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In this milestone episode of the Reimagined Workforce podcast, I’m joined by Professor Barney Glover, Commissioner of Jobs and Skills Australia, to explore how data, insights and emerging technologies are reshaping the future of work.
Professor Glover leads a national body of work connecting labour market dynamics, skills systems and workforce planning. Supported by Deputy Commissioners Megan Lilly and Trevor Gould, the agency provides critical evidence to help individuals, organisations and governments make better workforce decisions.
In this conversation, we unpack key insights, including:
- Jobs and Skills Report 2025 – highlighting the need to align productivity, participation and skills. Nearly 90% of employment growth has come from service industries, and AI is augmenting rather than replacing work, increasing demand for human skills like communication and problem solving.
- VET National Data Asset Report – demonstrating strong employment outcomes and income uplift for those completing vocational education.
- Higher Education Outcomes Report – providing longitudinal insights into career pathways and earnings growth following university study.
- Generative AI insights – reinforcing that most roles will be augmented, reshaping tasks and elevating cognitive and human capabilities.
- Emerging priorities – including a shift to a skills-first economy and development of a National Skills Taxonomy to better define and deploy capability.
We also explore key workforce challenges, including:
- Misalignment between career aspirations and labour market demand
- The growing importance of vocational pathways alongside higher education
- The need for large-scale AI capability uplift
- Persistent participation gaps, including young people not in education, employment or training
- The role of inclusion and diversity in addressing skills shortages and improving productivity
What becomes clear is that workforce planning is no longer just about headcount. It is about capability, adaptability and informed decision-making, underpinned by high-quality data.
As Professor Glover AO shares, the opportunity is not just to respond to change, but to anticipate it—
Episode Transcript
Kath Hume: 00:10
This is the Reimagined Workforce Podcast, and I am your host, Kath Hume. Through my work, I’m privileged to have fascinating, thought-provoking conversations with people who inspire me and make me so optimistic about the future. They’re rethinking how work gets done and how we might do that better. I am aware that not everyone is as fortunate. So I created this podcast to bring some of these conversations to others who share a passion for reimagination. Today’s episode is a bit of a milestone, and I thought long and hard about who would be the perfect guest. Fortunately, I keynoted a conference with Professor Barney Glover late last year, and it became very clear that the work of Jobs and Skills Australia offers incredible value to anyone working in workforce strategy and capability development. It provides a clear line of sight between emerging skill needs, labour market dynamics, and the decisions we need to make today. For individuals and organisations, this means being better equipped to plan for what comes next. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. Welcome to a very special episode of the Reimagined Workforce podcast. This is our 50th episode, and I can’t think of a better guest to help us explore how we might reimagine the future of work so that organisations and the people within them thrive. Joining us today is Professor Barney Glover, Commissioner of Jobs and Skills Australia. In many ways, Professor Glover embodies what I dreamed when I started this podcast. His work focuses on anticipating the future through evidence, using labour market insights and workforce data to help Australians prepare for what comes next and create brighter futures for individuals, organizations, and communities. Professor Glover brings remarkable breadth and depth of experience to his role. He previously served as Vice-Chancellor of Western Sydney University and Charles Darwin University. Throughout his career, he has contributed to education, research, and innovation through leadership roles across universities, governments, and industry. He also contributes more broadly through service on a range of boards and advisory boards, including the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, and internationally as an honorary professor at the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City. His work across these roles reflects a deep commitment to expanding opportunity, strengthening the connection between education and employment, and ensuring workforce systems support thriving societies. On a personal note, it’s a real pleasure to welcome Professor Glover. In my work in strategic workforce planning, I regularly rely on labour market insights produced by Jobs and Skills Australia to help organisations understand workforce trends and make better decisions about the future workforce. And I am incredibly grateful for that amazing service. I was actually speaking with a group from a European country recently, and I was showing them what we have available to us in Australia, and I have to say they were extremely jealous of what we have available to us. So hats off to everyone at Jobs and Skills Australia who makes that available to us. But Professor Glover, welcome to the Reimagined Workforce Podcast.
Professor Glover: 03:31
Thank you, Kath. It’s great to be with you and congratulations on 50. And I’m very pleased to be your 50th guest and very happy to be here and to chat about something I’m very passionate about, which is the Australian labour market and how we can help Australians to reach their full potential in the Australian labour market and to navigate the national skills system to get there. So very happy to be with you.
Kath Hume: 03:55
Thank you, and as am I, I’m I’m absolutely thrilled that you agreed to be with us and to share your insights and to support others. And that’s the dream that I had when I created the podcast. Was I was fortunate to be in many conversations and have access to lots of information and good people with great intelligence and willingness to share, and it’s just very fitting that today I’ve got you as our guest. So thank you.
Kath Hume: 04:21
Thank you. I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what it is you do and why you love it so much.
Professor Glover: 04:28
It’s a very good question. Well, I’m the Jobs and Skills Australia Commissioner, which is a what’s called an independent statutory officer position with the Australian government. So I’m an independent advisor to government and to the broader community, um, to all of the key stakeholders who have an interest in jobs and skills in Australia, and that’s just about everyone. So providing advice. I have a team of people, including two deputy commissioners who support me, Megan Lilly and Trevor Gould are my two deputy commissioners, again, independent secretary officers, and a team of about 200 in Jobs and Skills Australia, relatively small agency, but it does a powerhouse of work, as you’ve outlined in your opening comments, Kath. It is truly, I think, a remarkably important part of the Australian government and the service we provide to people who are interested in the dynamics of our labour market and our skills system and how they’re working effectively together or not so effectively together. Where are the tension points? What do I do? Well, I’m ultimately responsible for the whole body of work that is underway within Jobs and Skills Australia, which means there’s a very significant amount of work that is focused on the workforce of today. What’s happening today in the workforce? What are internet vacancies like? What is what’s happening with employers and recruitment difficulty? What are we doing in skilled migration? All of these key point-in-time analyses of the Australian labour market, occupational shortages, core skilled occupation lists, all the sorts of very important business as usual parts of the mechanisms that help to inform and provide advice to policymakers and to the public more broadly. So all of that work, as well as the future-focused work, what’s what do we anticipate happening in the labour market in the future? What do we see with employment trends into the future? What can we see happening in our skills system in the future? And then we do a range of big projects. Last year, for example, we did a big project on generative AI, and I took the lead on that project. The commissioners, deputy commissioners, and I take leads on various big projects, and I took the lead on that one. Megan Lilly took the lead on our gender economic equality study, a very, very big and important study last year. And Trevor Gould has been leading our work on foundation skills. We’re doing a big, we just completed a big survey nationally of foundation skills, literacy, numeracy, and digital skills. And we’re doing some work at the moment on in a project called Mutu Youngaland, which is focused on remote indigenous communities and how how we should consider and respond to issues around foundation skills in that very different context. So it’s an exciting body of work. I lead the body of work. We make reports to governments and into the public domain. And importantly, I’m the spokesperson. I’m there talking to people like you, Kath, and many others who are interested in what’s happening and to explain the work of JSA and to be there to help encourage people to think differently about the dynamics of our labour market. A lot of young people now, particularly post-COVID, sort of struggling with what direction should I take in life and what’s what’s the right choice of career path for me? And we provide, as you know, a raft of data sources that can help people in making those sorts of decisions and to understanding how to navigate our skill system and our labour market. So there’s a big public relations role for the Commissioner. And today, for example, I’ve been involved in meetings with state and territory ministers to talk about state and territory priorities for Jobs and Skills Australia. So it is a very outwardly focused role, but also ultimately responsible for this incredible body of work by these very talented public servants.
Kath Hume: 08:35
What I think is amazing is I was with a group of high school students, so year 10 students this week, we’re looking at your occupational skills shortages list, for example. But then I go out into quite large organizations, and I and so it’s accessible and usable for a range of different audiences. And I think what I love about it is that it’s all working towards that same ultimate goal, is to have people in occupations that they enjoy, where they will thrive, where they can, as you said, live to their potential, and ultimately that’s the best thing for our economy. Then we’ve optimized our human resources and the people within our societies. And I think there’s a lot coming out, as you would know. You talked about leading that piece of work on AI, but I was listening to something earlier in the week, just around what’s the impact of AI on going to be on loneliness and how are we reimagining work and to ensure that we’re protecting that because as we all know, loneliness is becoming a really prominent problem in society. So I think the work that you’re leading is just making such a huge difference in the lives of so many Australians. So one other thing that I really liked that you said that I really caught on is the whole premise of the reimagined workforce is that you’re encouraging people to think differently. So where we’ve come from in the past is not where we’re going in the future. So I love that you’re anticipating the future and providing those insights. I know we can’t predict the future, but giving us a hint and helping us to see what might happen so we can do that scenario planning and be better prepared.
Professor Glover: 10:16
Yeah, no, it’s very, very important. There was a very significant OECD study last year that provided an interesting insight into the career aspirations of 15-year-olds. So it’s a very important study under their PISA program. And 750,000 15-year-olds were interviewed from 17 OECD countries, including Australia and New Zealand and many others. But the fascinating thing about the data that came out, and the troubling bit about the data, was that the top five, the top 10 occupations that young people were thinking that they’d like to be when they left school hadn’t changed much in 30 years. And what was even more troubling was when you looked at it against where we see really dynamic change and growth in the labour market, they were almost diametrically opposite. In other words, they were choosing things where the opportunities were very limited and not where there is an enormous amount of growth in the future. So in Australia, the economy is dominated at the moment by growth in health care and social assistance and the care economy in Australia is growing significantly. We’re seeing quite a shift from the producing industries to the to the service industries. It’s been ongoing now for some time, and it our projections are that it will continue on. So when you talk to young people and they give you their career aspirations, and they’re actually misaligned with opportunity, that’s a challenge. It was also misaligned with a sense of, well, what sort of post-secondary education do I need as a 15-year-old? Are they thinking about tertiary education and the jobs of the future and reimagining the workforce of the future that they’ll be part of? And often they were, they didn’t have a sophisticated concept at age 15 of post-secondary education. Whereas we know at Jobs and Skills Australia that over 90% of the jobs of the future within the next five years will require post-secondary education qualifications. And we also know that in the Australian context, and it’s very true elsewhere, I was actually talking to someone from the UK from our sister organization, Skills England, just earlier this week about some of the challenges that they’re addressing in the UK and what we’re looking at in Australia. But thinking about what we’re seeing as an imbalance in our post-secondary education system in Australia. That is, we’ve had enormous reforms in post-secondary education, vocational training in higher ed, but we have overqualified the workforce in higher education and not qualified it enough in vocational training. 60% of the all of the jobs in the construction sector are in shortage because we’re not generating young people interested in apprenticeships and careers in the construction industry. And we need that as a country that wants to build 1.2 million homes and create the jobs of the future that might be really interesting in a technology-rich environment. So we’re needing to address this lack of parody of esteem between our vet sector and our higher ed sector, something in Europe you don’t see to the same extent. The polytechnics in Germany and the universities live side by side and are highly regarded. In Australia, we don’t have that sense between our TAFES and our universities. We should. We haven’t got it yet. So we need to do a lot of educating of young people about wonderful career opportunities into vocational education and training and to grow our higher education system. This is not about curtailing that, but we need to see a significant in VET. One of the other troubling things that came out of the conversation I had with my colleague in England comes to your point a moment ago, Kath, about about loneliness and about mental health issues in general. We have in Australia at the moment a troubling set of data around people not in employment education or training, young people, 15 to 24 year olds. So in regional Australia, it’s one in six young people are not in employment education or training. And in metropolitan Australia, it’s one in ten. So not only are they not participating in the training system, they’re not engaged at all in education or employment. And that’s a worry. And that number has spiked. And we need to find out what’s happening and how we can lift the aspiration of young people. And partly, that comes back to the quality of careers advice. And when you unpack quality careers advice, you end up at JSA. Because you end up, where’s the evidence base? Where is the compelling data that tells a young person, well, what are the pathways that might take me from where I am to what I’d like to be, or possibly other things I’d like to be? I don’t want to be locked into a single career pathway. The future is about many career pathways for us. It’s not a single, you know, work in the same job for 40 years. It’s going to be very different. So two of our really important, I think our most important reports from JSA every year. One is the VET National Data Asset Report, and the other is our higher education outcomes report. They both came out late last year. Now, these are both reports based on what’s called PLIDA data. PLIDA is person-level integrated data asset of the Australian Bureau
Professor Glover: 15:47
of Statistics. And this is where the ABS has linked a whole lot of data together from tax data to schools data to vet data to social services data. So we can track what happens to people as they move through education and training and ask the question what happens next? Does it make any difference to their lives? And not surprisingly, but impressively, in our VNDA report last year, on average, median income uplift. If you complete a vet qualification in Australia, you’ve got a median income uplift of about $15,000 a year in the first year or so of coming out of your VET qualification. That’s great. You have a big uplift in employability, and you have a big uplift in opportunity to go to further study. And remarkably, over 40% of people who are on income support before they do their vet qualification come off income support from the government after. And that’s a great example of how people are getting out of that intergenerational poverty challenge and moving into an opportunity to earn money and participate in quality jobs in the Australian labour market. So the VNDA data is incredible. VET National Data Asset, well worth looking at. You can actually interrogate it down to what happens if I do a CERT two in hospitality or I or do a CERT three in electrotechnology. It gives you all of that data about median income uplift and employability. Interestingly, side by side with that is our higher education outcomes data. And this is doing the same analysis for people who are completing their higher education qualifications. And we went back and we looked at what happened to them over five and ten years. So it’s longitudinal data. And it is a remarkable story of success. On average, over the first five years, if you complete a degree, you have on average about a 35% increase in salary over the first five years. That’s impressive. Um, and in some areas, you know, you do a nursing degree, you end up mostly in nursing, but not always in nursing. About 70-odd percent end up in nursing. Engineers, yes, mostly go into engineering, but not all of them. And then you have some other degrees, like a Bachelor of Arts, a Bachelor of Social Sciences, a Bachelor of Business, Bachelor of IT, that end up moving into a whole raft of different areas. And this, I think, is where young people who are thinking about the work in the future, imagining or reimagining the workforce of the future, can get a real sense of, wow, if I do this degree, look at all of the opportunities that come from that in these very, very different areas. And you start to say, well, yeah, this is not locking you in to a particular outcome. It’s actually opening up a raft of outcomes. And one of the things I think is most important about that, coming back to the generative AI conversation we had, because you you have to reimagine the workforce of the future in the context of generative AI and agentic AI, that will be the transformation of our economy over the next few years will be the impact of Gen AI. But one thing that we see happening at the moment when we’re thinking about and imagining the workforce of the future is the importance of the cognitive skills. So critical thinking, problem solving, communication, being able to work in a team, the whole raft of skills which are appearing now more frequently in job adverts because we analyze job adverts and less so technical skills. And we’re also seeing a move towards skills as the basis for recruitment away from qualifications and credentials. And when you think of those cognitive and you think about that skills first framework for recruitment, it emphasizes the importance of the humanities, the arts and social sciences. Because the arts and social sciences and humanities are very much about those cognitive skills. That’s very much what they teach in a whole raft of interesting areas of application and in different cognate areas and discipline contexts, all very, very important. So one thing that I say frequently, whenever I have a chance, is to say this is the renaissance of the humanities. Wow. Because we had concerns about various policy settings that have impacted on the humanities in higher education, the so-called jobs-ready graduate reforms and the impact that’s had. And I think the generative AI revolution we’re in and will continue, is going to require more and more people to have the skills that comes from an arts degree from an Australian university. So there’s a lot that I think our reports, like Banda and higher ed outcomes, I think it tells a remarkably powerful story to young people and to people who are being
Professor Glover: 20:54
disrupted in the labour market in various ways. You know, we’re in whenever you have an industrial revolution, in this case it’s a generative AI or an AI revolution, you have disruption and you have dislocation and you have job losses and new jobs emerge, and the ratio between them changes as the impact of the technology takes full effect. But when in that context and you’re in a vulnerable area, then it’s important to think about skilling and reskilling. And again, it’s it’s great to have that sense of well, what are the pathway opportunities? One thing that we recommended in our big Gen AI study last year was the critical importance of upskilling all Australians in their Gen AI skills. It’s a major focus for this government in Australia to pick up this and to find ways through, I think, empowering our future skills organization, one of our great jobs and skills councils, under Patrick Kidd, that’s focused on this question of how do we accelerate AI. Skill acquisition because if we don’t give people the agency to participate in this reimagined future by having the skills they need, then they won’t be able to participate to their full potential. So we’ve got to do all of this baseline uplift. And and by the way, there are countries in our region already doing that. So we’ve got to be careful we’re not left behind. But we’ve also got to be saying all of our vet lecturers, all of our academics in universities, they need to be confident in the use of AI tools and confident in being able to pass on to students those skills. So they emerge from degree programs and vet courses ready for the workforce of the future. And that has to be comfort familiarity with AI. You’ve got to be AI literate and or AI fluent or AI competent. These are the new competencies and skills that people will need to operate. Because a lot of technical things are going to be done by AI. So you’ve got to have all of those human skills as well as all of those cognitive capabilities and that AI familiarity in order to be successful. One of the other dimensions that you think about reimagining the workforce of the future. When we did our study, we’re interested in two other dimensions that I think are really important. One is a labour mobility dimension. And this this is a really interesting observation that some of the areas which are likely to be heavily impacted by AI and clerical and administrative tasks often fall into this category. Many of those are gender biased to women. And when you look at the labour mobility of women in those particular areas, they end up moving into occupations that are also susceptible to impact from AI. So when we think about these impacts on the labour market, we’ve got to be careful of gender implications as well as implications on First Nations and equity groups. But for women, it’s quite an interesting challenge that we now have to provide an opportunity for people who are going to be dislocated in some way by AI and to make sure they have an opportunity to move into areas where they can upskill and reskill and have confidence in their future. So that labour mobility piece, I think, is really important about the workforce of the future. One of the other areas that gets mentioned a great deal in terms of disruption is entry-level jobs. And people worried that, in a way, agentic AI will be the entry-level graduate intern of the future. So what happens to entry-level jobs? So that’s a very important point. We haven’t seen that in Australia yet. We look very carefully at what happens with entry-level jobs. We’re not seeing any particular impact in the Australian labour market, but there will be some. It’s interesting in other places the US is seeing some impact on entry-level roles. When I talk to business leaders in various industry sectors about their AI journey, because many of them are not particularly AI competent or AI literate, but they understand it is a game changer potentially for their industry sector. And they’re thinking about recruiting, you know, digital natives, those who are AI fluent, young people coming in entry-level, because they need the knowledge base those people bring to
Professor Glover: 25:32
influence the way they will capture the benefits of an AI-infused future. So they see them as part of the upskilling of their own workforce and the introduction of new ideas and opportunities. So, in a way, that’s enhancing the entry-level pathway for people who are who are AI literate. I’ve had some great examples of that in different industry sectors. So I think the AI dimension is a really important one that we all have to watch carefully. The government’s released its national AI strategy, which is an important part of shaping the national narrative around artificial intelligence. The onus now is on a whole range of participants in our labour market and in our skills system and more broadly in the community to respond to that. And we need JSA to some extent and others to monitor the impact over time. Our report was a point-in-time analysis, but now we need to find out well how much of that is going to come to fruition and how quickly. And where we were a bit different in our analysis to some commentators and the media and tech gurus and others is we were predicting much more augmentation than automation. Yes. So our analysis said, well, yes, almost every job to some degree or other is going to be augmented by AI, but the job will still be there with a very important human dimension to it, but supplemented, complemented, and enhanced by AI. There’ll be hybrid jobs that emerge because AI will allow you to create new ways of combining existing work together. And then, of course, you have an opportunity for new jobs to emerge. And we’ve we put out a report last year where we saw just on the horizon some emerging spikes of jobs in new areas. Again, great asset for young people thinking about interesting jobs in the future. And want to be a quantum computing technician. Not many of them. There’ll be lots of them in the future. Um so there needs to be that you know, very, very careful analysis of augmentation versus automation. The big job losses we’ve seen in the tech and the finance industry are not surprising. In some cases, that that wasn’t so much an AI reset as a really a reset from companies that have over-recruited in recent years. So that I think is a reset. Some of it’s AI driven. So we’ll see how that plays out in the next few years. But I have a very positive view of the reimagined workforce of the future because I do think we’ll not just equilibrate to the benefits of artificial intelligence, but will also accommodate the human dimension to work in the future and the quality of work. It’ll take away drudgery from some roles where some transactional, repetitive transactional work can disappear and people can then refocus on other interesting parts and particularly client and customer-centered aspects of the role. Interestingly, one of the challenges that people talk a bit about with AI is work intensity. Because if you think about the normal working day, you know, you have ebbs and flows, sometimes intensely busy, sometimes less so. If you take out the parts where you’re not very busy, because AI will do that part of your work, and you move everything into the more intensive zone of activity, that will take its toll on people. So we need to accommodate changing ways in which people will work. And um one thing that we emphasized in our study was the importance of inclusive implementation of technology in the workplace. I think if we look at what works successfully, it is when workers and management are working together to design the implementation of a technology transformation. AI is just one example of it. So I think in in imagining the future, I’m reassured by many of the companies I’m talking to that they’re very inclusive. And quite often it’s because workers are already using AI and not telling you that’s exactly right.
Kath Hume: 29:46
They’re the ones doing it. So best that we ask them. And I think it’s that in work intensity is really important as well, because I think what I’m seeing is a lot of people talking about or hoping for productivity gains from AI, but not a lot of conversation around so what do we do with that time saved? And I think that’s a really important thing that we should be discussing, and as you said, have a that human-centered design approach to be asking the people who are doing it, and you you also touched on a few things um aspirations. So, what would people like to be doing rather than what do organizations just want people to be doing? The skill adjacencies that you talked about, you know, declining professions, where might they be able to utilize those skills elsewhere? So I think all of the reports that you’re talking about just give visibility to people. So is there’s not that lack of hope or optimism that the world is changing around me and I’m helpless to do anything about it. I think it’s a real enabler that you’re giving them all of this information. Um, one of the things that you also mentioned around human skills, so I my background is learning and development and HR and economics, and I’ve sort of combined all of those, but learning and development, I really think that that learn of mobility is going to come about when people are have the capability to learn and we need to really build that skill of learning independently because we can’t always rely on organisations to educate us, especially if we’re looking at upskilling to move outside of an organization. But one of the things I’m really interested, and I’m not sure if you’ve how much thought you’ve put into this. So, my role as a strategic workforce planner is to go into an organization and and just for listeners, in case they’re not aware, is to really look at what are the trends happening in the environment around the organization that we’re thinking about over a say probably five to ten year period. So we can’t predict, we’ve but we want to anticipate, so we’ve got some capability of adapting to that environment if and when it happens, but then putting plans in place to say, okay, there’s multiple levers that we can move to prepare for this, and we can do it in a sustained fashion, and time is that we can do it incrementally. Um, what do you see for the role of the strategic workforce planner in ensuring that your data and reports and intelligence is utilized as it’s intended to really complement the organization, but also the individuals and then the people we serve in those organizations?
Professor Glover: 32:23
I look, I think it’s a fascinating time for strategic planning. It’s it’s probably never been quite so challenging in a way. Um primarily because um if you look at aspects of the digital revolution of the last 30 years or so, the
Professor Glover: 32:41
ability to begin to scenario plan and and strategic plan what the future might look like, as much as you can determine it and then work back and start preparing for digital transformation. I suspect now with generative and and particularly with agentic AI, that’s going to be even more challenging to predict in a way. So strategic planning is going to take on another edge of perhaps the time frames are being contracted a little bit.
Kath Hume: 33:10
That’s correct.
Professor Glover: 33:11
And I think that’s that’s um probably a good thing because in Australia, if we want to be competitive, we want our businesses and industry to be competitive, and particularly if they want to be globally competitive, and the time frames are going to contract. They’re going to need to be thinking not in the five-year horizon, but in a two to three-year horizon as they think about repositioning themselves for a in a different context. So the strategic planning aspects are really important part of it. I hope that our data is going to be of value. I’m sure people will appreciate the way it’s been been put together. And of course, a lot of it is point-of-time data. So, apart from our big employment projections over the next five and ten years, which are looking out beyond the horizon, the rest of the data is really what’s the trend been like, where are we at, what’s emerging, and how do we provide some analysis and interpretation around that. Interestingly, though, we did recast our five and ten year employment projections as part of the generative AI study because we wanted to impose upon our model, our equilibrium model on the labour market, we wanted to impose upon it some additional assumptions around the depth and the breadth of AI uptake as a way of saying, well, what does that do to employment? Because we had all the work we’d done on augmentation and automation, and we could make assumptions about how slow or how rapidly industry would pick up AI and implement it and so on. So we did some longer-term forecasting on that. And that’s, I think, something strategic planners should look at because it begins to show not so much an overall decline in employment levels, but it shows a different pattern of growth over time, particularly initially some flattening out and then some increase. So we see a different structure to the labour market growth in the five-year horizon to the 10-year horizon, but still we see growth. Now that’s driven by some assumptions about augmentation and automation, so that needs to be reworked on a fairly regular basis, and governments will do that, and and I’m sure the Australian government will be doing it. But it does, I think, add another dimension to the planning horizon work about you know what do we need to be saying to businesses about what’s likely to happen and how to prepare for it and and how to future-proof yourself to a certain extent. One of the things I often say to young people when they ask the question about what I should do to future-proof myself, I said, well, be AI literate, because that will help you enormously, and have an open mind to the opportunities, because there are many opportunities out there. But you walk walk into a job interview and that you’re confident around AI and you understand hallucinations and you understand that managing an agentic AI system is to interpret and ensure that you have the capacity to ensure the outcomes and the output from that are actually fit for purpose. So there’s a lot to be said for someone walking in future-proofing themselves, just as businesses need to take advantage of that data that we have, point in time, and some of the longer-term trend stuff to help in longer-term planning.
Kath Hume: 36:30
Oh, there’s so much richness in all of you have to say and all of those reports. I will send links to all of those and I’ll include those in the show notes. You have touched on this already, but I do ask every guest, what does your reimagined workforce look like?
Professor Glover: 36:46
As I said, I’m really positive about the future, despite some of the almost dystopian views you hear from people about robotics and AI and the future. I’m much more confident about the future than that. And so my reimagined workforce actually comes back to something Kathy, you said a little earlier, which was around productivity gain. When I talk to colleagues in the public service about AI, I refer them to a particularly telling graph that’s in our AI study. And it shows hours worked mapped against salary increases in the professional areas of the economy over the last 20 years. And what it shows is hours worked going up steeply, salary increases nowhere near a steep. So one of the first things we need to capture with AI is around recapturing our life and our work-life balance. Because it is a great tool to help us to better manage our work when it’s used appropriately. And I think the big copilot trial that was done by the Australian Public Service showed that yes, people could see how it could benefit them, whether they’re policy makers in the general policy sense or whether they’re more specialists, they could see how it can take away some of the challenges they face if they’ve got the capacity to manage it well and could be of huge benefit. So my first comment is let’s get ourselves back equilibrated in life. I think when I reimagine the workforce of the future, I see a workforce where people have got that balance in their life. And I see a workforce which is much more inclusive. One of the things that we spend a lot of time looking at at JSA, and I shout at every opportunity, is the benefit of a diverse workforce. So we’ve done studies to look at the relationship between occupational shortages and gender segregation. So if you’re in a gender segregated occupation, so male-dominated or female dominated, much more likely to be in shortage. If you have a balance of men and women in your workforce, you’re less likely to have shortages. The same applies to an aged workforce. If you have a reasonable proportion of older workers, you’re less likely to be in shortage. And that’s 45 and above. And in fact, if you have a multi-generational workforce, you’re less likely to be in shortage. The benefits of older workers working with younger workers is hugely important. If you have more First Nations employees, if you have more people with disability working in your organization, you’re less likely to have shortages. The other important thing that we note is that occupational shortages, high levels of shortages, equate to low levels of productivity. So if we want to uplift productivity, let’s make our workplaces more inclusive. So my reimagined workforce of the future is one where the balance is there in people’s lives. And importantly, we have a very diverse and inclusive labour market. And by virtue of that, we are managing occupational shortages and we’re driving up productivity in the national benefit. And of course, there’s the dimension that that should bring around the quality of work and that people are paid appropriately for the quality in quality jobs because we want people, and this is something, again, AI can help us with in many, many ways. So I have a very positive view of a reimagined workforce. I also think people will engage with that labour market in very different ways. Absolutely. That’s exciting. Sometimes they’ll be a contractor, sometimes they’ll be a part-time employee, sometimes they will be a full-time employee, and sometimes they’ll be on a short-term contract and whatever. This is the nature of a dynamic workforce. We do need to see higher levels of labour mobility in Australia. We’ve seen that decline in recent years. People are not leaving one job and moving to another to advance their opportunities, to increase their salaries that we saw historically. We need to see more labour mobility because that’s good for the economy. It brings more people into the economy and it’s a wonderful opportunity. And I’d like to think the reimagined workforce is one where the barriers to participation are lowered considerably so people have an opportunity from a disadvantaged background to participate to their full potential and to see that much more prominently than we we see at the moment. And I think that’s an aspiration everyone should share. But I see it in a very positive way, Kath.
Kath Hume: 41:34
And it’s so great that you’re in the position you are because I think that optimistic future that you’re painting that picture of is so appealing to me, and I’m sure it would be to others. But I think we need someone with that optimism to be leading this work because you can see that’s at the foundations of everything that’s being provided, it’s all about how do we make the future better. So, on that note, thank you so, so much for setting aside the time. I know you’re a very busy person and got very big responsibilities. So really appreciate that.
Kath Hume: 42:06
Could I ask if people wanted to contact you, is there a way that you would be happy for them to do so?
Professor Glover: 42:13
Yes, Jobs and Skills Australia has a very straightforward public communications arrangement through our website so people can always get in touch. It’s not hard to get in touch with me, it’s barney.glover@ jobsandskills.gov.au. So very happy for people who have an interest in the labour market. We’re about to go to public consultation on our next work plan. So if people have ideas about what they think we should prioritize under our act, um we’ve just been reviewed, and our act has just been reviewed in a very positive way for JSA. But our act requires us to go to public consultation on many, many things. So if people are interested, they should have a look at our website. It’ll tell them how they can participate in our public consultation. And it’s always valuable to have people from diverse parts of society tell us a little bit about their lived experience, the labour market and the skill system and their ideas for where we might focus our work in the future.
Kath Hume: 43:10
What an incredible opportunity for all of us to actually shape the work plan. That’s amazing. That’s perfect timing, too. And I will include information about all of that in the show notes. So thank you so much, Professor Glover. It’s been a pleasure.
Speaker 1: 43:23
Thank you, Kathryn. Great talking to you, and good luck with number 51 after this.
Kath Hume: 43:29
Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to the Reimagined Workforce Podcast. If you found the episode valuable, I’d encourage you to share it with your network and subscribe so you don’t miss any further conversations. You can also find show notes and resources at www.workforce transformations.com.au slash podcast. If you’re looking to take a more structured and practical approach to strategic workforce planning or capability development, you can connect with me on LinkedIn or Via the Workforce Transformations website. But for now, let’s just enjoy reimagining the workforce together
High-stakes learning environments
Ulrik Christensen:
So I think that there is a huge disconnect in large parts of the world, particularly the ones where death and disability is not the consequence of bad learning. Then we hide behind a complacency around learning, where the people who have decided to live in that illusion are waking up to harsh reality because it’s not sustainable with all the things happening in the world right now. So back to can we instil a growth mindset?
First of all, the answer is yes, now that we have destroyed it in the first place, it has actually been shown that you can. You can teach people a growth mindset. David Yeager published a paper in nature when they showed that just teaching high school kids the principles of a growth mindset, their academic performance improved. That was like a very, very small intervention.
Ulrik Christensen:
So just understanding the principles of a growth mindset, said, helps, and that’s of course, one of the things that set humans apart. We are able to learn principles and then go apply them if they really appeal to us and make sense.
The impact of competing priorities on learning
The bigger problem is with adults is that we have so many competing priorities. We have so many bosses yelling at us, colleagues who are preparing for how they get ahead in the queue, because we think it’s a zero-sum game and if I don’t get ahead in the in line, they will get the promotion before me. And I think that as employers, like we have a rapidly increasing responsibility to establish a different kind of culture around learning, where learning is an option, but, on the other hand, is not something that is being forced upon you either.
Hopefully you can establish and I’ve in some cases failed to do that, but establish environment where people understand why they need to learn in the first place.
Kath Hume:
I am also intrigued by the things like the LinkedIn learning report.
Kath Hume:
You know, McKinsey do a lot of reports around the retention of staff and how people really see learning as an opportunity for career growth and moving along into the futures that they want to create.
Kath Hume:
But what I also feel is and it’s a could be the way their questions are worded. But I feel that people think of learning as being taught and they are almost the passive recipient of knowledge and therefore someone else’s responsibility is to educate them. And whilst, yes, there’s definitely a place for the learning and instruction driven by another external party, I really would love to see that learning culture and start developing those skills for people themselves.
So then they’ve got the agility to go and move into other areas, and I think, when you talk about your staff, if they were able to appreciate that we’re learning all the time, but how do you actually embed that? How do you do some repetition or some reflection or some visualisations to just cement that, but otherwise we’re going to forget that. So maybe it’s not a separate thing, maybe it’s just part of what we do all the time.
Motivation for learning
Ulrik Christensen:
So I think that a lot of people will say that they want to learn in corporate world. But one of the things we find quite frequently is that there is a difference, like, if it’s something that can give me the next promotion, then it makes sense.
If it’s something that has a less direct consequence positive consequence on my life, the answer actually is different, or at least the behaviour is different, and that’s why I think that it’s one of the very important tasks we have ahead of us is to establish some kind of a currency for learning in the future. What does it mean? Is it just meaningless batches or meaningless degrees? Because, honestly, would you like to have surgery, like to have a surgeon do surgery on your kid? Because they watch the YouTube video and they got a badge for it? Of course, not for everything that is important to us.
We do apply serious due diligence on whether we have reason to believe that they’re learning actually works and that they’re mastering what they’re proposing to master, whereas a lot of the discussions we have about badging and gamification and these kinds of things are living in a completely different kind of la la land where we put ridiculous labels and pixels on the screen instead of actually daring to have the tough discussion.
Differentiating gaming and learning
Ulrik Christensen:
Which is what is it that matters to adults? And many years ago I’m like more than 10 years, 15 years ago I hired a top game designer. He had made one of the blockbuster games in the world. Like every man is dog knows the game what.
What is interesting about it was we relatively quickly concluded together that education was fundamentally different from gaming in a couple of very important ways.
First of all, games were made to abuse your time or to occupy your time and keep you engaged for as long as possible, whereas in education, we typically run out of time and we want to get you to proficiency as fast as possible. So that’s the first.
Ulrik Christensen:
But the second one is that, in order to establish gaming, constructs are goals that are that adults are willing to try to pursue.
Ulrik Christensen:
They have to be completely different. For kids, it can be okay to collect dots or cards or whatever attitude adjustment tools have been tried in classroom management, but for adults it’s very different. It needs to be money, it needs to be better living conditions, it needs to be more spare time, more influence on your life.
It’s actually the really tough ones for employers to give in on and to accept that this is part of it, which means that if we are to engage in that as the driver of people’s learning, we may be facing a bigger problem than and then actually tying the learning directly to becoming meaningful, just as is as part of the daily life.
That and the problems you’re solving because nobody has to force me to learn. I’m super self-driven, but I choose my own destiny. I choose what I’m interested in, even in my spare time. I learn all the time but I pick, and I think that that’s a very important part of that discussion about why do people decide to learn in the first place?
How learning can lead to happiness
Kath Hume:
I love where you are taking this conversation here. So I read this book Happiness by Design by Paul Dolan, and he brings it down to that happiness comes down to two fundamentals – pleasure and purpose.
So, pleasure is that I’m having fun right now, in this moment, and that’s your gamification. But also, then, purpose is what am I here for? What’s the legacy I’m going to leave on the world, and that’s that intrinsic motivation that drives you.
So, I think in your situation it’s really clear that you understand, you’ve got a vision for the future that you want to create and you’re motivated to achieve that. Your purpose is really clear to you.
Kath Hume:
I’m wondering about organisations though. So, we talk about purpose driven organisations more and more, but I do wonder if people struggle to understand what their purpose is. And I think that if we tell people that ” it’s easy.
All you have to do is work out what your purpose is and then follow those goals”. That leads to frustration, I would imagine, when people are saying I can’t go, what’s my purpose? And so do you think that there’s a role for organisations to help people in finding that, so they can marry it up with what the organizational purpose is? So, as we’ve on this shared path and we can actually support each other in our journeys?
Ulrik Christensen:
So I think only very few people have any empiric data to support statements about this. My suggestion to where to look for the answer would be the following I think it becomes too wiffy wuffy to say that it’s the purpose of the organisation that can drive individual’s decision to invest and engage in learning.
And I think that a large part of the discussions we’ve had about upskilling and reskilling and skills the last years have been somewhat confusing for a lot of people. Meaning like, oh, I need to learn Python, let me do a little bit of Python here or there, or let me let me sign up for something. But I cannot take too much of my time because I have to go back and do my real job. So if you’re in that situation where it doesn’t, it isn’t accomplishable goals that is more clearly aligned with what you feel that you are trying to do right now.
I think that we will have a hard time. I think we’ll continue to run into the same roadblocks. So what is the alternative? Are there some good examples out there of things that work? I believe there is, like actually some. Particularly in high school is some of the most advanced situations you find, apart from the people where they die and they have to solve the problem. We can go back to that.
If we look at the high schools and the organisations that have worked on mastery-based learning or project-based learning. The ones that have done it best have actually shown the way in many ways. Where the students, the kids, are really driving this. They are designing things, and we’ve just concluded the first phase of a giant project in North Carolina run by an organisation called Spark NC, where, for instance, Unity takes part in it and the kids are doing real things.
Making learning meaningful
Ulrik Christensen:
One of the things we have seen that we have a trouble with in schools should be super obvious to solve for adults, which is it has to be meaningful. I t has to be real. In school you often end up with artificial exercises invented for something. And you know it doesn’t matter whether they do a really good job.
There’s nobody’s going to look at it anyway. We don’t have that problem in the corporate world, right, because everything we do actually has real relevance. And it could be something that somebody else is looking at.
So that first part is taken care of, but the second part is that they have turned it on its head and said we start with the problem we’re trying to solve and then we build learning around it.
Ulrik Christensen:
But when did you last see that in corporations where people said, okay, we’re going to go through this M&A with a company. We’re going to as a team, we’re going to learn different things, we’re all going to find something we want to learn from this? I’ve never heard about it. I’m an advisor to top banks and transaction advisors. I’ve asked many people if they’ve ever heard about this. Never. Why not like? Why not?
Ulrik Christensen:
Actually and this is my this is the Forbes article coming out next week about teach people not to be a jerk.
Ulrik Christensen:
I’ve been through several transactions and I know quite a few people on the other side of the table, of course, not from Andrew’s previous organisation, but where they probably would benefit from not being a jerk, where, like we’ve been harder to negotiate with because they were jerks, they felt entitled.
So people going through an M&A it’s super obvious to learn, not like at least practice not to be a jerk, or practice how to do conflict resolution or practice how to be conscious about our own limitation, or there are so many things, or it could be.
In the finance department, they learn more about cross-border taxes, but we never do that. And that means that it for me it’s like a penalty kicking soccer I don’t know what it’s called in in Aussie rules, but the equivalent is probably being able to punch somebody with his hand tied behind his back. But if you are, it’s obvious to be able to say let’s pick something that has meaning already and that’s built learning around that.
Learning through problem solving
Kath Hume:
We’ve got someone who I interviewed on the podcast in Australia called Kieran Murrihy and he has done some beautiful work with school age children in rural communities where they go find a problem in their community and they go and create ideas. That’s called the Crazy Ideas College. They go and partner up with the people then in the community who can help solve it so they learn work-based skills by going and engaging in these partnerships and he’s found we don’t have the brain drain in those local communities, because people stay, because they’re committed, and they these kids then are part of the solution and it’s beautiful what he’s been doing.
Kath Hume:
One of the things that I really like to do in my work is I build a community of practice and so believe that that social constructivist view of learning. So we bring people together, we look at what the problem is, use human-centred design to say what’s the actual real problem, we are here to innovate, but we’re here to learn along the way as well.
We develop those metacognitive skills to say how are we learning and how are we promoting learning individually, but also then producing resources and support tools so other people can learn from that solution as well. I think people are doing it. I would love some case studies. I don’t know that I can share too many of the ones that I’ve worked on, but I’ll see if I can. But yeah, I think that more and more, we’re seeing this human-centred design to solve problems. But are we bringing learning into that arena as well? Not sure.
Two recent breakthroughs enabling learning
Ulrik Christensen:
Well, but I think that there’s been some major obstacles. That is like it’s not groundbreaking to propose this by any means, but how do you then execute it? That’s the big problem, and it means that you have to be able to rely on non-human delivered education, because if you are to have a company with 5,000 people and 5,000 learning paths, what are you gonna do? How are you going to handle that if, if you just leave people on their own?
I think there are two big breakthroughs that has happened within the last few years. The first one is that you can actually make e-learning now that that is reliable, as opposed to the stuff where we throw a bunch of slides at people and ask three questions at the end, which we all know doesn’t work. But we now have for years been proving that you can take some of the most hard core problems in the world and use this for it the toughest physician problems you core problems to solve with us.
So if it’s good enough for them, it’s probably good enough for more bite-side stuff. But the second part, of course, is as well how do you deal with the ad hoc guidance, because that’s been the other big stumbling block, that depth of learning or personalised instruction, stuff like that. That’s not the answer to that non-linear learning models. But what actually has come as a gift from heaven is you can just ask chatGPT.
It is actually incredibly good at getting you over that. Next time. So, combining these two worlds one where you actually have a super knowledgeable person who you have a specific problem you’re stuck like trying to solve your problem. What is this? What is important here? What should you focus on? And then say, oh, now I get it, this is what I need to go do, and then you go learn something deeper. It’s not enough with chatGPT, don’t get me wrong. This is far from being enough.
Ulrik Christensen:
And what is interesting about these most super hardcore areas I’ve been studying lately is when and the best example is something as weird and niche as cave divers. But the thing is they’re exposing themselves for extreme life danger. It is a super dangerous thing. Many of them admit that they probably do not deserve to be alive still. But what did that lead to? That led to a safety culture.
That led to an education culture where the top, top people deciding how do we do education are the ones who need the next generation to be trained to join these missions, and that has led to something which is a beautiful combination of knowledge and skills and attitude development, plus safety systems like checklists and quality assurance systems.
All the things that we know from human factors really, really matter, and there is one of the leading experts in this in the world is actually in Australia. But it’s fascinating when you find these pockets of brilliant education.
Drivers for brilliant education
Ulrik Christensen:
What is it that drove it? It’s a profound, honest desire and need for the education to work. But I think the big difference here is, for them, it was worth investing in doing it. When you’re hired in a bank or an insurance company or in a manufacturing plant, what makes it worthwhile for you to do this?
And can we make it accessible enough that we can lower the barriers to entry enough? But then the other part of it is are people even aware that they need to learn? We had some feedback very, very positive feedback across the board but we often find in these systems that some people are very resistant to learning. They’re actively against trying to improve.
Raising awareness for the unconsciously incompetent
Ulrik Christensen:
And that qualitative comment paraphrase it a little bit to anonymise it, but that person basically said that this system he never wanted to see it again because it made him unsure of himself when he was answering something incorrectly and he was asked to say how sure it was about the answer and he was wrong about it.
It told him he was wrong. How dare you? I have lost my confidence. It’s like you’ve lost your confidence because you should lose your confidence if you were wrong about something and you thought you were right about it. You were unconsciously and incompetent and you’re blaming the system. You didn’t even get it.
Ulrik Christensen:
Luckily, this person is an outlier. But the wild thing is that if you have these situations where people are so you could say treatment resistant, that they insist on being deliberately incompetent. That’s pretty wild when you see this. Luckily, there’s two thirds of most adult populations we’ve studied.
Once you get to the people who are actually engaging in the learning, once you get to those, you’re actually seeing the two thirds genuinely want to learn. They just can’t find the time for it. Often it’s like more than 90% who genuinely wants to learn. So that’s the good news that a lot of people, if you make learning relevant, they engage immediately.
Creating learning and performance zones to optimise our outcomes
Kath Hume:
I think it is about that environment too. There’s a really cool TED talk that I’ll link to in the show notes, but it talks about dividing your time between learning zone and performance zone. When are the times at work where it’s absolutely critical that you perform at your best? So they would be those high-states environments like medical and airlines is a good example too, but there’d be lots of them in any workplace. We all have them. Where you need to be on your game. This is not a learning opportunity. But then when are those moments to learn?
Kath Hume:
So we could go back again to your colleagues who are saying they don’t have time to learn. But maybe what are the things that we could do? Where we’re just pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone and doing the things that we’re not comfortable with, but in a safe way. But the scenario that you just mentioned there around being told that you’re wrong that’s not what we want to create in workplaces.
We don’t want to have people learning and then told that they’re wrong. We want to create a learning culture where people have opportunities to fail in safe ways, where they can then get the feedback and this podcast I was listening to from you. We’re talking about identifying weaknesses for the benefit of overcoming those weaknesses, rather than just to point them out, merely to say you’re incompetent and leave it at that. So I’m really interested. Could you give us a bit more clarity around what you mean by adaptive learning and then talk to us maybe about a problem that you’ve solved with adaptive learning?
Learning from what we don’t know
Ulrik Christensen:
Yeah. So the interesting thing is with knowledge in many ways is pretty concrete, right? You either know something or you don’t, and if you don’t know it, it’s actually a big advantage to get crisp around whether you’re there or not. It’s a little bit like if you were only allowed to see like one third of your golf shots, your golf game would improve a lot slower than otherwise. The interesting thing here is it is actually not as dangerous to be told you’re wrong if you’re in a private environment. If you cannot live with the fact that the system tells you on the way that you thought that the text rules were X, but they really were Y and you were wrong about thinking they were X. You have a serious problem.
The bigger problem that people often confuse this with is when you’re learning in a team setting, you do not want to be corrected in front of your peers. This is one of the very early findings we found when we worked on simulators that it has been the standard in aviation simulation. You rarely show the final crash. You abort the simulation before that, whereas when we started to build the computer simulators for patient treatment we could go all the way. We didn’t have nearly the same psychological negative impact by letting the patients die and letting people follow this and try to course correct all the way until the last second.
So I think that there is a lot of merit to using private systems to knock that shell off people who are very treatment resistant. And this is one of the things where you will find that there are some populations that are really hard to reach.
We’ve just recently and we are allowed to talk about it worked a lot with physicians in Saudi Arabia. They had a huge challenge that a lot of their internal medicine physicians had a hard time passing their recertification board exams less than half of them and in a few years we got it close to 100 percent not fully 100, but over 90.
Ulrik Christensen:
And these are good examples because the thing here is, first of all, getting a precise measurement instrument of telling you where you are compared to where you want to be. You don’t want to tell people that they’re bad people, but that’s a very different thing than saying that your suggestion for which antibiotic to use for that disease should be a different one. Yes, you are telling them that they’re wrong, but you’re not telling them they’re bad people. You’re just helping them improve.
Getting good at identifying weaknesses
But the second part of it is and this has been my big interest, which is how do you work with this metacognition of getting good at identifying what you don’t know so you can more quickly hone in on the things you are weaker at, which is the performance you see among top performers? Top performers are always doing this they’re looking at the things that they’re least good at. They’re not celebrating their successes they don’t need to celebrate their successes Whereas the weaker performers are celebrating all the things they have learned, but not the 15 percent that they missed and therefore trying to build skills like this by weaving it into what you’re learning anyway.
Ulrik Christensen:
So a lot of people have seen color-coded buttons. How sure are you about this answer? This is a method that we derived from expert performers more than 20 years ago and the last part of what is initial. That was initial to address people who are really hard to reach, and then we realised this is a completely pervasive pattern that people can benefit from getting faster and more accurate at realising what they don’t know.
We did some really, really fascinating statistics on large, higher-edition population, where we showed that on very large, very, very large hundreds of thousands of college students. We showed that within using these methods in one semester for one semester in one subject. We made them twice as fast and twice as accurate, knowing what they didn’t know. So this is a big improvement if you can basically shape your generic ability to looking at what you’re doing and what you know and say I have a weakness here.
Kath Hume:
And I think that comes back to the mindset that you talked about earlier. It’s okay to find if you have a weakness, if you know that you can overcome that weakness, and I like what you say about it. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or that there’s a deficiency in you as a person. It’s just a learning gap that can be filled. And if we have people who are capable of learning and are confident in driving that themselves, then hopefully we’ve got that autonomy and empowerment so as they can do that themselves.
Building adaptive learning systems
Ulrik Christensen:
One of the big reasons why we made these adaptive systems in the first place was that we realized that there were no reliable methods out there for validation of what you know and don’t know, not as a test, but as a way to, in a safe manner, secure that you had the tools in your toolbox to actually solve the much harder problems out there. And that’s why we built these systems initially. Not as to prepare people for a test or final performance of that kind, but as a way to meticulously monitor their learning process. So that you were sure that you had accomplished the skills you needed. Because I’ve never met a physician who said I wouldn’t love to know everything I need in a given case when I have a patient in front of me. My dream is to immediately be able to pull it out of my mental drawer and be able to do the right thing. There is nobody who says ‘who bothers’. Like everybody would love to have that magic skill right?
Ulrik Christensen:
And this is how these systems started saying in these critical situations where you could potentially save lives or like do something really good. Wouldn’t you love to be able to store things on your mental hard drive in a better way? So it was useful there. You could use it as part of a complex problem solving. Of course, everybody says yes. That’s why you then need to build the education in a different way, because you have no idea after you’ve been through medical school. What did I miss?
Ulrik Christensen:
No yeah, you can graduate with very fine grades and you have no clue what’s staying and what is evaporated since you learned it the first time.
Kath Hume:
So when you talk about the systems, is it an interface? How does it work? Can you give us a little bit of a practical understanding of how it actually functions for the learner?
Ulrik Christensen:
Well, so the best is maybe to the main thing we’re known for. Oh, this is the system that asks all these questions. Yes, it is, because that’s what good teachers do. Yes, good teachers are asking a lot of questions. That’s why, when the first day in medical school in Copenhagen, you’re told get somebody to study with, you need to ask each other a lot of questions. You need to practice whether you’ve actually learned this.
Voice over:
I love that.
Appointing a coach from the outset
Ulrik Christensen:
You need somebody who learns how to pick up Just in the tone of your voice that you’re not certain about the answer. So a lot of this is actually taken out of and out of the methods, that’s taken out of my own career as a lifelong learner and say what is it that the best learners out there do? Well, and, yes, I’ve read all of these books behind me and I’ve forgotten a lot of it because I didn’t learn it in an appropriate way. But the things that are most important, which is an emergency medicine for me at least, all these things, I can still do that 20 years after without practicing everyday.
Kath Hume:
Yeah, it reminds me of Peak, the book by Anders Erickson, and he talks about Deliberate Practice and he says find a coach, essentially. So put something into practice, get feedback, get some instruction on how to address that, and then continually and intentionally improve over time. And so it sounds very, very similar to that, but it’s a system rather than a person.
Ulrik Christensen:
That is not a coincidence. Anders and I studied this together. A nders is one of my best friends and we worked really closely for almost 20 years. And when I originally democratised it’s actually his research I moved from experts to non-top performers and when I showed it to him the first time, I was holding my breath being afraid what he would tell me.
I pictured his thinking, but he did the opposite. He said promise me one thing I want to be part of the research teams that are investigating this further. So we worked together. It became a career- long friendship.
Kath Hume:
Excellent. Oh wow, I’ll put the link in the show notes because that’s one of my favorite books. But that’s phenomenal that you worked so closely together. I wasn’t aware of that relationship before today. That’s great.
Ulrik Christensen:
Anders has a lot of the honor for why we actually built these metacognitive systems the way we did. Because it’s directly inspired from what he was primarily interested in experts. But I thought we could translate this to non-experts and it has worked incredibly well. I actually attribute this significant part of the macro effect we see of these systems.
We don’t know exactly why it happens, but we can reduce initial training time to half. That’s pretty monumental and we can reduce rehearsal time or repractice time to stay proficient to one tenth. So how can we do that? And I think this is probably the most important effective ingredient in it.
Kath Hume:
Wow, yeah, I’m very excited. I have one question that I ask all my guests, and that is I think you’ve answered it, but if you could articulate for us what does your reimagined workforce look like? So what’s your idea, or what’s your future vision for the workforce? That would be your preference that we should be aiming for.
Ulrik’s reimagined workforce
Ulrik Christensen:
So I think there are probably three parts that is different from today. Also many things that are the same. But the first one is that we recruit people in a different way. We get hired and we get recruited based on what we’re able to do, not based on a sheet of paper or a list of words. I think the second part is that we will see that the future employee or colleague is behaving like.
Ulrik Christensen:
When you look at top sports people which I enjoy very much to study, particularly to talk to them when they didn’t win the championship or they didn’t become Olympic gold medalists and try to find out what do they take away from it. And the top performers are constantly learning. They constantly, always have a plan, and Anders did the same.
A lot of his research was around this, which was how do you build the plan for what to go back and improve? How do you decide on what to improve? And then I think the third one is that we move out of the idea that people are predetermined to a certain level of performance.
Ulrik Christensen:
All of my research for 20 some years has shown that we cannot predict who the top performers will be. How fast you learn is not a good predictor how much you know already is not a good predictor. Your ability to learn is probably the best predictor. But how do we monitor that? Because that’s something we need to look at moving forward.
So that means what if we change the incentive schedules to looking at who are making the delta and who are delivering real value with what they’re doing. As opposed to who are living up to our preconceived notions about what top performers probably look like?
So in some ways, in a popular way, I’m proposing that we do Moneyball in corporations. Let’s look at who gets on base instead of who has the pretty girlfriend and the right kind of haircut and the beautiful swing.
Kath Hume:
That’s so funny that you mentioned Moneyball, because Nick Kennedy, who I worked with quite closely in strategic workforce planning, he always uses Moneyball analogies and he’s right. They do look at and they use data and they look at. Then they break it down into what do we actually hope to achieve and then they deliver on those metrics. So it’s very funny that you use that analogy. I think we’ve run out of time, but if people did want to connect with you, how would they best do that?
Ulrik Christensen:
So they can write on LinkedIn or you can share my email as well.
Kath Hume:
Okay, thank you so much. It’s been a great conversation. I think I’d love to continue it and I think you’ve got an amazing repertoire of experiences there to share, and I’d love to dig into some of that research that you’ve talked to too. So if there’s any of that we can share in the show notes, I’ll put that down as well. But thank you so much for joining us and all the best.
Ulrik Christensen:
And we also have a local Aussie. Andrew can answer a lot of these questions as well. He’s in the same time.
Kath Hume:
Yes, that’s Andrew Smith, and he’s with us today as well, but I will also put Andrew’s details in the show notes as well. So thank you very much.
Ulrik Christensen:
You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.
