How to Build a Skills-Ready Workforce in 2026

(upbeat music) - Jamie, welcome. How you doing? - Good. How are you? - All right. - We've decided this is gonna be the best one of these. You've done yet? - Yeah, and we said that for the PR and comms purposes, we're gonna follow none of the notes. - None of the notes. - Order questions. - It's literally just gonna be a chance that makes me the top of the 1,557 aircraft. - Thank you for having us. - I'm gonna ask me, I'm gonna feel pressured to be like, "You was the best one." - It was definitely you. - Yeah, I should have been. - It's been good, busy. It's an amazing show, been walking around, having lots of great conversations. - You're using everything, apparently. - I've lost a lot. I've lost my phone and my make-up bag, two very important things. - You've got nothing else to lose at this point. - I literally have nothing else to lose, but it's been amazing. Lose a great conversation. - How was it you spoke today, right? - Yeah. - Let's say, what was it about? - So I did a couple, - Cool. - I did a really work in your art. - I did a panel, which was amazing. And we talked about adoption of HR tech and how it's a human problem, not a tech problem. I think that's important that we talk about. And then I did a case study on ServiceNow University after that. - Yeah, well let's talk about that. So what, firstly, why? What prompted ServiceNow to create its own AI Power University rather than relying on traditional learning solutions? - Yeah, okay. So I'm just gonna take you back. So I'm Janie, so I run L&D for ServiceNow. But we actually say I run Global Workforce Skills and Talent Readiness. And the reason we talk about that is because talent readiness is a massive challenge for us. Internally, we've got 28,000 employees. We 85% of the Fortune 500 use ServiceNow. And they have hundreds of practitioners who need to make our platform work. And at the same time, they're going through massive transformation. So we know training which data you see, but up to 90% of people need new skills. So we had this truly burning platform where our internal audience needed to learn fast and our external customers needed to get the skills to unlock the value of our platform. So it's not good enough to give people great technology. We need to do a human transformation too. - How did you approach that? Obviously it's gonna be an AI first approach. - Yeah. - But how are you delivering that? - So we really want to create the university of you. So we want to be able to create an experience where Chris goes in and Chris is going to know this very well because he lives in this world. But Chris has a completely unique experience that looks very different to Janie. So the University of Janie and the University of Chris feel very different. So we want to create a platform experience that does that. That it really wraps around you. So Power BI, AI, so the learning is predictive and it's personalized. And it's personal, so it's the right. It's like three minute long video versus a three month course. If that's right, or it is a three month course, if you need to be certified or whatever that is. So it's a platform that delivers that at the point of need. And we integrate that through the service now platform. So internally you get it in your portal, et cetera. So that was important. But we also wanted to make sure that we embed all of the other experiences. So if we've got peer-to-peer learning, we want to make sure that's reflected through service now university and through your profile. If you're in a cohort and you're going through onboarding, we want that to be reflected through your profile. So it was about creating a completely holistic, skilling experience built around the learner. Yeah. How do you embed that so that it shows up in the flow of work? And it isn't something people have to go to? So we weren't really hard on that. So we're continuously more building learning into the agent experience that we have internally within service now or within service now university. So within service now, we make sure that your career profile has all of your data, all of your skills, all of your job profiles. And then that powers the learning that comes through the agent experience. And so that will remind you in the flow of work, you haven't done your compliance training. But rather than doing all of your compliance, like the full half hour, let's see what your knowledge is like from last time. So you only do the minimum viable duration. MVD is what we talk about in terms of learning. Yeah. Minimum viable duration. Because that's one of the frustrations, right? But everyone's at different skill levels. And forcing someone to go through a 20 module program when they may need five is just absolute. We all have all been there, and it's just painful. Yeah, it's really, really painful. And also, I think we're on a journey where we've talked about learning paths for such a long way time. I think we need to start learning about skill paths, assessment paths, where my biggest fear, I think, for humans, is that all of our learning will go to waste, because no one will know. We learn in the choir. Like we learn in the shadows a lot of the time. I'm learning now having this conversation with you. It'll be, and nobody knows that I've done hundreds of podcasts and that I've got that skill, unless they really wanted to look into it. Wouldn't that be amazing if I carried that with me within my profile that I could promote to the world the whole of time? And I think that's been driven by the fact that we've judged ourselves on how much learning people's people have done versus how much they know. And I think that's got to change. Yeah, no, I agree. And also, like, I mean, I make a joke to my friends. I like, I didn't learn how to ice skate by watching Eugene. No, you know? Yeah, just because I watched an ice skate in tutorial. Because you went in and you fell over on the ice and you hurt your ass and you got up again and you kept going and your friends were there. That's why we've got to create environments where people can truly play and get in and immerse themselves and learn that way. Yeah. And I think only until now, we just haven't had the technology to be able to create that cost. We've always spoken like personalization. Like truly understands my Chris, like you said, Chris's context to me, where how I want to learn as well. Yeah, your preferences, yeah, my preferences, right? I'll be able to do that. And then matching that with the organization, making it skill-based to be able to do that. So I think it's like we're just at the beginning of the art process on this one. And I think when we talk about, it's really interesting. I think when we've talked about, I think, personalization, I true personalization, like, I, the, I don't, it's a learner of one. Like, you're never going to say the same thing twice. I think it's amazing. But I think when we talk about the flow of work, sometimes we miss the point that it's, it needs to be like the flow of career as well. Like, how do you make sure that that data then feeds into the fact that you will do the next job? And what that next job is, I still think we've got a disconnect between those two things. It's like, I'm learning in one place and I'm growing in another place. I talk about that in, I say, learning needs to be embedded into work itself. Yes. Because like the flow of work is not enough. It's full. Because it's still something you've got to go to to some extent. Whereas like, how do we embed learning into work? Yes. It's self because learning shouldn't be something I have to go to. It should come to me or should be present. Yeah. Where I am. And it is embedded into work itself. Like, as it is, like, what we're learning if you think about the true, like, you need to set out. It's not track. So you don't know. And also, I'll tell you what, if you asked your favorite, if you ask Chatt� VT now to tell you how clever it is, it could give you every evidence of how clever it is. You, we need to be able to compete with that as humans. So we need to track it. We need to understand it. We need to assess it. As we need to be OK with that. Yeah. We're getting there. So you built it, you built it yourselves. We did build it ourselves. Yeah. What was the decision between building it? I suppose you have your service now. So why would you not build it? What does this look like for your customers? We mentioned internal. But now you're offering it as an external. Yeah. Well, there's kind of three levels. So at the top of the pyramid, you've got our internal audience who get all the bells and whistles. Absolutely. Everything. Fully immersive programs. In person experiences. All tracked. The platform. Then you've got this middle layer, which is the practitioners of service now. So we've got, we're on a target, have three million people learning on the platform by the end of 2027. We're more than halfway there. And that's how many people we need who have skills to have fingers on keyboards. And that's controlled by us because it's our content. We exist to provide service now content to help people be successful with it. How are we creating it? Yeah. We are creating it ourselves, but with a lot of AI support. OK. We've, in the last 12 months, we've more than doubled our outputs, decreased our cost by about 10% by leveraging AI. But we've got a lot further than we can go in. There's some amazing tools out there that I hear about all the time that could make us even better. But then we've got the bottom of the pyramid. So as I said, 85% of the 14,500, about 40 million people touch our platform every month. And the role we have there is to really just help our customers on this journey. We are at the burning edge of the innovation we try to be. So we're getting a lot of scars and bruises from going through the chain. They just don't bring people along with you, right? Yeah. A lot of education. We don't exist to sell an LMS. That's the important thing. We have an AI platform that does the critical thing of making sure you have the data in the right place. And you can do intelligent things with it. But really, we exist to be able to tell stories about how we're transforming people's lives and careers. I think that's incredible that you're basically offering that internally and externally. Yeah. And it's free. That's the important thing to say. Historically, we used to charge for our training. Now our training is completely free. It's completely democratized. So if you're, you know, early in careers in India, which we have about a million of our learners are in India, you can be learning on our platform for free totally free. There's also a talent pipeline for you. There's a huge talent pipeline and we want people to fall in love with it. And there's a still shortage in you're basically developing that. Absolutely. All over the world, like Idris is our brand ambassador. Because of the work we do with Idris, we're really passionate about helping the continent of Africa. And we do lots of work there. And we can because our training's completely free. So we're really. Idris Elba for everyone listening. Idris Elba for everyone. Yeah. This is my main Idris. I let you know a message today from my friend with Idris DJing at his birthday. Bye. That is. I mean, that's a clanger. Yeah, it just. It is. It just dropped. Yeah. You mean, no, no, no, you mentioned Idris and I was like, it's just weird that my friend was with him on the weekends DJing. And it just was the MC for him DJing. That's so cool. Really random for everyone listening. We were. I knew what you meant. But the vast majority of people were like, it was incredible. It's an amazing and he's such an incredible human being. Yeah, he is. And he believes in what we're doing with service now university because we are really trying to democratize access to amazing. So is that a new thing? Then is that your team's responsibility? That's really unique. I know. And so I just started just clicked in my head. That's. So our team's response. So no, I'm so a brand team. Idris Elba is our brand ambassador. So I mean, the learning side, but the learning side is all us. Yeah. So you're both in your service in internally and externally. Certainly. Have you ever learned that before? I haven't. No, I'm like I said, that's why learning is work itself. I'm learning as I do this. Yeah, what does this mean for the skills and capability required in your own team? As you go, as you go in this journey, it's a huge transformation. I think that's something we've all got to recognize. And like I think learning, but HR in general, the ground is shifting. Yeah. And what we're expecting, which I think this is a fascinating human dilemmas, we're expecting a group of people to guide us through a transformation into a world where their jobs might not exist in that same way in the future. And that takes a huge amount of trust and faith and agility that I think is something we've got to train people. Yeah. And also, you have to be transparent about it. You have to be transparent. And I think there is something we can be more transparent about. I did a talk earlier, and I said from within service now, we think we've got a $1 billion trust gap. And what that means is, there's a ton of data that says productivity of your teams can be about 25% less if they don't feel trusted to do their job. It's costing us millions, hundreds of millions, a billion dollars a year if we can't get that productivity from that trust gap. And some of that trust gap gets sold by telling the truth. Yeah. And I've seen a few companies. It's been quite controversial. I'm not going to mention names, but I think this is a good thing that I've published, published publicly, these are the skills that we're looking for. And these are the skills we think are going away. Yeah. And being very transparent about that. And you know, in some people, like, oh, that's a bit, I think that's the right approach. Absolutely. And obviously, creating the opportunities internally for other opportunities. 100%. And the truth is that there is a huge opportunity. So we just did a skills report with person. We did millions of data points on the impact of agentic on work. And the evidence is really clear that the future is hiring. There are more jobs. It's just that those jobs look different. And those humans don't exist to do those jobs unless the humans we have in work today retrain. So we've got to, that's human labor is required. It just looks different. And we need people to feel brave enough and courageous enough and curious enough to lean into that. And that's why we create these playgrounds for learning. Yeah. That feel safe. It's a big right. You created that, like, that sandbox where people can fall, you know, they can make mistakes. But then that's how they learn. That's how we like we mentioned earlier. And it creates that psychological safety and that trust, right? And it's just how the brain works like our prefrontal cortex needs to be triggered for us to explore and grow. Yeah. And we don't do those things if our back of our brain, if our amygdala is like terrified and running away, so we need to create environments where that part of your brain where you feel trusted and safe, just like a playground, just like you see kids in playgrounds need to create that in work. There's some variety to go, Jenny, what, what, as you look ahead, like what, what you're most excited about. I am really excited about the future of work because I think if we get, if we get this right and we will, because in humans, we trust, I think we've got the, you know, we've got the best brains and the planet to make this work, then the future is more human. The future of work is more human and more humane and if we're doing less work, drudgery work and we're doing more inspiring work and we're having more conversations and we're making new friends and we're falling in love with what we do more. I think that's what I'm most excited about being part of that. And I think that's a misconception, right? Like, AI is actually allowing us to be more human. It really is. It's just freeing us up, right? If we get our own way of risk, we'll end it there. Well, it's a appreciate you coming on. It was super fun. And maybe I got a, a co-host now. Exactly. Exactly. It's as well. Is this the best podcast ever? Yes. Yes. No choice, by the way, stay down. Thanks for coming on. Thanks.