dozen Guardian leaders enrolled in the first module. We’ve been soliciting their feedback as they make their way through the course and harnessing their feedback as we work to build the other five modules. As some of the leaders who are supervising the development of the LDP have relayed to me, it is a process that is both challenging and rewarding. Building on the fly is hard. But so is adapting to massive technological disruption. By taking on this challenge, these supervisors are helping Guardian stay innovative, flexible, and open to learning so that we can stay ahead of the curve and our competitors.
ENGAGE THROUGH AGENCY
Instituting a learning program and a learning culture can have a significant and positive impact on a company’s bottom line. Moreover, it can help employees stay engaged.
According to a Gallup survey of more than 30,000 respondents, almost two out of every three working adults report being “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” at work.41 A survey by LinkedIn showed that almost half of all adults in the prime of their professional careers (between the ages of 35 and 44) feel like “they’re on a treadmill going nowhere.”42 Nearly nine in ten bosses assume that their workers quit over salary concerns,43 but in 2018, the most common reason workers gave for seeking a new job was boredom.44
This disengagement carries a hefty price tag. Gallup estimates that every year, unengaged American workers account for up to $550 billion in lost productivity.45 For context, the U.S. federal government spends about $620 billion on K–12 education per year.46
The vast majority of executives—90 percent, according to one study—recognize how important employee engagement is. But less than half know what they should be doing to boost it.47
Luckily, employees have the answer: training. When asked to name the most important part of a job, 65 percent of millennials selected personal development.48 The opportunity to “learn and grow” at a company, another survey found, is even more important to today’s workers than “making an impact.”49
Over the past few years, workers have watched their roles change and responsibilities evolve in unpredictable and sometimes uncomfortable ways. They recognize that if they can prepare for the future—if they can learn today the skills that will be in demand tomorrow—then they can use those skills to move forward. Employees want to be in control of their future, and they see skilling as one of the best ways to do so.
This desire for control of one’s destiny is a fundamentally human one. In 1976, a group of researchers studying residents of a nursing home, writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, illustrated the importance of agency using three unusual tools: a plant, a movie, and a comment card.50
Researchers had the staff at the nursing home bring together two groups of residents and gave each group a different speech about what they could expect over the next couple of days. To the first group the staff offered choices: residents would be allowed to choose whether to see their weekly movie on Thursday or Friday, each would be given a small plant to take care of themselves, and they would be encouraged to share feedback on nursing home services with staff.
In the second group, the nursing home staff emphasized passivity. Residents were told they would be assigned a movie night, they would receive a plant that would be taken care of by the staff, and their feedback on nursing home services would not be solicited.
Then researchers left the residents to their own devices. A while later the scientists returned and administered a well-being survey to both groups. The results were striking. The choice group scored significantly better on measures of alertness, active participation, and general well-being. Just by allowing residents to pick their own movie nights, water their own plants, and share their own opinions, researchers were able to markedly improve quality of life.
A little agency means a lot. This is something we’ve seen firsthand at Guardian. Learning programs make employees feel in control. Instead of having to predict their skilling future, they can actively prepare for it. In this way our learning programs boost engagement. This is as true at Guardian as it is at AT&T, Google, and Shahi Exports. When employees are given the chance to learn for tomorrow, engagement and bottom lines go up. Additionally, we come one step closer to our goal of building a twenty-first-century education and training system that works for employers and employees alike.
But to truly create such a system, we’re going to have to do more than just bring the classroom into the workplace through internships, mentorships, training, and lifelong learning. We’re also going to have to bring the workplace into the classroom, through innovative partnerships between educators and employers.