How RMIT is bridging the digital skills gap with Kade Brown

What if we told you that the growing digital skills gap in Australia is costing businesses $3.1 billion each year? Tune into our latest episode where we explore this pressing issue with Kade Brown, Director of Workforce Solutions at RMIT Online. Together with Kade, we pull back the curtain on the hidden costs of the skills gap and dive into RMIT Online's innovative strategies to meet the tech talent demands of the economy by 2030. As Kade shares his insightful journey from teaching to strategic consulting, discover how she is helping organisations identify skills challenges and design effective solutions. 

We promise that you'll gain a newfound understanding of the critical role of universities in workforce transformation, beyond just granting degrees. In our engaging conversation with Kade, we go beyond the 'one and done' approach to education and highlight the importance of continuous upskilling and reskilling. You'll get a closer look at how RMIT Online brings industry voices into learning for job relevance, drives skill acquisition, and measures skill impact. Hear about their approach to fostering a learning culture and incentivizing reskilling and upskilling within organizations. 

Riding this wave of upskilling, we finish our conversation by casting a glance at the future of work. With a focus on the need to cultivate a sense of belonging and connection within the profession right from the start, we explore the successful outcomes of the Digital Skills and Jobs Program funded by the Victorian State Government. Kade provides fascinating examples of how industry voices shape learning experiences for successful outcomes. Become part of this insightful journey; join us in exploring the future of work, the role of continuous learning, and the strategies needed to bridge the digital skills gap. 

Here are some resources mentioned by Kade in the episode:

• RMIT Online 2023 Skills White Paper
• Terrell Strayhorn's website - a leading researcher in belonging among university students
• HBR article The Project Economy Has Arrived – this is article is behind a paywall, but listeners can hear this interview with the author for the HBR Ideacast for free

Tune in, and embark on this learning adventure with us!

The Reimagined Workforce podcast is brought to you by Workforce Transformations Australia Pty. Ltd.
All opinions expressed are the speaker's and not the organisations they represent.
If you have a story about a workforce transformation to share and would like to be a guest on this podcast, please contact us at kathhume@workforcetransformations.com.au.
Connect with Kath Hume on LinkedIn

Transcript

Kade Brown: 0:00

You want stickiness in terms of retention and completion outcomes through learning. Get students exposed to a sense of what the profession is like, connecting to practitioners within that profession, being able to visualize themselves in that the context of that profession from day one of the learning, and that is how you get sort of the completion outcomes. It's super interesting as we think about helping students succeed right through to the completion of their learning. That is one thing that we really think about is driving a sense of belonging with the profession from as early as possible inside the learning experience.

Voiceover: 0:33

This is the reimagined workforce podcast from workforce transformations Australia, the podcast for people and culture professionals seeking to drive meaningful, impactful and financially sustainable workforce transformation through curiosity, creativity and data science. In this podcast, we hear from talented and innovative people making a positive difference for their people, their organizations and those their organizations serve. They share stories and learnings to help others on their path to transforming their workforce today and tomorrow. Now here's your host,

Kath Hume: 1:13

Kade Brown is Director of Workforce Solutions at RMIT online, with a mission to create a community of lifelong learners successfully navigating the world of work. RMIT online is a disruptive digital business inside a large university, with a portfolio of solutions ranging from master's degrees down to bite sized micro credentials, all delivered online. Kade has been at RMIT online for four years and leads several functions responsible for partnering with enterprises and governments to identify the skills challenges facing workforces and designing solutions around those challenges. A former schoolteacher, Kade re-skilled in order to achieve a career pivot into strategic consulting, spending many years working with public and private sector organizations in areas ranging from strategic planning to operating model design, transformation initiatives, customer experience strategy and product road map design. Outside of work, Kade is a proud and busy dad of two young kids and an avid consumer of live music and the arts. He holds an MBA from Melbourne Business School and a Bachelor of Music Education from UWA. Kade Brown, welcome to the Reimagined Workforce Podcast.

Kade Brown: 2:25

Hi, Kath, thanks for having me. It's just such a wonderful privilege to talk to you today. I've been listening to the podcast for a little while now and what an honor to be a guest.

Kath Hume: 2:33

And it's great to have you here. I was very fortunate to run into a few of your colleagues at Edutech a couple of weeks ago and there's been some great conversations and I'm really thrilled that we've got a university in the conversation today and the bigger picture, because you're such an integral part of the whole ecosystem that we're trying to bring together. So I'm really keen to hear how you see your role and where you fit in that function. So can we start with a little bit more about your background and how you've arrived in your current role at RMIT?

Kade Brown: 3:06

Yeah, sure, I mean you covered a little bit of it in that intro, which was very nice. But yeah, as you said, like many people who start or who make their way into the world of learning and development, I started my career as a teacher a school teacher but my career involved a pretty significant pivot. Over a decade ago, though, when I did my MBA, left the teaching profession and went into strategy consulting for quite a while and, as you said, I was working with businesses and governments on a wide range of strategic problems. I joined RMIT online about four years ago because I think I just really bought into the mission. You know we're a digital startup, but we're within Australia's most applied university of design and technology. You name checked our mission in that intro, which was great. So we're trying to create a community of lifelong learners successfully navigating the world of work, and that is such a powerful mission. That really, really spoke to me.

Kade Brown: 3:56

I saw in those conversations you often have when you're meeting people and thinking about taking on a new role, what I saw at RMIT online was enormous opportunity to translate world leading digital learning experience, design practices plus a core capability of bringing the voice of industry into skill delivery and sort of turn that into a powerful workforce development engine. And it's not something that the organization was super focused on at the time. They were building learning solutions and reskilling products for individuals and consumers and not really tuned into the opportunity to really make impact in the world of work sort of at scale. And so I jumped the fence from consulting in 2019 and I've been here ever since.

Kade Brown: 4:36

Currently, as you say, my title is Workforce Solutions Director at RMIT online and I guess there's really two main parts to my job. The first one, as you'd expect, it's sort of focused on upskilling and reskilling Australian businesses and doing that by tailoring credentialed learning solutions designed for real time skill application. And then the second part of it is sort of really around partnering with the experts from within those globally leading organizations and getting their inputs into sort of what the digital and tech skills gaps are that are facing our economy and sort of really meaningfully bringing their voices into the way that we design learning experiences and also, ideally, bringing them into the delivery of those learning experiences. So it's very much an external engagement focus that I've got and partnering for real impact. So it sort of ticks all my boxes in terms of the things that I love and things that make me get out of bed.

Kath Hume: 5:28

I find it really funny that people who I have on the podcast seem to have a similar background to me and I don't know if it's just me seeing the world that way or if it is the reality, but I used to be an economics teacher at one stage as well, so I really love that ability to see what happens in school education and how we can utilize that to translate into real world value and impact, and I love that you're bringing that. I also love that it's music education. I love the bringing the creative element in. I think more and more we're understanding how the brain works and that creativity and how important that is for innovation. I think it's a really great blend of skills and experience that you bring to this role, plus the passion, obviously, and making sure that lifelong learning is something that we support for all members of our workforce.

Kade Brown: 6:22

Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean definitely some common themes with you and some of your guests which I absolutely see Kath, and I think there's something in there about skill adjacency and what skillsets you build as you're learning to be an educator and how do you translate that into other environments. But there's also something about walking the talk. It's kind of re-skilling yourself for career transitions and sort of being the example, which I think is really great. I mean, in my case you called out that I was a music degree and a dip head to become a music teacher. You want to talk about sort of career pivot or standing outside the comfort zone. Take a classical clarinetist and put them in an MBA classroom and then in front of clients doing sort of strategic consulting work. But the power of re-skilling and the ability to see outcomes from that and having lived that I think just makes it that much easier for me to do the job I do now.

Kath Hume: 7:14

And I know this is just audio, but you actually don't look anywhere near old enough to have had the experience that you've had today, so pretty intrigued about how you've managed to fit all of that in.

Kade Brown: 7:25

Oh, you're too kind.

Kath Hume: 7:26

So can you possibly tell us, to give some practical examples of what the problems are that you're actually trying to solve in your role?

Kade Brown: 7:35

So we, not me, but we as a collective at RMIT online are really focused on partnering with organisations to bridge the digital skills gap in Australia's economy. So you know, we know that skills that we once thought were niche in this digital and tech domain are now sort of in high end enduring demand, and I landed upon a pretty stuck data point recently that summarizes this challenge. Came from Deloitte Access Economics, who we partner with quite a lot to do research and sort of translate that into white papers and that kind of thing. I can spit a lot of data points that you all try not to do too many, but the data point I mean or I'm referring to is an estimate that the existing digital skills gap in Australia is costing Australian businesses $3.1 billion each year in terms of lost productivity, which is equivalent to about $9 million a day. So there's a dollar figure on this problem that we're trying to solve and how it's impacting Australian employers and the economy more broadly. And we know that this digital skills gap is widening. You know we've got triple digit percentage point increases in skilled migration every year since 2021, and it's still widening. We've got generative AI and other AI innovations driving increased automation and increased productivity, the skills gap is still widening, so we're really sort of facing some big challenges here in terms of this skills gap, and there are existential ones for our economy as well as for specific organizations.

Kade Brown: 8:56

But when you zoom into the individual level, there's even more to the story, right? So each year, as I said, RMIT Online runs some research with Deloitte Access Economics, on the skills challenges facing our nation, and we released those results in the form of a white paper, and our research this year suggested that, on average, each skill becomes half as valuable after the first five years in terms of its application and its relevancy to the world of work. So there is an emerging crisis in terms of skill recency and relevance in our workforces, and our research also found that, while almost every job requires some kind of digital skill, an average of three and five of us lack the digital skills we need to do the jobs that we have right now. So that's, you know, close to 60% of people that we surveyed saying I don't have the digital skills I need to do my current job.

Kade Brown: 9:43

So in my role, I'm really interested in what organizations are doing to keep pace with these skills challenges, and I know that it's an ecosystem and individuals and employers and universities and other learning solutions providers have roles to play. But if we, if we think about the university role, we know that universities are only graduating about 3% of the tech talent that our economy is going to need by 2030, as our research suggests. So what can be done in light of that? I'll just throw one more data point at you I love data points.

Kath Hume: 10:12

Go for it. That's all good.

Kade Brown: 10:14

Our modelling, I've seen a few different versions of this statistic, but I'll cite the one that we've got from our own research and that shows that, on average, Australian businesses pay about 18% more to hire a new staff member than they would have paid if they'd invested in reskilling or upskilling someone from their existing workforce. So I've seen yeah, as I say, modelling that puts that figure much higher, but say that's conservatively correct, based on the average salary across Australia. That equates to about $12,000 on average per replaced worker as a premium that employers are paying to replace workers through recruitment. So it's a better business case for organisations to upskill and reskill rather than to hire or to import new skills. But in the majority of cases employers aren't doing that. So that's the big hairy problem that we're trying to solve.

Kath Hume: 11:02

And two, when you do recruit in, you're bringing someone in who's not oriented to your organisation, who hasn't got that organisational knowledge, who's coming in completely well not completely new, but I completely agree. The better business case is to have these long term plans with your staff who are on board and working together in partnership for the future. It's interesting that you pulled that out. Your colleague at Edutech presented that data about what it's costing per day and tomorrow I'm presenting at a conference and I've actually got that in my slides. I've got two slides, so the first one has got that stat without the number and I'm going to ask people if they actually know the number. So I'll be really interested to see what the expectations are there, because I was a bit floored when I saw that, as much as I know what that is when you put it in a dollar term. That is what will get business leaders eyes opening and ears opening to hear about what we can actually do about this.

Kade Brown: 12:01

Yeah, absolutely.

Kath Hume: 12:02

I'm also writing a book at the moment and I've got that in there as well, so the book is about that. How do we help people to become lifelong learners so as they marry that up with the formal education opportunities, but keep continue learning all the time and not leave it to somebody else to educate you? You're a member of the workforce, or the big economy or the broader ecosystem. What's your responsibility to keep pace with change, and how do we bring people on on board with that?

Kade Brown: 12:33

Absolutely.

Kath Hume: 12:33

I do love the whole ecosystem. I think when you see all the parts working together, it's easier to see what our role is within it. It's really good. So I think you've jumped in. We're going to ask how you're going about achieving that. Can you tell us about what you have achieved and who and how that's benefiting our economy?

Kade Brown: 12:52

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And before I launch into what we're doing specifically at RMIT online, perhaps just to share some broader thoughts about the role of the university sector inside that ecosystem for workforce transformation, because, as you say, there's a role for each stakeholder to play and it's really interesting to see how universities are responding to the opportunity to have impact in this space. I think universities always have and always will be fundamental in the ecosystem, purely in terms of the role they play in discovery and innovation, how they translate new knowledge into applied settings. So that's kind of the very traditional role of a university and I think that will endure. We've always played a role as well in supplying a skilled workforce into our economy, but the challenge that we've got now is that we aren't keeping pace keeping pace with demand in terms of volume of talent in key areas, or keeping pace in terms of the job relevance of skills, and that makes sense, though right, like you know, to my earlier point. If the half life of skills is only five years and most university educated workers only do one qualification, usually at the very start of their careers, there's clearly a mismatch. But the universities that are really succeeding at playing an active and impactful role in the workforce transformation ecosystem are doing it probably in about three ways. The first way, I think, is responding to the need for periodic upskilling and reskilling throughout the career journey, not that sort of one and done approach, but developing offerings that are bite-sized, that are designed for consumption by people who are engaged in full time work. That's the first thing I think that those that are getting it right are doing. The second is sort of a little bit to what we focus on here, but bringing the voice of industry meaningfully into the design and delivery of learning. Not just saying you're doing it and putting a logo on your product brochures, but actually bringing them in in a meaningful and genuine way to influence what is what is taught and learned inside the learning solution and therefore enhancing the job relevance of what is delivered. And the third thing I'd say is just being easy to work with. Rightly or wrongly, as a sector we've got a bit of a bad rep in terms of navigation responsiveness. So defining operating models to really engage with the industry. It's about customer orientation, it's about agility, it's about tech enablement and interoperability, it's about solution design and it's about lots of things. But being easy to work with is a challenge that those that are getting it right are managing to solve for.

Kade Brown: 15:14

In terms of our specific context at RMIT online, we're trying to do all of those three things that I just said, but we're trying to do more as well. So we're on a bit of a campaign, or a couple of campaigns. Firstly, we're on a campaign to demystify micro credentials. There are so many different definitions of this and so many different interpretations of what they are and how they can add value in the world of work. It's really simple Micro credentialing is about meeting people where they are, ie in their world of work, and it's about assessing a skill or skills and providing an external verification of that skill. The other campaign that we're on is about driving skill acquisition and skill application and work outcomes, not just content consumption, and we think about workforce development.

Kade Brown: 16:00

I don't want to be disparaging about some of the other models or providers in the ecosystem, but we don't believe that skill attainment comes from clicking through to the end of a module and saying I've read it or I've watched it, I'm done, skill tick. It's simply not true. We think speed to skill attainment and speed to skill application is important. We build it into our model and we do this by making sure there's assessment, making that assessment work-based, designing the learning to be conducted in the context of the learner's world of work. We do it with our activity-based learning methodology, which is we call it, the ABLE design methodology, which is a bit of a signature of our approach. It's about building formative milestones into the learning, translating the learning into the work context rather than keeping it in the theoretical context or into a generalized context. And we also do it by, as I say, bringing leading experts from industry into the design. They're often the base of the learning and they're often the ones that are actually assessing the skill outcomes at the end of it. So our industry partners, depending on the skill of the domain area that we're really focused on, we'll draw from a stable and we've got quite a lot. We've partnered with AWS, Sales Force, REA Group, more locally, Canva, Tableau, so really, leaders in this digital and tech environment and getting the experts from within those organizations to design and deliver learning in collaboration with us, so that it's super relevant and meaningful.

Kade Brown: 17:20

And then the last campaign that we're on is really about helping organizations measure skill impact and talk about that, and that to me, I mean we're on that journey, still ourselves right, as is everyone else, but that's the secret source, isn't it, to really having impact inside organizations.

Kade Brown: 17:37

But we're focused on building out a customer success model that works closely with our clients on pretty sophisticated reporting and that you know. Initially it's about how learners or employees are progressing through their learning, but increasingly it's about measuring or reporting on the impact of skill attain and speed to application and the broader business benefits, and they're increasingly sophisticated ways that you can think about that. Almost always it's very tailored to the outcomes that each organization is trying to drive through their skill initiatives. But what gets measured gets managed right. So if we can measure the impact of that upskilling or reskilling initiative, we can help our partners to tell a story about the impact that we're having. We can help them drive a link towards the broader business objectives that they're trying to support with reskilling initiatives, giving them a language to speak in to drive that decision making across the organization. And so that's the last campaign that we're on.

Kath Hume: 18:32

And I think going through that process of defining what those business impacts are and then reverse engineering to understand what the skills and capabilities that we need to be able to deliver on, that is really a beneficial process for all involved as well. And I whole hardly agree with what gets measured, gets managed and presumably using something like Kirkpatrick. So, as you're seeing, the evaluation of performance rather than just yes, people were happy and enjoyed the experience of the learning in itself.

Kade Brown: 19:03

Yeah, absolutely. It's really impact in terms of the actual skill speed to attainment. Has that skill been applied in the work context since the learnings taken place and what has been the impact of the application of that skill in the work environment?

Kade Brown: 19:17

And how can we visualize that in a way that's easy for the individual learner to see their trajectory in the context of the transformation, also for the manager and also for the organization at a kind of broader level to see that impact? And it's super interesting. It's funny, you know, initially we started inside out in. By that I mean we developed some impact measures and ways to visualize that impact with our own teaching workforce. So we kind of really focus on capability uplift and continuous improvement. With the way that we do online facilitation inside our short courses and degrees and we have a wonderful community of online facilitators that we actively coach and manage and drive communities of practice and the way that we defined our approaches in there and the way that we sort of set up dashboards and visualizations to support that continuous improvement was the starting point for how we began to think about, I guess, translating that to impact for our partners in the world of work as well.

Kath Hume: 20:10

It's funny I've just written social collaboration down here because I was thinking it's very, you could really utilize human centered design here to think through who are the people facing the problem, who can we talk to about what the solution could look like? And I was going to ask you about that social collaboration piece. But really interesting that you've taken it there and that your staff and team are already utilizing that opportunity. Have you seen skill uplift by taking them through that process?

Kade Brown: 20:37

Absolutely so. We are very metrics driven at RMIT online in terms of the way that we measure our own performance. We have defined or created new metrics to talk about. You know we've got good teaching scores that are based on feedback from learners and we've got basically a you can imagine it sort of a five point spider diagram that we talk about the key things. We have the dashboards across that and we've tracked.

Kade Brown: 21:01

You know we're RMIT online as a wholly online entity within the university has been around for about six years and we've tracked a really sustained improvement on those teaching metrics that we really measure and report on inside our organization and the coaching systems and the sort of skill uplift systems that we've put around. Those have, I think, been fundamental to our sort of success as early movers into the wholly online learning deliveries play. So we've really seen the results and we're at a stage now not just with our teaching capability for online facilitation, but also with our overall satisfaction with learning scores that are comparable with Best in Breed for wholly online learning, which we're really proud of and we speak about lots of the time to people who listen.

Kath Hume: 21:47

Can I also ask you so that's looking at current state. What about future state? Do you do much with? So in strategic workforce planning we'll look forward and say what are the things we're going to need into the future. Are you working on with strategic workforce planners to look at what are those capabilities going to look like, and how do we prepare in advance for things that we might not need now but we will need soon or over certain horizons?

Kade Brown: 22:10

Yeah, so look, our origin was very much around just designing and delivering a learning solution.

Kade Brown: 22:16

Increasingly, the way that we partner with organisations to support them on their strategic reskilling journeys has required us to focus at either end of that learning experience around the diagnosis of the current skills landscape inside an organisation, overlaying that with the future state either capability architecture or the end point from a skills and capabilities perspective, and also then, as I said earlier, around that after the learning, what the impact story is around that.

Kade Brown: 22:45

And so as we've evolved our business model, we've really focused on that front and back end in terms of supporting with that sort of capability assessment diagnosis, current state landscape and overlaying that with the future state. The way that we do it differs depending on the client's need, depending on the scale of the reskilling challenge that they've got. Some of our more sophisticated clients don't need us to support them with that. They've got really well-defined in-house kind of capability frameworks and a view of current state and a view of future state and how to get there, and others will need us to work really closely with them on doing that. So, yeah, increasingly part of what we do and how we collaborate with our clients is really around that front end of what are we actually trying to achieve? How do we define and communicate that in a way that you know? Maps to the transformation agenda, helping work through that before we even start putting pen to paper on what a learning solution might look like.

Kath Hume: 23:39

Yeah, it's a really good partnership model because I can imagine that some people would be advanced and have that good visibility, but then there'd be some who I know just from talking to people that some people are really grappling with. How do you actually work at what that future state looks like? And if you can't work that out, or if you're having difficulty in that space, how would you even know where to start with your learning and development? One of the things, too, I'm really interested in is just around metacognition and making sure people actually understand learning in itself.

Kath Hume: 24:10

I've found from the research that I'm doing we tend to still have this perception, and I looked at things like the LinkedIn learning report, for example, where three out of five of those top requirements or top reasons why an employee might leave their employer are related to the learning and development that the employer is offering. Now, my interpretation of that is still that there's this expectation that someone else is responsible for educating me. How far does RMIT go into enabling people to develop their ability to learn themselves? So, as beyond like you've mentioned around lifelong learning, beyond your programs, they've actually got that capacity and capability to say, okay, now I've done this, I've had that lived experience. I've developed that capability with guidance. How do they progress that on their own in a self-directed way?

Kade Brown: 25:03

Yeah, it's a great question. So much of the work that we're doing in terms of customer success is around activation and engagement of the target learner inside the organization. So how do we partner with our key stakeholders inside the organization who are trying to drive the skilling outcomes, to actually really engage target learners and get them to not only think about but begin and complete and actually drive the outcomes that they're trying to drive? So we have a, I guess, a suite of tactics and other things that we do and we support. So much of the value that we're trying to add is around that piece. We also have a lot of data, much like the stats I was throwing around with you earlier around our own research about how much individuals value a learning culture in our work environment and how much they see support to do learning and upskilling as a core part of the employer value proposition and, to that point, also some stats around how much employee engagement can be positively impacted by simply redeploying someone inside the organization to a vacant role rather than recruiting a human being by.

Kade Brown: 26:18

Letting me throw you one more stat, but you know we talked about organizations that will go straight to the job market and hire externally, rather than treskill reskill r r ror or o o r rr r upskill. When organizations do upskill or reskill staff to replace a vacant role, 53% of respondents tell us that it promotes greater employee engagement and retention and 46% strongly agree that it positively influences team culture and performance. So there's something around investment in a learning culture and incentivization or around reskilling and upskilling that speaks to overall ecosystem of capability uplift and employee engagement.

Kath Hume: 26:54

And do you also track anything like retention? So are you seeing, and you might not, because that's not your role. I get that, but when you're doing evaluation, have you got any insights into whether or not it leads to longer term retention of staff?

Kade Brown: 27:08

Well, it's a really timely question , K Kath, because it's sort of the next frontier of those big hairy problems that I was talking about earlier that we're grappling with. Right now. We talk about impact from learning in terms of driving business outcomes. If we can talk about that in direct terms related to the skill that's being delivered, we should also be able to talk about that in terms of financial terms around employee retention as well. We know we've already got some numbers right. We already know that it costs $12,000 more to replace someone on average in Australia than it does to upskill and redeploy someone inside an organization. If we can kind of put together some try not to give too much away but we can put together some more longitudinal data around the retention outcomes that we can attribute to reskilling and upskilling initiatives and put some numbers around that what gets measured gets managed. We think that's really powerful data. We're not there yet.

Kath Hume: 28:01

I think too, the difficulty with that is there's too many factors. I wouldn't say too many, but there's so many factors that go into retention. It'd be really hard to pinpoint and say, oh, because we had this intervention. That would therefore result in retention, but it just would be interesting. I do love delving into a little bit of data, but just to pull out that people who were given the opportunity to be involved in these programs, how long did they stay versus people who weren't? We can draw our conclusions from that.

Kade Brown: 28:28

Exactly, yeah, attribution is a challenge, but getting the data baseline of the data would be a really great starting point for us.

Kath Hume: 28:34

One of our first episodes with Alicia Cook.

Kath Hume: 28:37

She talked about five challenges to workforce planning in healthcare, because that's her area of expertise.

Kath Hume: 28:43

But one of the things that she talked about is how devastating she finds it when people will do a five-year degree and then they'll go and work for a couple of years and then leave the profession after only a couple of years, and often because they didn't necessarily know what they were getting themselves in for, or I guess that's an assumption. But so what I'm really interested in about is how do we get people to have the opportunity to experience the work before they complete a whole degree, so, as we don't have the situation where they come out into the world of work and the experience might not be what they expected and with as an individual, they've invested so much time that might not be realized? What are the sorts of things do you think and maybe not with the RMIT hat on, just as a human who lives in the Australian economy but how do you think we can combat that scenario and provide better opportunities for people to know what they're likely to experience when they graduate?

Kade Brown: 29:35

Yeah, it's a great question and it comes back to some of that broader discussion we were having earlier about the role that universities should and could play in the ecosystem and those that are getting it right, I think, in terms of free career or pre-work training. So we're talking about the learning that someone does, often in a bachelor degree context, straight out of school, before they've really hit the workforce. In our context, in the university context anyway, it really comes down to nailing that industry collaboration and making sure that you are working with industry partners that can bring an authentic voice about what it is really like in the profession and, ideally, not just being able to talk to that, but being able to give learners the opportunity to experience that in the course of their life. And so I mean in traditional contexts that looks like a teaching practicum or a nursing placement. That's kind of in the traditional sense. But the universities that are really thinking innovatively about these kinds of partnerships are taking it into other contexts that don't require it necessarily but for whom the students really benefit from it. So in digital and technology domains, in other STEM disciplines and arts and others as well, industry partner learning, I think, is the answer to that and getting experiential learning into the curriculum before graduation is the way that you can prevent I don't want to say buyers remorse, but prevent the use case that you just described, which is someone completing a large chunk of learning, going into the workforce and finding actually it's not for me and I've needing to rethink my career and maybe retrain and reskill and upskill sooner than I'd hoped to. It's a really good question, I think, and it's a challenge that we're all trying to grapple with.

Kade Brown: 31:09

Another thing that I'd say about that is some learned colleagues who work in the area of belonging.

Kade Brown: 31:16

I'm thinking of Strayhorn, who's probably one of the leading researchers from the US in the concept of sense of belonging in a student and workforce context and talking about the different ways that belonging takes place.

Kade Brown: 31:30

And, interestingly, from the reading that I've done, when you talk about a university student enrolled in a course, their sense of belonging is to a very small extent with the institution, to a slightly greater extent to the subject or to the degree discipline that they're doing, to a slightly greater extent to the cohort that they're doing it with, and that varies based on discipline and specific context, but to the greatest extent it's to the profession.

Kade Brown: 31:57

So, if you want stickiness in terms of retention and completion outcomes through learning, get students exposed to a sense of what the profession is like, connecting to practitioners within that profession, being able to visualize themselves in the context of that profession from day one of the learning, and that is how you get sort of the completion outcomes. And so I'm regurgitating research that I've read. It's not my own findings, but I found it super interesting. As we think about helping students succeed right through to the completion of their learning, that is one thing that we really think about is driving a sense of belonging with the profession from as early as possible inside the learning experience.

Kath Hume: 32:35

That is so interesting. I'm just thinking about my own kids. One has entered into nursing. She did it as part of her HSC. There's been that really clear path all along. She works part-time as a nurse and so it's really clear and she's got all that experiential learning. I'd be really surprised if she came out of this whole experience and didn't know what she was in for. But it's interesting. My son has done a mathematics qualification and there isn't really any career pathway that's clear to that. I'm just noticing, based on what you're saying, I can really see the distinction between those two experiences and why some people might come out and be a bit lost and unsure where to take that degree, as much as that is really applicable to so many opportunities and career pathways. I really can see what you're talking about there being a differentiator between those two experiences. It's very, very interesting. I'll definitely go and check that out.

Kade Brown: 33:33

Yeah, and as we're talking about sense of connection with what happened after the learning, I think that's something that we obviously really care about and measure and manage at RMIT online and in terms of examples of where we've seen it work really well. There's one case study that I might share with you of where we've partnered. This is interesting because it's not actually a traditional workforce development partnership that we usually enter into in the context that I work in, but we actually are part of a Victorian State Government Initiative which is still happening at the moment. It's called the Digital Skills and Jobs Program and it's basically state government fully funding a big chunk of learning followed by an internship. So it's 12 weeks of learning, 12 weeks of internship, fully funded and paid for by the government.

Kade Brown: 34:18

The target audience is Victorians who are wanting to reskill into digital careers. Either they're job seekers or they're maybe at risk of needing to be job seekers, or they're just really wanting to make that career transition, and they've got a cohort of about 5,000 people that they're hoping to put through it. Wow, yeah, but it's just such an impressive program. I think I had about $64 million of state government funding put against it in 2021 when it was launched. Since launch, I think the programs help match more than 740 Victorian businesses as in that internship capacity with I think they're about halfway through about 2,500 candidates.

Kath Hume: 34:56

Brilliant.

Kade Brown: 34:57

Like such evangelists for that program because we just think it's making such an impact at a systems level. We've had about you know they've got quite a lot of education providers supplying into it. We've got about 60% of the candidates who come through RMIT online short courses for that program and 48% of the ones who've come through RMIT online are now working in a digital role and we've got 80% of employers agreeing that the participants they hired had the adequate sort of foundational knowledge in that digital skill area that they didn't have before. They did the learning with us, which we love, you know. But the most exciting stat that has come out of that initiative for us has been we've had 97% of participants that have come through our courses in that program have gone on to successfully submit and pass the assessment at the end of their course, which is pretty high, like you know, 97% completion rates where it is a genuine work-based assessment.

Kade Brown: 35:52

So it's obviously there's something in that program, even though the learner isn't paying out of their own pocket, which often is a bit of an incentive to complete. By the way, we're seeing like sky high completion rates and we're just really impressed by it. Such a such a cool initiative and we're seeing some really great results come out of it.

Kath Hume: 36:09

I think that's really impressive, because I actually would imagine that because someone else is paying for it, sometimes that's not as much of an incentive, because you know what have you got to lose. If it's someone else's money you're wasting. So 97%, that is absolutely huge. And what do you say? 80% are actually in roles, did you say?

Kade Brown: 36:26

We've got 48% who've achieved that desired job outcome, which is a really meaningful career from a, I guess, a non digital role. There's something that's very digital and we're supplying into different skill verticals as part of that scheme. So there's a lot of brand digital marketing around UX and UI design, around business analytics and data analytics, and so different skill domains. But overall we've got 48% have achieved an actual job outcome from participation, which is pretty high when we're talking about a wholesale sort of career pivot, yeah, and a program that's only been running for a very short period of time, so really powerful yeah that's very impressive, especially when you go back to your $9 million a day that those skills gaps are creating to costing the economy.

Kath Hume: 37:10

So very impressive.

Kade Brown: 37:12

Yeah.

Kath Hume: 37:12

I have one last question, and since my last podcast I've decided to put this at the end what does your reimagined workforce look like?

Kade Brown: 37:20

That's a fabulous question. I have heard you ask others this on the podcast and I found myself in furious agreement with some of the responses in previously. I'll try not to be too repetitive, though, with your other guests, but a year or two ago I read this article in Harvard Business Review. I think the author was Antonio Nieto Rodriguez. It really stuck with me and the title was the Project Economy has Arrived. I recommend going and reading at anyone that's listening to your podcast now a Yep

Kade Brown: 37:45

But ever since I read that, whenever people have asked me what does the future of work look like, my long answer is the future of work is projects. And what do I mean by this? It's not quite bye-bye to the traditional org structure, but it's close, probably in terms of our deference to structure, in the way that we work and the way that we come together to solve problems, I think, and also by the way that has all sorts of implications for how we manage and develop talent. But it's effectively coming together to form sort of virtual teams to solve particular challenges and the individuals that are swarming around those bringing their unique skills profile to bear to do so. I think it's underpinned by flexibility.

Kade Brown: 38:22

So flexibility in terms of time, flexibility in terms of borders and geography, flexibility in terms of collaboration mechanisms, but the idea that, as I say we are, we're not sitting in clearly defined job roles with clearly defined career paths ahead of us, but we are each a unique collection of rich skills that we can bring to bear on a case-by-case basis on solving challenges that face our organizations, noting that transformation is a new constant and that we're always reimagining and reinventing the way that we do business and the way that we work.

Kade Brown: 38:59

That feels like the reimagined workforce for me, and I think it's also. I mean, why that's so interesting to me is because there's such a strong skills lens to it. Right, it's enabled by an entire skilling or skills ecosystem and it contains a robust approach to verifying and credentialing those skills that each individual has, hopefully with some rich skill descriptors underneath each one that bring those skills alive, but also a way of surfacing those skills inside the organization. Probably two customers for this. There's the individual, the employee, who uses skills as a form of currency to trade with in their world of work.

Kade Brown: 39:35

It is yeah, and the other customer, I guess, is the manager or the business who needs to assemble project teams around those big problems, and they need to assemble project teams with the right complementary skillset. So I think the last thing is a sophisticated approach to building on those skills and turning those into pathways and turning those into careers through formal and informal learning, and aligning those skills strategies at an organizational level with the broader sort of business objectives as well. It's a much more, I think, and this is where I listened to your interview with Michelle It It know about you, know they're great friends of ours at RMIT online and we're such fans of their work and just listen equally to anything they have to say. But I think the word porous to describe her version of this future and I really like that term to describe it, because it's less rigid.

Kade Brown: 40:26

It's much more porous and borderless, both in geography, but also in terms of the org chart as well.

Kath Hume: 40:32

And that flexibility and what you said around that it's currency and that to me, if skills are currency, then the ability to develop your own skills or to be able to be, you know, tap into the opportunities that are available but really benefit from those. So if there's a course out there that someone sends you on or you're fortunate enough to be able to engage in, are you getting the most out of that? And to me, that ability to learn is that missing link there, and I think that so if people do have that ability to learn, then they can develop those skills. They're your currency and that's where you get agency and I think that we are seeing that more and more. It'll be interesting to see with the changing economic conditions if we lose a little bit of that and if the power and balance moves back in the employer's favor. But I still believe that ability to learn is the differentiator and if we can build that into people's toolkit, then everyone benefits because they're going to have competitive advantage, but they can be very, very valuable in our economy.

Kade Brown: 41:34

Totally. And when you talk about ability to learn, what underpins that, I think, is motivation to learn. What underpins motivation to learn is the right set of incentives, the right settings about how we can build learning inside work and work inside learning and make it sort of you know one thing, helping individuals see what that currency looks like and see how that links to career pathways, which means employers really focusing on not just delivering content and saying we've done learning, but doing learning in a way that drives skill attainment, that is tangible both to the individuals, so they feel that sense of outcome and that return on their own investment of time and effort, but so that the business can see that outcome as well. The ability to learn is underpinned by motivation, I think, and there's a lot of work that employers can do and are doing to really work on that as well and their role and that is important too.

Kath Hume: 42:28

And I think their role is about marrying it up, because where I start with my, with what I'm writing in the book, is about meaning, and I think that is that tends to be intrinsic, and I don't know if the employer can actually change that, but they can definitely align to it and highlight the purpose of the organisation and help people understand what's meaningful to them and then match things up and then we can progress, because we've got that discretionary effort that I always talk about, because people, if they're passionate and they're following the paths that is important to them, then we don't actually have to fight them to, we don't have to pull them into learning. They'll be pulling it themselves. And if you've listened to enough of my podcast, you know I'm a dreamer, but we've got to have some dreamers in the mix.

Kade Brown: 43:12

We absolutely do, and I can't wait to read your book, by the way .

Kath Hume: 43:14

Well, wait, I've got to finish it first. But yeah, I'll definitely share it with you when it's available. So how can people contact you, Kad Ke?

Kade Brown: 43:22

Well, people can absolutely track me down on LinkedIn. I've got a pretty unique name, so if they search for me, they should find me. And other than that, I mean we've got an email account that is monitored by me and my team at RMIT online. So if they want to email business solutions solutions@@ onlineeduau online RMIT.. . they will get me, and I'd love to speak to anyone that's listened to this and wants to have more of a chat.

Kath Hume: 43:44

Fabulous. So it's Kade Brown, k-a-d-e-b-r-o-w-n, and I will put all those links in the show notes as well, and I'm definitely going to go and find that article about belonging, because I haven't heard of that, but I'm super keen to go and delve into that. Thank you so much for your time. It's been awesome, as I expected it would. I've really been hoping to get university into these conversations, so it's really, really great that we're going to be able to share this and I look forward to staying in contact with you.

Kade Brown: 44:11

It's been lots of fun. Thanks so much, Kath.

Kath Hume: 44:13

It certainly has.

Voiceover: 44:16

Thanks for listening to the Reimagined Workforce podcast. We hope you've found some valuable ideas that you can apply to transform your own workforce today and tomorrow. Additional information and links can be found in the show notes for this episode at workforcetransformationscomau slash podcast. Please share this podcast with your community and leave us a rating to let us know what we can do better for you.