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Reimagined Workforce - Workforce Transformation
Stories from people who are driving workforce transformation to deliver business performance and value that matters.
Reimagined Workforce - Workforce Transformation
Innovative Solutions for Bridging the Gender Gap in Business
Unlock the secret to maximising women's economic power with insights from Ellen Sullivan, co-founder of EVEN.
Discover innovative strategies to propel women’s career development as we address the need for equal access to high-profile assignments and the reduction of non-promotable tasks. Ellen introduces EVEN’s unique approach—a year-long membership that provides women with a personal board of directors, designed foster growth. We emphasise the necessity of aligning personal values with organisational goals, maintaining a learning mindset, and understanding future skill demands to effectively plan career paths that benefit both individuals and organisations.
Uncover the unique challenges women encounter, from health issues like menopause to limited access to leadership roles, and understand the crucial importance of addressing skill gaps to prepare women for future careers.
Access the EVEN website at:
even-careers.com
Connect with Ellen on LinkedIn:
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
Purchase Kath's book Learn Solve Thrive: Making a difference that matters in a fast and complex world:
Learn Solve Thrive: Making a difference that matters in a fast and complex world : Hume, Kathryn Lee: Amazon.com.au: Books
Ellen Sullivan is the co-founder of EVEN, a holistic professional development platform dedicated to accelerating women's economic potential. Ellen is a business education trailblazer, with over 15,000 plus learners upskilled to date through her online learning innovations. As a leader at Melbourne Business School, Ellen created award-winning global academies, innovation labs, platforms and leadership programs advising clients such as Google, Department of Defence, ANZ Bank and CSIRO. With a design background from London, Ellen's a creative at heart and pushes beyond the conventional boundaries of the status quo. She's determined to make a life-changing impact for over 100,000 learners within the shortest time frame possible. Through a combination of creativity, the latest research and deep expertise in people development, Ellen believes this goal is possible as she raises two beautiful kids. Ellen Sullivan, welcome to the Reimagined Workforce podcast.
Ellen Sullivan:Hi Kath. Thank you for having me today. I'm very excited. I've been following you for a long time. I'm just delighted to join you in conversation today.
Ellen Sullivan:As am I, and reading through that bio, I just see so many parallels with my background and probably more my interests as well. So I just love the concept of innovation, the scale that you're trying to achieve, the scale that you're trying to achieve, the creativity that you're trying to bring to this space, but particularly interested in your interest in women and progressing things for women. So I'll just ask if you can start by telling us a little bit about the story behind where you are and what inspired you to focus specifically on accelerating women's economic potential.
Ellen Sullivan:Ellen Sullivan Okay ,
Ellen Sullivan:it's a hard question to kind of condense, you know, like one of those, it's like why, why have we done this? So I'm the co-founder of Even EVEN I've co-founded it with Dr Nora Kozlowski, and I think the question is why have we done that? So if I go back for me personally, you know all the way back to being a kid, I was one of those girls that was just elbowing her way into everything. I didn't see a gendered way of looking at the world, and I don't think many girls actually do. I was playing soccer, I was the one crawling in the mud with the guys, but I was also playing with sequins and I was doing ballet and I just was throwing myself at everything. I saw the world as even, and I just think that's where a lot of us start.
Ellen Sullivan:And it was only really when I was the full-time worker in my relationship with my husband and he was the primary carer for our children, and I had real health issues that a lot of women experience.
Ellen Sullivan:They have much more prevalent to have more chronic illnesses and for the first time in my life I was kind of going. This isn't fair. Just because I'm a woman, I'm dealing with more of these issues than a man or a colleague of mine whose male is, and so it was the first time I had to wake up and kind of go well, it's really not even. I still want to contribute to society, I still want to make money, but I can't because I'm a woman. So Nora and I founded EVEN six months ago. We've known each other over four years. We worked at Melbourne Business School as executives, so Nora was the Chief Innovation Officer at Melbourne Business School. When I left, I was leading the innovation lab. We met when we were both pregnant with our second children during the pandemic, and we've been very aligned around what could be possible if the world was even. So our background like 10 years each in leadership development, workforce development, online learning and we thought, well, look, we're working with business so closely and we know that business
Ellen Sullivan:is looking to close its gender gaps, especially at kind of that mid-career level. And we know that women are facing real challenges in so many different spaces. How about we bring our expertise to that space? And so that's why we created EVEN. And then I think the second part of your question was kind of what inspired us to focus on accelerating women's economic potential, and so I'm going to roll out a few stats here. Yeah, great.
Ellen Sullivan:So there's new research that's just come out recently which is showing that the ASX 300, nine out of ten CEOs are men, and there's not many women in the leadership pipeline to really change that anytime soon.
Ellen Sullivan:So that's one reason. Another reason is that 62% of women that are working age in Australia are working, but there's a gap, and so if we think about that gap, we could be adding 461,000 women as full-time employees to the Australian economy if we remove barriers for them to work. So what does that mean in a productivity sense? It means that there's 128 billion left on the table for the Australian economy because women can't participate in work in ways that works for them. And then the other one is and you know it's a personal favourite, I'm sure it's a personal favourite for you too, Kath is that Australia is facing massive skills gaps. So the Australian Industries Group found that 90% of businesses are facing a skills gap. That 90% of businesses are facing a skills gap, and so the reason our mission is to accelerate women's economic potential is we want to take some action on these types of challenges.
Kath Hume:I really like that. There's a business imperative behind this and the fact that you've got all that data and we all know that the skills gap is upon us. It's been around for a while and that optimising the resources that we have in our society is how we can address that. And there's other things that we need to do too. But I think it's a really, really good call out. And also I think that it worries me when I hear about those statistics because I think, if those are the decision makers, there is research I don't have it on me, but I know that all this research and you've probably got this around that women might make more compassionate decisions than a man and I'm generalizing, I know.
Kath Hume:But just if we've got equal representation and not just in gender, obviously across lots of the diversity spectrum, it just gives a better outcome for all the individuals that those organisations are serving. So I love it that it's not just about women for women's own benefit, but also to, I think, role models. If women can be in the workforce and role models to their kids, that's another way we can actually build the future workforce pipeline where it's the same, like we're all the same, we all have opportunities that present to us, and we don't have to be restricted because of gender or other reasons. So can you talk to us about how your experiences have shaped your approach to workforce development?
Ellen Sullivan:You know, I was at Melbourne Business School a long time and what kept me there was that I kept getting to work with businesses in really unique and innovative ways and what I was at Melbourne Business School. So I set up their online offering, like their early online offering, and then, when Nora joined, we kind of scaled that up with a really large team. I was a disruptor at Melbourne Business School, so it's a very well-known brand in Australia and it's a legacy organisation, and I got there and I was like where's online, where's digital? You know there's so many wonderful things happening in this space. This was the time of MOOCs and there was this real conversation going on around the democratization of education Mm-hmm. And so what I did whilst I was at the school was really ensuring that the wonderful, incredible resources of Melbourne Business School could be accessible by thousands of learners, and so I was creating capability academies, innovation labs, leadership development programs that typically used to only be offered to 20 people face-to-face, and so by the time I'd left, I'd upskilled 15,000 learners all across Australia because we'd been able to integrate online into the offering.
Ellen Sullivan:And that's really where I'm coming from at this. It's about creating more accessibility to the opportunities that are available in this country and available in our very incredible education institutions. But I've always come at it through an innovation lens. So what has worked in the past so you were just saying this when we started this off what's worked in the past just isn't going to work for the future. The problems are too big and knowledge is available everywhere now. So we can't with the advent of AI, we just can't kind of gate knowledge and insight anymore. We have to be able to allow everyone access to the same information and really get a lot more involved in how we think about career development and learning and allowing people to have real autonomy in where they want to take their career and there's not these friction points of excessive exclusivity or cost to kind of what they want to do in their life.
Ellen Sullivan:Yeah, Does that answer a little bit kind of where I'm coming from.
Kath Hume:Yeah, and it's so aligned. I'm wondering if our timelines are similar. But I think I did my Masters and I think I've mentioned it before on the podcast, but I did it in adult education, but I specialised in e-learning and I did lots of research around and this was so just to position us in time. I think around 2008.
Kath Hume:So Kevin Rudd was doing the rollout of one-to-one laptops for kids in schools. I think it was from year nine and above or year nine and below, anyway. There was sort of three years of cohort, but there was promise that we were going to see more of that. So I did lots of study around. What could we do for free, given that if we had that one-to-one rollout and there was so much potential for online learning to deliver more accessibility and equality and I was working in a school in a relatively low socioeconomic area and just seeing the difference that that could make for these families.
Kath Hume:And you know, there was people who were refugees and who would otherwise not have access to lots of opportunities, who this would be a life changer, literally a life changer for. And you know, I just think the scale of e-learning and also the pedagogy behind it, the asynchronous component, the ability to sort of have that available but reflect on it, and I think it would mean that teaching was different, and I'd be interested to hear what that looks like for you as well. But yeah, I just think there's so much potential, there's so much opportunity to level the playing field, so I really like it that you're moving in that direction. What do you think are the greatest challenges? You talked about health being one challenge. What do you think are the challenges that women are facing today?
Ellen Sullivan:I'm just going to check. Can you hear any background noise for me? I realize there's a bit of noise going on. Sorry, it's school holidays.
Kath Hume:I can't hear anything, and I can usually sort of strip stuff out. So please don't stress. And you know what, if there's kids in the background, doesn't that make a?
Ellen Sullivan:good part of the story.
Ellen Sullivan:Correct?
Ellen Sullivan:The way I like to answer kind of the challenges that women are facing is really showing how those challenges kind of come up for business, because it's not just woe is women, it's also woe is business. Women's career challenges have got a massive impact on organizations and business. So if you think about women not being promoted into those key leadership positions on boards or the C-suite within an organization, that means that a business is less profitable than their more diverse competitors. It's out there, that is just a fact. You think about women who have been proven to be more stressed and have poorer well-being than their male counterparts, that's going to mean there's lost productivity in a business because of absenteeism. We've got women who need to take time out from work because they might have children and then they want to return to work and for some like that, they feel that they've got challenges with confidence. Well, that means a business is going to lose current or future talent because it's not making it easier for women to kind of get back into the workforce.
Kath Hume:I mean, I can go on.
Ellen Sullivan:So, like women, Randstad found that 7% of women have had access to AI development and training in the last year. That's compared with 17% of men. So women do not have access to upskilling opportunities to enable the sustainability of their future career. But that also means for business that their future skill gaps widen and they won't be as competitive in the future. What's another one?
Ellen Sullivan:The hiding, the health issues. So I talked about my personal health issues, but we don't talk about it at work. We don't talk about that. Women have menopause. We don't talk about that. Women have chronic illnesses. It just needs to be able to be talked about, because we have women opting out of either full-time work or opting out of all work and not being able to kind of accelerate their careers because they've got health issues. And then you've got the flexibility piece as well. So flexible work really helps women to juggle all these different things they've got going on in their lives, but sometimes that might mean they become less promotable, depending on the organization they work for, the industry they're in and the culture that's going on. But that means that you've got talent attrition and you also are probably creating a risk for your business in regards to reputational issues and you need to have a negative employer brand.
Ellen Sullivan:So there's a lot of challenges women are facing and others really not just women but that means there's a real detrimental impact for business as well.
Kath Hume:It's actually really interesting because, as you're speaking about those, I often feel like I'm a bit of a fraud because obviously I'm a female, I've had four kids, so I've done what lots and lots of women do, but I personally have been really lucky to have leaders who have allowed me flexibility and being also very, very fortunate to be married to a school teacher so the school holiday thing isn't an issue and so I feel like I've kind of bypassed all of those challenges. But I think, too, I did have to do that by setting up my own business and doing something different. It wasn't the usual pathway, it wasn't the simple option, but it was the one that I kind of had to make happen if I wanted to be a mum but also have a career, and I think the priority for me most of the time was I didn't want to get to actually where I am today, where my kids have now finished school and sadly don't need me as much anymore and not have an identity, and so having a career, having a meaningful purpose outside of being a mum, being a mum, was always the priority. But I didn't want to arrive at this point in my life and I'm really grateful because I do see that happening with women, and I think I'm not sure if it was one of your posts, but I did see a post the other day talking about the women.
Kath Hume:Over 50 are some of the highest rates of homeless people, and part of that is because they haven't stayed in the workforce, they haven't maintained that skills base and so they don't remain valuable, and that confidence issue would be there as well. So I think what you're doing is really averting the future problems that we are likely to face if we keep on the trajectory that we're on. Which probably actually leads me into my favourite question is, which I've thrown in the middle this time but what does your reimagined workforce look like?
Ellen Sullivan:I love this question like this is the one where I'm like, oh yeah, what, what is my work? And then I was like, well, it's even. Yes, it's even, it's completely even. And so if I think about this in kind of the really tangible sense and I'm kind of going to go back to some of the stats I talked about at the start so we think about participation. It's even participation in work, so that's the 461,000 women who would have the opportunity to participate in the workforce. It's around productivity, so it's about those productivity gains from women engaging, being able to engage in work that works for them, so that $128 billion that the Australian economy could gain by having an even workforce.
Ellen Sullivan:And then, finally, it would be in regards to skills, so organisations, seeing that you can actually close your gender gaps and your skills gaps at the same time, if you're thinking about both those problems together, not in a linear sense, and so, with 44% of what's the stat from the World Economic Forum, I think it's 44% of skills within any role are going to change within a five-year period. And so if you start thinking about what are the skills you need for the future, or what are the tasks you're going to be doing in the future and thinking about what you have now in your workforce, instead of kind of the layoffs and kind of thinking about hiring new talent. How could you think about career mobility and career mobility for women and the types of skills they might need in the future and kind of what are those job transitions that could be created? So those would be kind of it's about participation, it's about productivity and it's about skills for me to create an even workforce.
Kath Hume:I really like that and I like the call out around career mobility. And one of the things I think would be interesting there is I've just written a book and I've got that stat in there about the 44% and then I've followed it up with some stats around. Rmit online did some research around the cost benefit of recruitment versus upskilling the workforce that you have and it's a bit of a 50-50. So there's not really that standout option where you say, okay, we're much better off to do this, but I think then it brings in those the things that are difficult to quantify so that the opportunities for women, the role modelling that they do for kids, like the future potential that they deliver by doing that for their kids.
Kath Hume:I just think there's so many benefits from having this approach to career development and it's interesting. I don't have the research on this, but I was looking at some McKinsey research the other day around generational insights and how lots of people try to argue that there's these massive differences between different generations and we try and put people into boxes and say, therefore, they like this approach to learning and et cetera, et cetera. And interestingly, this research suggested I think it was over 13 countries, a couple of thousand people, but it showed there wasn't a massive difference in terms of why people are attracted to jobs, why people stay in jobs or why people leave jobs. But the one difference was that younger workers will stay for career development.
Ellen Sullivan:Oh, absolutely yeah, it's like the number one thing. Why are you leaving the number one reason for attrition? Is there's not enough opportunities for career development or advancement? Like number one reason time again. And it's kind of like this magic, this like it's, it's the piece of magic if you can offer.
Kath Hume:It's the bit of gold, that's yeah, and it doesn't have to be programs, does it?
Ellen Sullivan:no sometimes, especially if they're just a few days, that they don't really have that much roi to them, and so there's all these different ways that you can do career development that will keep people and retain people in such for much longer periods than if you, if you, don't do it what I think is really crucial is the conversation.
Kath Hume:So the marrying up of this is what the organization needs, and we really have to get a clear insights and foresight on what that looks like. So the strategic priorities of an organization is so important to make clear. But then that enables those conversations with people to say why are you here? How do you, your values, align with our organization. Therefore, we get mutual benefit because we can marry up Okay, this is what you want to do, this is where you want your career to move, and then we can say so. Therefore, if we invest in you and you can see yourself here because we've created that story and that vision for you, then maybe people will invest and stay.
Kath Hume:And there's that longer term. You know we won't have the 17 jobs and six careers that we've got today. We'll have people who are more loyal. Stay. We retain organisational knowledge. We've got that longer term benefit because I think the churn that we've got now is so unproductive, like all that loss of organisational knowledge, that then we have to rebuild. And you know there's lots of data around. We've got an ageing population. They're leaving. The younger entrants aren't staying for as long. So we've got these theories about graduates, for example. We bring them on and we think that's going to solve our future workforce challenges, but when you look at it, actually they might not stay as long.
Ellen Sullivan:Yeah, there's no stickiness, there's no correct that hiring yes yeah.
Kath Hume:So what's that strategy and and are we going to realize that? So, oh, look, we could go on. Um, I was wondering if you could share a real life story about a solution that you've implemented and the people who benefited from it look, I'm gonna.
Ellen Sullivan:I'm gonna take this opportunity to talk about what evenEN is offering. So we have our first client. I can't announce that yet, but the offering for EVEN is it's evidence-based, so it's from what we know works. So it's one year of membership for career development with EVEN. It's because we know a day's program, a conference, doesn't work. It does make you feel really good, it does make you connect with some people, yep, but from a career development perspective, it's the roi is just not enough. And so we're like you know, our business model is we'll provide you one year of membership for the same price as a conference. Yeah, that's, that's kind of what we're offering. And so what we're doing is we're creating a personal board of directors for women.
Ellen Sullivan:When they come into Even because we know that is quite difficult Women are always saying they feel alone or they feel like they don't know people, women who are like them, who are either facing the same challenges or got the same career goals. And so we bring them together and we're creating that board of directors for them and they'll actually go through group coaching with a professional coach for that entire year. So we're creating the board of directors. Then we're also ensuring that there's no gates in regards to the upskilling that we provide, and it's also one of our beliefs is that we don't. We're not fixing women, because women don't need to be fixed. They're amazing already, yeah, and so our even unlimited offering is about uh, we offer life strategies in in kind of financial management in regards to like managing pregnancy or menopause at work, but then also kind of financial management in regards to like managing pregnancy or menopause at work, but then also kind of investing 101. Then we will support in regards to career strategies, so leadership, management, influence, negotiation, confidence we deal with that. And then also future skills, so AI, data, digital product growth but we offer all those and it's the woman's choice around what she's going to focus on.
Ellen Sullivan:So we will run masterclasses every single week in those spaces, all delivered by women who are role modeling what you can look like in these different spaces.
Ellen Sullivan:They're all executives, they've all succeeded in these spaces, and you could just focus on growing your AI capability, or actually you might want to focus on leadership, but we're not creating a program for you because we don't believe you need to be fixed. And then the other part of even is that it's all delivered by women. We know it's hard to find examples for women of what success can look like in so many different spaces, and so our experts are people who've been there, done that. They've got like it's hard earned expertise and it's practical. So you're not going to get mansplaining, you're not going to. It's just it's a world that's designed for women, and so we know it's working because we know we've got a very long wait list of women who are interested to sign up. And we know it's working because business are wanting to offer this to women as a retention strategy or a way to create a leadership pipeline for kind of those more executive roles.
Kath Hume:And so you talk about the pipeline and the career coaching. So and we talked earlier about, it's good to have a conversation with the organisation. So is this something that the organisation can embed into their existing career planning conversations or is it something that sits separate and this exists outside and then they have to bring it independently into the organisation? Or have you got different solutions for different purposes?
Ellen Sullivan:So the way we're starting because we know this is a challenge for business is we're starting by offering this to business. We know women want this at an individual level, but at the same time, we know women aren't great as investing in themselves. They'll invest in their families.
Ellen Sullivan:They'll invest in others, but investing in themselves is quite an ask, and so we're working with business and we understand. So where are your policies? Where are your strategies? What are your targets? Hopefully they're targets with teeth and they're targets that they're looking to achieve quite soon, because we really believe this can accelerate those targets and integrating into that. And you know, typically we'll hear them saying well, we also need to work with our managers, we also need to work with our decision makers and we also need to work with executive sponsors, and so that's actually part of the membership. So it's a membership for the women, but it's also a membership for the businesses that they work for, because sometimes it's also helpful to have an outside party come in and and really kind of talk about these issues. Yeah, and it doesn't have to. It's not on the women to have to point out these challenges. We're there to to help do that.
Kath Hume:Yeah, I engaged a coaching firm a couple of years back for some staff and one of them was talking about they had a tripartite agreement, so they had the coach, but they also had the leader was part of that, and so every couple of sessions they'd come and be involved and so they were across it and it was exactly what you said. They had that opportunity to speak to someone who was neutral and outside of the organisation but then bring it back in and say, okay, now how do we make this mutually beneficial?
Ellen Sullivan:Yeah, that would have got a much broader impact from that approach.
Kath Hume:Yeah, it just becomes holistic, comprehensive and future-oriented because it's going to be longer-lasting, and I like the idea of blending it into the workforce planning process as well and thinking about what are the capabilities and the capacity we're going to need, what are the strategic priorities? Where are we going?
Ellen Sullivan:Yeah, I think you could do this in a tokenistic way. You could say, okay, we'll just send some women on this, but really integrating it into the kind of the strategy of the business is actually where you're going to see the change.
Kath Hume:And I really like the idea that it's an ongoing 12 months and that call out that a one-day solution is not a long-last solution, but it's that Kirkpatrick level three and four. What business? What's the transferability? Are we having a business impact because we're doing this?
Ellen Sullivan:Yeah, yeah, and it's so important because then that creates business impact because we're doing this, yeah, yeah, and it's so important because then that creates the business case to keep doing this, because you do see the return on impact if you take a different approach and it plays out itself, it creates its own business case. But yeah, if you're sending individuals on something that isn't connected to what the organization is looking for, it will be hard to keep that going over time.
Kath Hume:So what advice have you got for organisations to fill their gaps and strengthen their leadership potential for women in the workplace?
Ellen Sullivan:I love this question as well because I love getting extremely practical and action orientated. So you know, you can talk about problems and challenges and impacts, but actually what can people?
Ellen Sullivan:do Like you know what can they actually do to make a change. So first of all, I would say focus on where the divide occurs. So there is, you know, there is a lot of focus sometimes especially because the board's looking at these targets that there's a focus on executive women and we still need to support executive women at management and leadership level. Focus on you know, your high potential, talent, your aspiring managers, your managers, your emerging leaders. Focus your action and your support for career development on where the divide occurs, because you're going to future-proof yourself and you're also going to get an outsized impact because you're going to be dealing with so many more people. Another approach is that you can ensure that women have access to those high profile assignments or those stretch assignments that really can lead to promotion or career mobility. So women have a higher likelihood and I don't think it's any surprise to anyone here that they will be given the non-promotable tasks.
Ellen Sullivan:So you know we've got a whole department meeting. Could you maybe book the room? Could you make sure we've got water in the room, or could you maybe help me present that? Just that's probably not a great idea to help women in their careers. How can those be, even? But then also, how could high profile assignments be even? How can that conversation start happening at a manager level? And then also, what can you start seeing in your organization around the divvy up of those high profile assignments? Another approach you could take is actually how you could amplify the voices of role models within your organization, within your industry, within your sector, so you can't be what you can't see. And it's so important for women who are looking to progress in their careers to be able to see there's so many different ways to be successful and there's so many different kind of be successful and there's so many different kind of careers that are possible for them. And then the other one would be kind of reducing kind of friction points for women to to learn. So we've got the friction point of not having enough time outside of work. So, ensuring that you can enable women to learn at work, what are the types of allowances that could be in place? What are the types of incentives for managers to ensure that people can learn at work?
Ellen Sullivan:I'd go with online first. So online doesn't need to be self-paced. It can be live, it can be engaging, it can be delivered in 45 minutes or 90 minutes. Go digital first, live it in 45 minutes or 90 minutes. Go digital first and then, if there's a desire to go face to face, then support to offer learning face to face. But if you go online first, people can integrate that flexibly into their work schedule.
Ellen Sullivan:And then my final one would be that and we kind of touched on it already is like accessing that talent surplus in roles for now and think about how you could transition them into the future so you know what kind of career mobility can you get, not just in a vertical sense but actually in a in a horizontal sense, so that you have you're creating sustainability for those women's careers, but you're also thinking about the future of your business. So they're like the five that I really like to share that are kind of real actions, that for those women's careers, but you're also thinking about the future of your business. So they're like the five that I really like to share that are kind of real actions that you can take to support women but also support your business.
Kath Hume:I love the practicality of all of those. One of the themes I felt was coming through here and from our conversation is that whole concept of a learning mindset, so the fact that learning doesn't have to be separate from work. It doesn't have to be something that sits outside and then we come back to work. If we are seeing the learning as something that we do in the flow of work, in those stretch assignments, we understand that learning can happen online equally as well, if not better, I would actually argue. Sometimes the asynchronous nature of online learning gives greater potential. We can design learning.
Kath Hume:I'm not saying that that's the only way we learn, but there's definitely things that come with online learning that don't come with face-to-face. But I do think that mindset of there's so much change in the world, there's so much complexity how do we actually help people learn to learn as well? So we can provide them with lots of tools and resources, but do they know how to engage with them to be effective and efficient in what they're trying to achieve? And also then back to those conversations around your career and what is it that you actually need to develop? What are those capabilities that will actually help you to achieve what you want to achieve and take that next step, so having a really clear picture and then it's achievable for people because they're not having to look at hundreds and thousands of options there and that can just be overwhelming and that in itself can be that barrier or that friction point that you talked about of. Oh wow, where do I start? So, yeah, I love the practical nature of all of those.
Ellen Sullivan:I mean, it's hard, isn't it, If you don't know what you want, and that is something that a lot of us go well, what do I want?
Kath Hume:That's not uncommon One year to five.
Ellen Sullivan:What's my five-year plan? Gosh, I don't know. And look, my advice would be think about your values first. What are your values? Advice would be think about your values first, what are your values, and then you can start defining what are your goals and your career goals. But if you don't know what your values are first, then it's going to be really hard to decide what your goals are and then also how your goals align to your organization's goals.
Kath Hume:Yeah, and I also think another helpful tip is to look at the World Economic Forum or any of those reliable, credible research that suggests what skills are going to be demanded in the future, versus the ones that could potentially be replaced by machines and AI to help people to navigate. Okay, I could invest a lot of my time in some skill, but then in five years' time of my time in some skill, but then in five years' time, it's no longer required. So, really help people to shift that mindset again to that future focus of okay, this is what I need today, but what am I likely to need in the future? And that's why I think that setting of strategic priorities is so important for organisations and why those conversations need to happen, because it's not always clear to an individual in an organization what that 5, 10, 20 year plan is. So that's why I think it's really important to have those conversations and have that clarity, opening that knowledge up to everyone because highly likely that most people want to stay but they don't know how they could be valuable.
Ellen Sullivan:Yeah, opening that up, that information up and creating that autonomy for people so they can kind of lean into what the future looks like, yeah I love that. That's um, that's a way you can really unlock kind of that change at scale and help your business kind of to work at the speed of change, I guess yeah, yeah.
Kath Hume:My last question is just if people wanted to get in contact with you, what's the best way to do that?
Ellen Sullivan:So, yep, you can find me on LinkedIn, ellen Sullivan. Reach out for a conversation. I love to chat. I mean, this is what's brilliant about creating even is I get? I get to focus on this problem every single day and I you know, I'll never get tired of chatting to people about this. But also, you can go to even-careerscom and you can learn more about what we're what we're doing at even and, you know, join our wait list for when we're launching. But also reach out to us in our email to kind of have a further conversation, especially if you're an organization who's looking to support women within your business.
Kath Hume:Fabulous, excellent, all right, well, I will put all of those links into the show notes as well so people can find them very easily. But thank you so much for your time. I've loved hearing more about it. I've got two daughters, so I'm very happy that there's people out there looking after their future, but I also think actually I've also got two sons and I think their world will be much better if they've got women in it and just more diverse populations in general, because you know, hopefully maybe then that gives them the opportunity, like your husband and my husband, to take some time to actually be the parent rather than the main breadwinner, and so everyone gets a go and I think you know that just is great for the kids and the workforce. And, yeah, there's so many benefits.
Kath Hume:So, great job. Great job for everyone.
Ellen Sullivan:Thank you, kath. Great job on raising four children Like that has to be said, what an achievement. Congratulations, and thank you so much for having me on four children Like that has to be said, what an achievement. Congratulations, and thank you so much for having me on. I've loved it.
Kath Hume:Thank you, thank you and thank you to Nora too. Thanks, kat, see you later.
