 I'm really excited to be able to introduce Jonathan Monk, Global General Manager, Skills Division at DeGreed, a company I know many of you are already familiar with. DeGreed is a lifelong learning platform that individuals and organizations use to learn, build skills, and certify expertise. I think one of their slogans is to jail break the degree. We're big fans of their work. Jonathan oversees the development and launch of new lines of business, including skills and certification. You can read the detail in his bio along with me. He was previously the VP of Marketing and Sales at Goal Zero and a marketing director at Skullcandy Headphones, which I have in my purse. Before joining Skullcandy, Mr. Monk ran marketing automation at a division of Hewlett-Packard, and he is a graduate of BYU. So please join me in welcoming Jonathan Monk. Thanks for being here and sticking around. I want to just start with a little bit of informal, a little informal survey. By just a show of hands, who here has a bachelor's degree? Surprise, surprise. OK, who has a master's degree? Not surprised, OK? Who has a PhD? About a third. Who here in this room works in the same field in which they graduated university? So less than maybe a quarter of you are working in the field in which degree, yeah, OK. And the following question, just for self-reflection, is what skills? What would you say your top three skills are today, that you're using today? Maybe jot those down somewhere. The market, and I'm going to kind of talk about the labor market in my remarks today, and how the labor market is changing and pivoting and orienting itself to the conversation and language of skills, with skills at the center. There's kind of a real challenge that companies are facing as they hire and promote individuals in the marketplace. We'll go through some data that backs this up. The first piece is this. More than half of the companies in the Fortune 500 have been replaced in the last 15 years. 20 years ago, the average lifespan of a Fortune 500 business was 75 years. It's 15 years today. CEOs, Price Waterhouse Cooper just did a survey to CEOs on talent. And more than half are saying it's really hard for them to find digital talent. Broad definition, but it means all the new IT skills, the new marketing skills, anything to do with technology, those skills are hard to find. Only 5% of CEOs say it's very easy to find those skills. And 80% are worried about the availability of key skills in general. And if you look at the trend of those skills over time, we're seeing that that worry and concern is growing. We're approaching full saturation on CEOs that are concerned about being able to hire for key skills. 91% say they need to strengthen soft skills alongside digital skills. And almost 70% are concerned about the digital skills of their leadership teams. So think about the senior leadership of a Fortune 500 business. Do they have the skills to succeed in the digital economy and the skills economy? At the same time, there are more and more open jobs that are unfilled in the market today. So this is Labor Department of Workforce Services data. You can see that in the last 10 years, we've dipped a little bit and we're coming back up where employers are reporting talent shortages. So it's a 10-year high that we're at right now in that metric. Deloitte ran a great survey and published some research. And this is where I think it's pertinent to this audience. So what's really happening is technology, the change in technology, the rate of change in technology is growing really, really quickly. Behind that, individuals, workers, are the first ones to feel that pain. They don't know how to do something that needs to be done. There's an emerging field. There's an emerging skill. They have to figure out ways to develop those skills to succeed, to keep their jobs. So they begin to work on ways to train up. And that largely comes in the form of informal learning. If you don't know how to do something, what do you do? You go to Google, you look on YouTube, you search a catalog of learning content on your own. You maybe subscribe to a podcast, go to an event, read a book, listen to Audible. And that happens pretty quickly because it's informal and it's agile and it's easy to get to. Businesses are on the heels of that, right? Where they then work to maybe systematically create programs to help train people against those changing technologies and skills. But the last curve is the slowest one, right? And a lot of us in this room are in that space. And you're sort of in a way at the end of the whip as it gets cracked. You feel that last and the impact you don't see until later on. And that's a challenge for this audience. How do you help shorten the curve to match the rate of change in technology? We've talked a little bit about already the half-life of skills, the decay of skills over time. You know, who can give me a quick estimate on what they think the average lifespan of a skill is in today's economy in number of three months? Any other guesses? Depends on the skill, right? There's truth to that. Technology skills, I think we would all agree, have a much shorter half-life than maybe a soft skill would have. Like communication or presentation. But regardless, there's a change of rate, there's a rate of change that's happening and it makes it really challenging for companies to stay ahead of those curves. So hence, CEOs are worried about how do we have the right people and the right seats at the right time? How do we make sure that we're gonna be competitive in this workforce by having a portfolio of skills inside our organization so that we can stay ahead of the competition and stay innovative? So again, another way to look at unfilled jobs. That number is growing drastically. The two gray bars you see are the recessions. You can see that we're reaching near 20-year highs in terms of unfilled jobs in the marketplace. And it's a worker's market. So for the first time in a while, job openings are outpacing job hiring. And at the same time, job mobility is increasing. So you look at the number of quits on that bottom line. How many people are quitting jobs on a monthly, quarterly, annual basis? That's rising along with the opening of jobs. So what that points to is that people are not staying in their jobs as long, which we sort of already anecdotally know. So that means it's a formula for a worker's market. I can go and get whatever job and even if I'm under qualified, maybe I can get a job somewhere because there's such high demand for jobs right now. And then careers are changing. So the length of a career is now 60 to 70 years. For someone in my stage of my career, that's not something that is appealing to me, frankly. It's too many more years to go, but that is the reality. People work a lot longer into their careers. The average tenure in a job is four and a half years. And that changes by demographic. If you look at the 18 to 30 year olds, more than 80% leave their first job before five years. As you get to 31 to 45 years old, it goes up a little bit more. And as you get to the older ranges, it goes up even further. So people tend to spend more time in their jobs further in their careers they are. And then based on the survey from Deloitte, the half life of a learned skill has a shelf life of about five years. So if you think about the skills that you have, you've had a chance to think about, what are my top three skills? In five years, you more than likely won't be using at least one of those skills. The skills that you will need to succeed in the future probably don't even exist today. Blockchain was not even a thing five years ago. Data science, 10 years back, that was called business intelligence. Machine learning, there was no such thing. Yet these are now some of the biggest fields that we have in demand in the marketplace today. So we have to figure out how do we help people in a world where you're working longer, you're staying at jobs for a shorter amount of time, and the skills that you have in your portfolio, your own personal skill portfolio is ever changing. It's a really tough dynamic. And so now what is the role of all of us in that space? The labor market at large, how should we think about solving this problem and who owns what pieces of that change? The last thing I'll point to is the unemployment rate. We all know is it one of the lowest rates it's been in quite some time? And that just points to the fact that there's more people employed in some function than there's ever been before. Yet we have all these unfilled jobs. So imagine if we can remove the friction from the marketplace, the labor market, what we could do with unemployment or underemployment. We firmly believe, at degree, that the labor market will use the language of skills as a way to operate. And by that I mean they will no longer use the language of job titles. They will no longer use the language of pedigree. They will no longer use age. They will no longer use race. They will no longer use even a traditional college degree as the de facto way to measure skills. We do believe that in jailbreaking the degree at degree. But what we mean by that is if you think about jailbreaking an iPhone, it means that you can take all of the existing functionality and add to it more things. When we talk about jailbreaking the college degree, it's not because we don't believe in the college degree. But we do believe that it's not the only way to signal expertise. That people develop skills throughout their lives. That the skills that I gained through my formal education opened doors for me to enter a career. But they are not the thing that helps me today signal my expertise to the market and unlock opportunities for me next. Here's what is actually happening in the marketplace. So Microsoft just last year cut 4,000 jobs in sales and marketing with a $300 million write down to reskill or hire skilled workers who have different skills than what their workforce had. There's a need for them to be agile. There's a need for them to be competitive in, in this case, it's the software, the cloud software market as they take on Amazon. And they did not have the skills requisite to do it. So instead of working to skill up people, they made the quicker decision. We're gonna eliminate these jobs. We're creating a bunch of new jobs. Now in some ways that's efficient. In a lot of ways it's pretty tragic, right? The workforce we've seen throughout history has been very willing to reskill itself. Just look at the for-profit explosion that happened a decade ago. People are willing to go to great lengths to develop skills, even incurring lots of personal debt to do so. The market is willing to do it. How can we help facilitate the more efficient way of doing that? CEO of AT&T Randall Stevenson said, there is a need to retool yourself and you should not expect to stop. People who do not spend five to 10 hours a week online learning will be obsolete. This was part of his initiative to reinvent and streamline learning and development inside AT&T. So despite the fact that they're a very old company, at least relatively speaking, they have remained relevant in talent. They have remained relevant in technology. They have remained relevant in having the portfolio of skills. Why? Because they place an emphasis on continued lifelong learning. Unilever, one of our clients, the CEO said, in any position in the company, including mine, you need to work very hard on learning new skills every day. So we're hearing this not just from leaders in learning and development, we're hearing this from CEOs. Which means the business needs are there, right? This is the transition that we're seeing. 10 years ago, the conversation was around HR. It was around the learning and development function, chief learning officers inside companies. They were the ones driving this conversation. That is not the way it is happening anymore. We just signed on Boeing as a client and they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars part of this tax savings they've gotten through the recent change in tax structure. They're funneling into ways to drive learning and development of their employees. So it's becoming a business need to develop skills. This is not a touchy-feely, hey, let's help people feel good about their jobs. Let's drive 10 year longer. This is about if we're gonna be competitive in the space, we have to have the right skill set. So skills are at the center of the way companies run. And there's a few ways that's happening. Individuals growing their own careers, the company being able to manage performance, the way you build teams, the way you hire, the way you promote, the way you resource people against projects inside a company, the way you manage your gig economy workers, the freelancers that's becoming a bigger and bigger part of the workforce. How do you manage all of that? Well, it's all gonna be using the language of skills. The skills that people have should be the thing that determines their mobility inside an organization. And then the labor market itself. So on the one side we have the supply of the market. Some of that supply is created by individuals going out and developing themselves through informal learning. Some of that supply, a large portion of it, especially as people enter the workforce is through higher education. There are boot camps that are emerging to help build a finite set of skills around a specific domain to help people enter the workforce as well. And then there's of course professional associations who have in some ways had to be forced into helping people develop skills over time because their roles has changed with the invention of LinkedIn. On the demand side, there's the employers, but that's not just full-time employees, right? That's part-time employees, that's also contract-based employment, which is a growing segment of the market. And then in between you've got the brokerage side, right? There's recruiters, there's job board sites, there's places that match the demand and the supply part of the equation. So the question is then, what is the currency that we use to transact in this market? And we talk broadly about, well, credentials are the currency that makes us transact in the market. But that only gets you so far, right? The reality is there are hundreds of currencies in the market because there are hundreds of credentials in the market. And it causes a lot of friction. That is the problem in the marketplace today. So we actually see that companies are really struggling with measuring skills. They know they need to. They're saying, we know it's important to measure skills. It's just as important to measure skills as it is to provide learning. Most don't do anything at all to measure skills and only 15% do anything formal around measuring skills. So this kind of gets back to this idea that how can you manage something that you don't measure? It's impossible to do so. So we see a two-part solution to this. On the one side is learning and development. We need to empower people to learn however they want to learn, whatever they want to learn, whenever they want to learn formally, informally on a short arc, on a long arc, in person or virtual. It should not matter. And the platforms and technologies are already emerging to do so. So part of what DeGreed does is support learning and development in any modality across any platform, across any topic. The other side of that problem is the language of the credential. How do you know someone has a skill? How do you know someone has a skill when everyone's using a different signal to describe it? We firmly believe that measurement should be not about learning activity. It should not be about knowledge. It should not be about how much time I've spent learning something or even how much time I've spent doing something. What it should be about is what can I actually do and how well can I actually do it? And that's really at the heart of skills. Skills are the things you can do. And mastery of skills is how well I can do it. So we've kind of talked about this. Everyone can learn whatever they want, whenever they want, whenever they need, across thousands of different platforms. Content is a commodity. There are almost infinite ways to learn free or paid, all different levels. And this is something that we talk about with our enterprise clients. It's a little bit, maybe a little bit hard to see, but above that line is the organization-sponsored learning that happens. And that tends to be on a longer arc and it tends to be more formal. So the things that I do every month, every quarter, every year, I take my sexual harassment training, I take my fraud prevention training, right? Those are the formal things that the company makes me do. Maybe there's some things around in structure-led training. Maybe there's performance reviews that happen on an annual basis. All of that is company-sponsored organizational training. But then there's all of the learning that happens, what we would say below that line, right? It's all of the informal ways that I learn. It's the TED Talks I watch. It's the books I read. It's the podcasts I listen to. It's the articles I read, the Atlantic article, for example, that was already mentioned. We could learn a lot from that article, right? Well, where are we quantifying? How are we measuring the benefit of all of that informal learning? Up until now there has not been a way to do that, but DeGreed has a platform in which you can track and measure all of the ways to learn. So that I have a personal transcript of all of the learning that I've done, formal, informal, across every dimension. And at the center of this is again this pressing problem. Companies cannot answer the question, what skills do I have? What skills do I need? And workers have no way to signal their skills. So what happens is what happened with Microsoft. No one knows who's got what skills. All they have to go off of is the job you're in today. And so they let you go and they hire someone who has a better signal than you. So it's a really tough market to be in. When we approach companies, we start at the very center, answering the question for the CEOs, do we have the skills we need to win? For the learning function in the organization, it's what skills do we need? Where are we strong? Where are we weak? How are we developing those skills? How are we benchmarking those skills? But there's a similar narrative for individuals, right? I don't care about as an employee, I don't necessarily care about, does AT&T have the skills to win. I care about what's gonna drive my development? What's next for me? What opportunities exist in the company for me to go from where I am to where I want to go? How do I develop those skills? How do I benchmark myself? But it's all a similar arc. It's all a similar cycle. What do out performers do differently? The ones that we see succeed, based on some data and studies that we've run, is that the people who reinvent themselves on the individual level or at the company level are the ones who tie skills to the business functions. They're the ones who say we wanna develop these skills so that we can accomplish this business objective. We wanna drive down recruiting costs. We need these types of skills. We wanna put people on this type of project. What skills do we have to do it? Skills become the center and it removes friction from the way that businesses can run. This is an example of some of the credentials I can earn if I'm a front-end mobile developer. So a pretty narrow field, but there are hundreds of these, right? This could be a bootcamp I graduated from. This could be a degree I earned. This could be a master's program. This could be an open badge I got. This could be a company-sponsored initiative or training program. But who can tell me what any of these things really mean in the marketplace? We have hundreds of currencies and we're all trying to transact with them. Which of these is a gold-backed currency? Which of these, what's one of these worth next to another one? We have no idea. And so we can talk about the value of credentialing and the importance of credentialing. We can even talk about blockchain and we can talk about the validation of these individual currencies. But until there's a standard way to communicate skills across every skill, every region, every level, we will never be able to remove the friction from the marketplace. We just won't. DeGreed's mission is to standardize the way we measure skills. So that if Susan, a front-end mobile developer, wants to communicate her skills, she can talk about them in terms of one system, one process, one benchmark, and one leveling system. So that I can go if I'm hiring a mobile web developer and say, what kind of soft skills does Susan have? Well, she has teamwork skills, communication skills, problem-solving skills. And she's got these technical skills, SQL, Object C, Java, Scrum. And they all should be measured in the same way, right? I need to be able to look across my entire organization. We're hiring right now at our company. We've got a few dozen openings inside the business and we have a recruiter. And the recruiter looks at portfolios of people we're looking for to hire for graphic design. Well, our recruiter is not a designer. Our recruiter has a terrible eye for design. So what is the job of that recruiter? What is he going to do to help me fill the jobs? Well, right now he's doing nothing to help me fill the jobs, right? Except for causing me to go back and say, this person doesn't have a good portfolio. So I cut him off from the process because it's the only way that I can, it's the most efficient way for me to get to it. And this is the same for any technical skill, right? What we need is a standardized way to measure that stuff. So DeGreed has created a single framework to measure any skill at any level. We call it skill certification. Underpinning it are a few principles. The first is that we focus on outcomes, not activities. We're not measuring knowledge because knowledge is not the same thing as skill. We're not measuring time because time is not a direct measure of skill. We're measuring behaviors, we're measuring results, and we're validating that. So we focus on the things that I can do. Give me examples of how you can demonstrate a skill, back it up by evidence, get it reviewed, and then rank it against a rubric. We have partnered with Connecting Credential Initiative on this rubric. So they have developed an eight level rubric on expertise. What is an expert? What are the ingredients of expertise at large? And then we apply that rubric against people who are going through a certification. And it's working. We've got a lot of people that are running through that process and being certified in skills today. We're certifying 1,500 different skills at eight different levels using one single framework and one single process. So what that means is that companies like Marshall McLennan can come and say, we get this incredibly valuable data on the back of this process. It tells us what gaps exist across the organization, where we should focus as we build toward the future and as we hire more employees. This is a really cool quote. What I love the most about it though, is that it's not from the HR person and it's not from the talent person. This is the CFO of the company. So we're now operating our business based upon the transparency into people's skills and their portfolio of skills. So if we can answer these questions for CEOs, then we are moving the market in the right direction. If we can hire and promote people based on their skill portfolio, not on pedigree, not on logo of my last job, not on job title, not on race, not on gender. If we can deploy people to projects based upon their skill portfolio, rather than randomly selecting people based on a recommendation from one person. What if you can reduce employee turnover by training them into skills that will lead them to the next opportunities inside their organization? And if you can benchmark skills from time to time, then you can see how competitive you are in your industry. So a quick example of what that would look like, right? If I'm a business analyst, there's maybe eight, 10 skills that are required for me to be successful in that job. I might have to do macros, I might have to do data modeling, maybe financial reporting, strategic thinking. And then maybe there's this other job of a research scientist. So if I'm a business analyst and I want to become a research scientist, how do I move from that job into a new job? In the old world it was, well, look at the company's framework for, you go from junior to senior to director to VP to SVP. That's your path. But that's not the way that we have all moved through our careers, right? We've moved through our careers in a much more fluid way. We are enabling that to happen using the language of skills. So if you're a data research, if you want to become a research scientist in AI, there are going to be some skills in dark blue on the right hand side that are unique to that job. There are going to be skills that are shared between the two jobs. And then you can have a meaningful conversation to say, how do we map these two things together? So I want to play a quick video. Looks like it's, do we have audio? So I'm going to share a quick video on how we are thinking about certification and credentialing within the enterprise environment. If I said to you, tell me about your health. And you said, I ran a marathon in 1999. That would be an absurd response. Not because marathons are bad, but because it informs so little of your health today. Yet, when I ask you, tell me about your education and you respond with, I graduated in 99 in economics. That is equally as absurd. Not because degrees don't matter, but because it informs so little of your knowledge and experience today. For years, the college degree worked well enough as a way to show your foundation of knowledge, which helped you get the job where you slowly moved up the ranks and retired after 30 years at the same company. But the world doesn't work that way anymore. We are living in a world where the jobs and skills of the future haven't even been invented yet. To keep pace with that, our mission is to build a new way to measure people's skills. That certifies what you can do today, not what you learned 20 years ago. And the best part, it doesn't matter where you developed your skills. I'm not saying education is a bad thing. Education is a good thing. It is a much slower to change machine than what's happening in corporations today. And so we've got to have a different answer that allows us to keep up. And that's what skills certification does. I think what we need is a common language of skills, not just across one company, but across industry. But there's not really a codified single source of truth for what skills exist. If you knew the skills that your team had and you knew the skills they didn't have, you could plan for ways to close those skills gap. So skills verification can be much more nimble, much more agile, and meet the true needs of changing businesses today. Google doesn't require a college degree to work at Google. Well, how are we gonna know you're good at what you say you're good at? What I think we need to do is come up with ways to validate those skills. Come up with ways to have a standard that says, I'm good at A or I'm good at B. And I'm not just saying that because I put it on my LinkedIn profile. I'm saying it because it's been certified. And I think that's absolutely critical for the future. At JPL, a space project could potentially be five years before it is launched. Those individuals have to have some way of seeing how the team is maturing, how the team is growing, both knowledge and ability. And agreed skills certification isn't just about measuring skills. It's about creating an equal playing field to communicate those skills to the world based on evidence and blind to the bias of age, race or gender. Skills certification is and has the true potential to be the great equalizer that we don't have right now. When we really look to have a diverse inclusive workforce, it's magical in my mind for what it can open up and what it can enable. We need change agents in this space. I'm excited to see what the skills certification brings to organizations and to individuals. I think it opens up tremendous opportunities for many people that didn't have opportunities in the past. You know, so many people have a natural curiosity. They learn and they grow. They do it in nontraditional ways. And then that manifests itself in skills and abilities. So when you have the ability to have a universal yardstick, it really opens up your whole world. DeGreed believes there is no single path to becoming an expert and that everyone deserves recognition for their expertise, no matter how they got there. So I'll just close with this and then do we have time for, we have a few minutes for, okay. So we really do believe organizations are going to be operating around skills. They're going to be hiring based on skills. They're going to be promoting and moving people around based on skills. And they need that to be able to stay competitive as they move forward. So with that, I'll leave some time for questions if there are some. So the question was, how do we believe that it's blind to age and gender and race bias? So that gets into the process itself, but essentially what we've done is pulled apart the different pieces during certification so that when peers review you, they don't see anything but your behaviors and your evidence. They don't see who you are or anything about you except for your behaviors and outcomes. And we do that across a peer review. We do that with an expert review and we do that with an endorsement. So it pulls away. In fact, we're seeing some really interesting things where I had a cohort go through recently and the manager of this department who got certified and skill reached out to me and said, this person is not a level six expert in this domain. And I said, well, what makes you say that? Well, she is way too young and she's only been doing this for a couple of years. There's no way she's reached that level of mastery. So all I had to do was go back to the data and say, well, let's look at how you rated this person in the peer review process. You rated this person higher than these four other people and you gave them this score without knowing who they were. Would you like to redact your rating? So we do see that it's reducing some of that bias. We have, we are collecting data. I would say it's on the early stages of that end of it. More to come there, but we do have a lot of data so far. Please. Thank you. The question was, how do we, if we're an enterprise-focused company, how does an individual benefit from this if they're not part of that enterprise? So two things. One is that there's a free version of degree available for individuals today. In fact, we launched as a consumer product first. So anyone can go on and create a profile and begin tracking and measuring all their learning and using whatever free resources are available there. The second part, which I think is at least as important, is that your profile persists with you, the individual. So if you go work for someone, so first of all, you can go and get certified in any skill as an individual user. But if you go work somewhere that has degreeed and then you leave, you carry your profile with you, you carry your credentials with you. That's sort of the point of credentials. And so that's a unique thing that we're doing as well is the portfolio or your own learning transcript sticks with you and your own credentials stick with you. They don't stay inside the company. We do. We do. For certification, evidences is part of it. We also ask for case studies. So evidence can be lots of different forms, but case studies is another part. So actual times when you've actually demonstrated an actual behavior. Yes. So the question was, what are the barriers to growth? So on the business side, I don't think we have very many because we're very unique in what we're doing. On the credentialing side, it's a two-sided marketplace problem, right? If you're introducing a new currency to a marketplace, the demand and supply side both have to use it for it to really be broadly used. So that is something that I think will persist. And then we have to look at, I think realistically, in terms of how quickly we can grow it. And I think we have to be making the right partnerships to help drive innovation. One of the things I think that's gonna enable this to happen more quickly is using the credentialing framework, right? We hope that we're not the only ones out there using that framework. We hope that lots of organizations use that framework because it's a standard way to measure skill. So we kind of look at it as a long arc challenge. Please. I think we would say our goal is to create the standard language. How we get to that goal can be very flexible. I care less about that than we need the standard universal language. So if that is a path that helps us do that, I think that's one we would pursue. Yes. Yeah, so it's all the engineering fields, IT, and then anything else that touches a technology product essentially. So that could be, from a marketing perspective, that would be marketing automation or email marketing, for example, rather than print ads and print design. So broadly speaking, it's anything that touches a digital tool from a categorization perspective, engineering, IT, and digital marketing would be the three big buckets, I'd say. We use an existing standard framework. The credential, the connecting credentials rubric is the standard framework. So every person who goes through certification goes through the same process just through the lens of their skill. Okay, one more. There was a hand here. If we are using the same rubric, then I think we can make it work. If we're defining what a skill is differently, if we're defining what mastery is differently. It's common. Yeah, I mean, these are things that we're gonna solve as we scale it up. We're not blind to the challenges. We know it's going to work, but what we are seeing is that on the enterprise side of the business, they're adopting this. And at the end of the day, if the demand side of the market is using a framework, if they're using the currency, if they're hiring people based on that rubric, then the market will slowly move that direction and then the supply side will adopt it. So the enterprise side is really gonna help us drive that adoption because they're the ones who are hiring the workers. Thanks everyone. I appreciate it.