Helping Others Find Their Dream Careers

Episode Transcript

SB S1 E9 – Denise Leaser

Kelly: [00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Welcome to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. I am your host Kelly Bailey. Each week I chat with inspiring visionaries about the skills that made them successful, how they developed those skills and their innovations on improving skills based hiring and learning around the world. Come learn what skills help you live your best life.

This week we have Denise, you know what Denise, the one question I didn’t ask you was how to pronounce your last name before we were just going over all this stuff. I apologize. So

Denise: That’s okay. It’s easier than it than it looks. It’s just, it’s Hartsock-Leaser.

Kelly: It is so much easier than it looks. Thank you. I’m going to give a little background on Denise real quick. Denise is the president of Great Biz Tools. She is a serial entrepreneur with [00:01:00] 25 years experience developing learning and development and HR tech innovations, such as web assess, my energy genius, compass, and pulse, the leading training program in the utility locating sector. A recognized thought leader and employee assessment, and has provided guidance for the US department of education.

And is a featured speaker for industry groups like CTA and training magazine. Denise believes that when people love what they do, they can change the world and that’s why she is committed to developing tools and programs to match people to the jobs they were born to do. Denise, thank you so much for joining us today.

I love that. I hope you don’t mind, I pulled it from your LinkedIn profile because it just really, really resonated with me.

Denise: Great. Yeah, no, I love it. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Kelly: Oh my pleasure. So everyone knows that I’m located in New Jersey. Denise is joining us from Florida today. How’s [00:02:00] everything going down there in Florida, Denise?

Denise: Absolutely beautiful.

Kelly: So jealous. I mean, not that weather is bad here, but you know, I’m lacking Palm trees.

Denise: Yeah. Yeah. I’m looking, I’m surrounded by Palm trees, so I’m loving it.

Kelly: So lovely. Well, Denise, I’m really excited to jump in and talk a little bit more about your business, but before we do that, can we talk a little bit about your history, kind of the journey that led you to Great Biz Tools and what you feel made you successful?

Denise: Yeah. So I was in management positions in corporations and working with that involved in not just managing employees, but managing departments, managing training, developing training programs. And I had my first daughter and found out that she had special needs. My world was turned upside down and I needed to create, I didn’t, I was traveling at the time 50% of the time.

I [00:03:00] knew that wasn’t going to work for me, and so I wanted to be there for her. So I needed to come up with a way to create a work from home job. At that time, there weren’t a lot of them. At that time. And so I went back to school and I started my company and and then eventually merged with another company.

When I was in companies working, I just saw so many people that were unhappy and so many people that weren’t really good at what they did. And so they felt like they weren’t successful and they had low self esteem, but it really was they just weren’t a good fit for their job. And people that were just miserable didn’t like what they were doing, but felt like they were stuck.

Didn’t know what else to do. And I thought to myself, I really want to make a change here because I had something similar where I needed to change my career too. And I wasn’t sure how to pivot. And so I ended up finding my dream career and now [00:04:00] my company focuses on creating tools to help people find their dream career.

So I really feel very fortunate in the turn of events that happened. And I think one of the things that really helps me be successful, is resiliency. And I think that’s a key for everybody. Resiliency and being able to say, I don’t care how many times I get knocked down or how many times life throws me a curve ball. I’m going to try to figure out how to make the best out of it.

And then also, just being able to problem solve and say, I see an issue, how do I solve that problem? So that’s really a problem solver. I love that it’s exciting to solve problems and that really is what I get to do every day.

Kelly: I absolutely love that. And I love the personal side of this story too, because typically that is something that happens. Something in life happens that makes us look at the way that we’re navigating our life in terms of [00:05:00] our work, which takes up obviously the majority of our time and our family.

So thank you so much for sharing that. I have a similar experience in my life that made me realize I also needed to figure out how to not travel as much, be home more so I can definitely appreciate that more. And I’m sure we all have some flavor of that experience. And then I love the idea that you mentioned.

Well, the problem solving thing and sort of this concept of resilience skills. Resiliency is such an important facet, at least in my mind, in my opinion in life. But the problem solving, it was interesting. One of the earlier podcasts guest, I think it was back in, I want to say it was episode two. He had written an article about if you always focus on solving problems, you’ll be successful in life.

And that’s just something, one of those quotes that has just stuck with me. And so I completely agree with you that if you’re always trying to figure out how to solve something, especially when it’s completely relevant to you, something that you see, something that you personally experienced because you feel about it a different way [00:06:00] and it just keeps you kind of going.

 And just like you said, these things come up in our life, like we never know. That’s what we were chatting about before we hit record here today, you guys was just this issue of like low confidence and not being happy and what that really does to reverberate around your life.

And the fact that you’ve really kind of pushed through this stuff. I just love to hear that. So now I’m super curious that you mentioned that resiliency and this idea of like solving problems are kind of these skills, if you will, that have helped lead to your success with starting this business and now being able to focus on your passion, what would you say?

Like, I always wonder if these, I know you mentioned you went back to school, do you feel like this is something you learned in more of a formal education environment? Or was this something you just figured out through life?

Denise: Yeah, I think it was the way I was raised really. I think just an innate. You know, growing up, I was probably more annoying to [00:07:00] my sisters because I was always trying to solve their problems. And they’re like, I just want to tell you about it. I don’t want you to solve it, you know? So I think it’s just something that’s in me. But I think resilience is something that’s learned and I think it’s something that if you’re never too old to learn it.

And I think that I was reading this book called Blitz Scaling. And it’s about how to make your business pivot and change and be adaptive. I really looked at it like, wow, this can really apply to our lives too. And I think COVID really has thrown a curve ball in businesses and personal lives and every aspect of our lives.

People that can’t adapt and pivot and regroup are going to really struggle every time something happens in your personal life or in the environment or in society. And I think adaptability and perseverance are two things that you can learn that [00:08:00] if you learn those, it will change your life.

And it will be nothing but good things that come out of it. You can’t just stay at home and go, I don’t know what to do. The things I normally do aren’t there anymore or have changed. So I’m just, depression is on the rise and there’s a lot of bad things happening, but the saying make lemonade.

When life gives you lemons make lemonade. You have to be able to say, how can I turn this into something good. Being able to work remotely, being able to work from home actually is providing opportunities for people that didn’t exist before. Nobody thought, there’s companies that were like, “the whole remote work thing. I don’t know how I’d make it work. It’s too hard. It’s too complicated.”

And then all of a sudden, in two weeks they made it work and it’s changed [00:09:00] people’s lives for the better in that companies don’t have to look just in their zip code anymore. They can look outside their zip code, provide more opportunities to more people, people in rural communities, people in disadvantaged communities can now compete for jobs that weren’t accessible to them before.

And I just think we have to look at the bright side and have to look at how we can turn things around and make a difference in the world. That’s just a skill that will be something you’ll never regret.

Kelly: I absolutely love this. And what I’m really curious to hear now, too, is you mentioned this being a learned skill.

So now I wonder if you have any suggestions on how people can seek out and learn more about how to be adaptable? Because if you’re right. The thing is that our world changes all the time. I just think about all the time, my kids found one of my old flip phones the other day, like the ones that opened and then there was [00:10:00] like a keyboard, and it was so funny because when they took out that phone, I was like, that was before you guys were born.

And then my oldest is 12. Okay. And then I opened up the phone and there were pictures on the phone when they were like toddlers. And I was like this, I just in my head thought that was forever ago. But you think of all the changes that have happened in your lifetime. I just gave one technology example, but we have to figure that out.

Right. I remember figuring out how to use the big old phones that were attached to the car and then the ones that you held and then a Blackberry and then an iPhone. And then we were just talking about Mac’s and PC and again, that’s just technology, but all things in life are constantly changing.

If you also want to progress in your life, I think it’s the Einstein quote that’s like, the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. That’s really something, but how do people go out and seek learning how to be adaptable.

Denise: Yes. So [00:11:00] one real quick thing before that though, is if you think about the rate of change, so all the different things you were talking about, the Carphone in a suitcase to the flip phone, to the to the razor.

I mean, you look at all that progression. It took years to go there. Now it’s months or sometimes weeks. And so the rate of change is getting faster and it will continue to go faster and faster and faster. And in fact, even in businesses, they talk about being agile as one of the most important things to be successful.

You can’t make a plan and have that plan even last for the year, much less a five-year plan. It’s going to be constantly changing. So there’s a lot of different courses online. There’s self-help tools that are out there. There’s a lot of courses you can take on learning how to be more resilient and learning how to be more [00:12:00] adaptable.

I don’t have a specific one I’d recommend, but there’s a lot out there. There’s a lot of tools out there and I know IBM has soft skills training, professional soft skills training, that have some really good courses. They’re all free. LinkedIn learning has courses. I mean, there’s a lot of courses out there that are free that you can get access to.

And then the rest of the work has to be internal. It might take journaling to write down this is what happened, what are some different actions I could take? So there’s different things that you can do, but the change has to happen internally. I mean, you can’t just take a course and go, okay, got it.

You have to really meaningfully and intentionally change your mindset and that takes work and it’s not going to happen overnight, but it will happen. If you try, if you put that effort in.

Kelly: Just like the changes that we just talked about, these technological changes, right? They didn’t, like you said, they didn’t happen overnight.

So even when you decide to like, [00:13:00] okay, I’m going to figure this out. Just be patient. Google is free guys. Go with Google to learn about resiliency. Just know that it’s just something that happens over time. It’s just not something that happens.

Like, we all want things to be immediate. My internet was down yesterday. And let me tell you, okay.

Denise: No, it’s not like when the phones are down, I feel stranded for some reason, it’s like, well, it wasn’t that long ago you didn’t need things like that, but now I’m in a desert island and I can’t communicate. But I think the most important thing to let people know is to be patient with yourself.

We all want things fast and we want things immediately, and especially in our society now it’s like people’s attention span is three seconds long. But be patient with yourself. [00:14:00] And when you’re making significant changes to yourself and your life and your outlook, it’s going to take time.

It’s going to take practice and you’re going to have stumbles, but just be patient with yourself. I think we don’t do that enough. We don’t pat ourselves on the back enough, we aren’t patient with ourselves and we’re more critical of ourselves than we are for other people. And we need to, to give ourselves a little slack.

Kelly: I was just thinking, I could be my harshest critic. We do have to really give ourselves some grace. A lot of the times for anyone that’s a parent out there or who has actually witnessed this scenario, or at some point you learned this.

So I know that this will resonate with everyone, learning to ride a bike. It’s not like we just came out of it and we’re like, oh, I ride a bike now. It took practice and that’s just anything that you want to learn. So, yes, like I fell going around a [00:15:00] turn, trying to show off my new 10 speed when I was trying to ride my bike and I felt so amazing and I fell and scraped the whole side of my leg. And for a week I was like, I am not touching that bike, but then I was determined because that was my only form of transportation.

Denise: You were forced to. Yeah. And sometimes we’re forced to make changes and sometimes we choose to make changes, but we have to be able to be adaptive enough to change. And I think the world’s changing so fast, but if you don’t adapt and you refuse to adapt, or you just don’t think you need to adapt, you do. And it will definitely be something that you’ll never regret learning those skills. And it’s it probably, I know adaptability is one of the biggest skills employers are looking for right now.

Kelly: Well, let’s talk about that a little bit too, because I feel like I want to dive in to Great Biz Tools and some of these new [00:16:00] amazing innovations that you guys are doing in the assessment world and sort of in regards to learning and hiring, because I really find, you talked about this or at least I shared, and you talked about the passion that you have around kind of helping people.

I say the same thing, helping people live their best life, but it’s that concept of finding that thing that makes you happy. And I just would really love for everyone to understand these tools that you guys offer, some of this work that you’re doing around this space, because I find that for people that might not know how to go about this, these are just like amazing new ways to think through some of these possible steps in your life.

Denise: Yep. You want me to talk about?

Kelly: Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t even ask a question, if you don’t mind just sharing a little bit. I mean, the things that really stuck out to me, I don’t know much about Compass and Pulse. I know we talked a lot about Web Assess and My Inner Genius, but feel free to yeah whatever [00:17:00] makes sense to describe it.

Denise: Okay. Yeah. We have an almost 40 year history of designing and developing every kind of employee you can imagine. So pre-screening pre hire training and development, inside training and development, there’s on the job evaluation and certification and all that.

And then performance management, which is what Compass is. And then training and certification, performance management and performance development. So we don’t call it performance management. We call it performance development because with our system, the focus is on developing people, not just managing tasks.

 So one of the things that we’ve really done is all of our tools are competency-based. So that means we’re focused on innate skills, abilities, personality, traits, knowledge. So knowledge, skills, abilities, traits. Those are what we’re focused on with all of our tools and they all [00:18:00] speak that common language.

We know that jobs require certain competencies. So we hire based on those competencies, who’s the person that has the greatest combination of those competencies. And then when we’re doing training, we’re training around those competencies and layering on top of that knowledge. And then certification is about competencies.

And then performance development is about developing those competencies. So that competency is that common thread throughout everything that we’re doing. So we’ve always taken that approach and Web Assess is our pre hire assessment tool. And if you’re hiring for a specific job, we have the competencies that are required for those jobs based on years and decades of job analyses and data.

So we’re assessing for the right things. And then then you hire those people, it’s the top of the funnel. And then they [00:19:00] go through structured interviews, which we all also have structured interview tools, which are competency-based too. And so everything is around the competencies required for that job.

Well, a couple of years ago, we started thinking really differently. And it’s really interesting because we did it before, way before COVID happened. But now that it’s happened, we’re in a really good position to meet the changes that COVID has driven because of the way we’re changing, the way we’re assessing.

So we created My Inner Genius, so My Inner Genius happened out of a need in the marketplace. So IBM it was really changing the way that they’re hiring for IT, in fact a lot of companies are doing that. Apple, 50% of their hires don’t have a college degree or their open positions don’t need college degrees.

I think IBM, 40% of their positions don’t need a college degree. Google, [00:20:00] Tesla, Microsoft, are all moving toward not requiring college degrees. And so IBM said we’ve got these what we’re calling new collar jobs, which is the new paradigm instead of blue collar, it’s new collar.

It’s all IT technology-related jobs, but they don’t require a degree. So how do we make sure that we’re getting people into the right areas? They don’t have any experience, background training, necessarily. Most of them probably don’t and I think the number is, it’s astronomical.

It’s like a hundred, I don’t remember what the numbers are, but it’s around a hundred million jobs are going away because of technology disruptions. But 155 million jobs are going to be created because of those same technology changes. So that means that we have a net gain of, I think the number was, 75 or 80 million jobs net gain. But we don’t have enough people that are trained in [00:21:00] those areas.

Kelly: Because it’s a slightly different set of skills.

Denise: Yeah, exactly. So IBM saying, okay, we need more people in IT roles. We’ve got 50,000 open positions just for data science alone, just in IBM. And so then what do we do? Or not actually, I think that’s, that’s in the US but anyway, but the point is there are way many more jobs by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of jobs that we don’t have enough people to fill because they don’t know how to communicate their skills, that they could do those jobs and employers don’t understand how to translate what they have done into those different sets of skills.

So what we did is we created a tool called My Inner Genius and it was originally designed particularly for IT. But it’s [00:22:00] expanded now. It includes all the other jobs as well. What it does is it says, okay, You don’t have any background or experience in IT.

How do we know if you’d be a good fit for it? And so a lot of times what has been done in the past for these, there’s an interest test, do you like working with computers? Do you like solving problems? And that would tell you if you might like that work, but it wouldn’t tell you if you’d be good at it.

So My Inner Genius is all about, it’s not just interests, but it’s also your innate cognitive skills, abilities, and personality traits. Do your innate competencies align with those roles? And if so, which role? So we even narrow it down to, cyber security is a little bit different when it comes to your innate abilities.

Again, we’re not talking about knowledge here. So cybersecurity is a little bit different. You have to have a higher level of integrity and different things like that. Data science, you need to have a higher level of [00:23:00] numeric, fluency and problem solving. Customer service, you need to have a higher level of empathy, right?

So there’s there’s differences for each of the jobs. So we can actually give an assessment and narrow it down to which area in IT, or healthcare, or hospitality, or finance, or customer service. What area would you be the best fit for? And then we align them with training on how to get started in those new careers.

So with IBM, it’s around the IBM new collar training programs. We’re also working with other companies that have their own internal training programs or we were announced at Tech for Good last year in France, which was really exciting for the work that we’re doing. JFF nominated us this year as one of four companies, they did a deep dive of all the assessment companies out there.

We are one of four selected for our social good. Because one of the things that we’re doing with this is really opening up opportunities for people. Because if you look at as we were talking before, certain communities [00:24:00] are really underrepresented in IT jobs, and those are the jobs that are growing at a faster pace than any other job.

So they’re already underrepresented. So how do we encourage more people to get into those roles and how do we help train them? Because they might have all those underlying competencies that are required for success, but they don’t have the knowledge. So can we line them up with the roles that are the best fit for them, where they have the greatest probability of success and then line them up for training?

So we take the guesswork out so they don’t have to, there’s nothing worse than getting dropped off, off on one of these training sites and say, okay, find a class on Cloud. It’s overwhelming. So we have these curated learning paths to help people, everything they need to know, taking the guesswork out, really trying to help people get started in new careers and changing their lives and having a better opportunity for better wages and a future proof career.

 We’re working with different job centers to help people get employed, and [00:25:00] one of the struggles they have is, they’ll find jobs for people but then that job goes away and those people are coming back and it’s a constant revolving door. So we’re talking about these jobs that have, that are future-proof that are going to have a bright future, better earning potential.

And they’ll grow with you. You can grow with them.

Kelly: I’m imagining now once they get in and they understand what direction. So as you know, there are other opportunities, I’m just thinking of your example with IBM, just because that’s the role they come in with IBM, and I know tons of people that have worked for IBM for years because there’s so much opportunity for growth.

It’s just a matter of coming in, learning where you need to get, and just keep growing and learning. And because there’s so much, it doesn’t mean you have to go on this, like one straight pathway. There’s tons of different directions you can go from there. And just like you said, there’s no requirement of a bachelor’s degree.

So this is just totally opening up doors for so many people. And I know this is something we’ve talked about, obviously it’s very [00:26:00] prevalent of our times right now. Just making sure that, from a hiring perspective, diversity and inclusion is really considered. And the thing that, and I wonder if you might touch on that a little bit, because the thing that I think of when I think of the way that you are assessing people and you’re really focusing on skills like that must just take out some of those barriers that people might be experiencing, might have experience with, or feel like are like perpetuate inequality in some sense. I wonder if you have any like thoughts or focus there?

Denise: Yeah. And that’s one of the really exciting things that we’re doing, and we’re working with companies on trying to increase diversity and inclusion through assessment.

There are some assessments which are biased and which actually decreased diversity inclusion. Those are the older types of assessments. Typically like general intelligence tests and different things like that, but the second metric field has grown and learned so much about [00:27:00] how to really assess people appropriately and doing it in a non-biased way.

So what we use are the best practices for psychology and psychometrics and HR and legal to make sure that we are creating and developing unbiased assessments that are looking at just the things that matter. So one of the changes that we made with My Inner Genius, instead of looking at jobs, we’re looking at capabilities.

So we’re looking at people’s underlying competencies, their capabilities, their potential. And instead of just focusing on a specific job, we’re focusing on what are all the different things they can do. And so everybody has an inner genius, and it’s everybody has capabilities and they can be used in many different ways.

Because you have a history in retail doesn’t mean that you always need to stay there. You already had [00:28:00] skills and abilities going into retail, and then you gained some more while you’re there, but those can be used in many different careers, many different ways.

And I think that’s one of the problems that has created a lot of the bias in the hiring process are things like looking at resumes, which we know have a lot of bias built in. Everything from somebody’s name, where they went to school, if they went to school, what their job experience is, where they live, those are all things that can add bias to the process.

And then resumes also have inaccurate information. People either over report what they’ve done or the significance of it or under report. So it’s both ways, cause people don’t know how to communicate to an employer, what my skill set is. So they may be focusing on the wrong things and their resume, and the employer may be focusing on the wrong things and they’re passing each other and it really would be a good match.

One of the things we’re doing is saying let’s not [00:29:00] focus on the old ways, the old paradigms that have all this bias. Let’s look at new ways. Let’s look at people’s potential. And that means that as jobs change, we’re not focused on jobs. And that’s one of the things that needs to change in businesses when you’re focused on jobs, when that job changes or that job goes away, then you have to completely retool.

But when you’re focused on capabilities, then you’re saying, “okay, this job is changing, but the capabilities really haven’t changed.” It’s easy to pivot into that, or maybe the capabilities change slightly, but it’s easy to look at our employees and instead of laying every, so like we’re working with a project with Department of Labor and IBM in Youngstown, Ohio, and the GM plant closed and they eliminated about 3,400 jobs.

What are those people do? So IBM is going in there and they’re giving them My Inner Genius, matching them to IT roles, and then [00:30:00] apprenticeships to get started, hit the ground running in a new career. That’s better than the career that they had, has better earning potential. It’s a really great, wonderful thing.

If GM had said we’re eliminating certain positions, but I have all of these great employees are there, I have open jobs. There are open jobs than GM all the time. So could they have pivoted some of those people into those open jobs? If they had started looking at capabilities instead of, “oh, this person’s been on in this job for 10 years and that’s all, that’s how we see that person.”

People are more than a job. So we’re really up and saying, let’s not look at where people have been. Let’s look at where they’re going and when they can go. And that’s really exciting.

Kelly: No, I love that. Those are one of my favorite things to see, when organizations are really trying to figure out something new and different.

I know a [00:31:00] center. I mean, there are a number of these initiatives. I know there’s one, I’ve seen notice of it, I know is pretty popular right now that a center started again, this was an answer to what was happening with COVID. I think they brought together a group of employers.

I can’t remember the count that it was originally, but each of these employers needed to have at least a hundred available jobs and a group of people that unfortunately they were needing to let go. And what they were trying to do was to figure out together, how can we shift these people that might fit.

If they don’t fit internally with us, how can we shift them elsewhere as opposed to just laying them off. You’re speaking my language when it comes to skills, but when we dial this back down, some people might have considered this transferable skills back in the past.

I know we don’t even use that word anymore, but that’s kind of what we’re talking about here. When you’re in retail or what’s happening now in the food and beverage industry, waiters or [00:32:00] waitresses, let me tell you they’re amazing salespeople when they describe that special that’s on the menu and you buy that, I mean, come on now. That’s like sales 101.

Denise: Yeah. And they’re constantly going back and checking and yeah, they’re doing great. Yeah,

Kelly: People just don’t think of that. That is a skill that you’ve gained that can work somewhere else besides where you’ve just innately worked in.

And of course, companies aren’t thinking that someone who is a waiter or waitress would fit into this role internally at our organization, because we’re a professional organization and that’s just not, but it does if you just break it down and you look at it this way and it can really change, not only how we as people approach the jobs that we might be interested in.

Like when we first started, when you described what you kept seeing in your work environments, people being so unhappy in a role. I actually can’t remember if we talked about that before we hit record, that concept where people are just so unhappy in their job, [00:33:00] there are a whole host of reasons, but in many cases, it’s that they lost confidence because they weren’t good.

But it wasn’t because they weren’t good at it was because it was the wrong fit. And instead of us thinking about like, oh my gosh, I keep just like stumbling and stumbling and stumbling. I have a daughter that has special needs too and let me tell you, if I kept pushing her into things that she was not successful in her life is quite sad, but if I find the things that make her soar.

It opens a whole new light for her, but that’s just how all people are with or without anything going on. And if we can just find that thing, like what you’re doing with these assessments, I just find that to be so powerful. It really changes the way we approach our lives.

It also changes the whole dynamic of how companies and people and learning is happening.

Denise: Yeah. And it even has a ripple effect into society too. So think about, if I’m unhappy in my job or I have low self-esteem, it [00:34:00] affects my demeanor, it affects my relationships with others. It might usually. It shortens my patience and I’m more quickly to anger.

It affects a lot of different things in your life, then that affects the people around you, which affects the people around them. And that affects the whole community. And then when you think about the diversity aspect of it, where companies have a history of unconscious bias built into their processes, which they’re not even aware of.

They’re not trying to do it, but it happens. They’re not even able to figure out how to solve it because they don’t realize what it is that’s contributing to it. A lot of it has to do with looking at the wrong things, having these requirements, which really aren’t necessary, like a degree or certain types of experience, like the waiter waitress thing, where somebody can go in and say, I look at your capabilities and I [00:35:00] can see all of the things you can do instead of saying, oh, you’ve been a waiter or waitress.

Well, this is professional sales job. So I don’t think it’s a good fit. I had a woman I was talking to the other day and she was a writer, and she was like, “I look at what I do and I’m looking to make a change and I can really see that I’d be a great project manager because I have to coordinate things. I have to gather resources. I have to get information from people I have to schedule. I have a timetable, I’m a project manager and I can’t get any company to recognize that I’d be great project manager.”

They have a project manager job. They come in and go a writer? No. She wasn’t going to get a chance to show that she could be good at these jobs because she couldn’t communicate to the employers in a way that they could understand, and the employers weren’t seeing what they needed to see, because they’re not looking at the right things.

If we [00:36:00] can help companies focus on the things that matter, and that’s people’s potential. And we can focus on and not specific to a job. So we’re really opening that up and we’re helping people to understand what their capabilities are so they can get into the right job. And I know we talked about this before, that opportunity cost of being in the wrong job, of saying I go down the wrong path and we’ve all done it, I’ve done it.

And you get into this job and you’re like, I don’t like it, but how do I get out of it? I don’t know what else, how do I communicate to an employer? A different job that I think would be better fit for me, but I don’t have that experience. And this opens up, it creates that common language that employers and people can talk about and it opens up opportunities for people as individuals.

It opens up opportunities for employers, if you think about it. So My Inner Genius is actually for both. It’s for people and it’s for employers. So for people, they take the assessment, they own that [00:37:00] data for life. They can take it and show it to employers and they don’t have to, some assessments the company that had you take the assessment owns your data. You can’t take it with you.

You might go to another company and take the same assessmen and it’s like I already took the assessment. But it grows with you. So as you change, and as you get into, you add skills, you can add to your your competency profile on My Inner Genius and it grows with you. And it continues to add recommendations to you as you gain new skills to say, oh, here’s some other things you could do and here’s different career paths you could pivot to. It can be used for career planning.

As a company, it starts saying I can be really strategic with my workforce initiatives. I don’t have to lay people off. I can do workforce rebalancing. I can identify ways that I can rescale and upscale. And I can start looking at people in new ways to say, as jobs change, it’s [00:38:00] really easy for me to pivot because most of those capabilities are the same.

Then you can look at it and say, okay, I can look at hotspots and say, what is the skills that I’m not having in my organization that I know I’m going to need in the future, like adaptability. And I can say, okay, how can I cultivate those internally? There’s training as we talked about earlier, that I can have employees take that will increase that skill that we’re having a deficit in.

So it just really opens up so many opportunities and so many avenues. It increases diversity, reduces that bias and it helps even in our tool, you turn off the personally identifying information. So you’re not seeing anybody’s picture, you’re not seeing anybody’s name. You’re not seeing anybody’s location, where they live.

You’re only focusing on their capabilities and potential, which is what companies need to focus on. And we’re kind of forcing them to do that but with the tools, and it really makes a huge difference in people’s [00:39:00] lives and we’re really excited.

Kelly: I think it’s fantastic. Not only for the future, cause we talk a lot about the future of work and education here, but even right now what’s happening with COVID, as you were describing that, I was like, you know what is so interesting? We see these huge numbers of unemployment.

And people think like doom and gloom around these huge numbers of unemployment. But the thing is, there’s also a huge number of open jobs like you just described. Now why is it that we’re crossing? You know, we’ve got just like we described that instance.

I specifically mentioned a waiter or waitress, cause there’s there’s certain industries that have been hit harder than others, if they could just understand and employers could just understand, how it is that their skills make sense within their organization.

I mean, I truly believe that that would be a huge help in what’s happening right now and sort of this recovery period, let alone the future [00:40:00] of how this looks. I just find the whole thing really fascinating. So that actually leads me to another question, Denise.

The way that people access these tools is this directly through an employer? How do you engage? Like, are you working with people directly through employers to people?

Denise: Yeah. So what we’re about is really helping people and helping them change their lives. So we don’t want there to be a barrier to that.

So it’s free upfront to the user and it will always be free upfront to the user. We are on the backend to sponsor it, like IBM is a sponsor, Microsoft, Workforce Solutions, Alamo, we’re working with 10 smart social in England. We’re working with IBM skills build in France, Germany, Spain, UK and we’re expanding to Japan.

We have representatives in the AP, we’re working with chartered accountants of Australia, which is a membership organization that is saying 50% of accountant jobs are going to [00:41:00] go away in the next five years. That’s huge. But these people have a wealth of innate cognitive skills and abilities that have to do with numeric problem solving and understanding numbers in a way, and being able to understand compliance and different things that would be great in a lot of different roles.

So we’re helping them, help their membership find other future-proof roles. There’s a lot of different organizations and groups and companies that we’re working with to try to get this out there for different purposes. So some companies are using it, they want to help hire people and manage their workforce with these strategic initiatives.

Like we’ve talked about where they’re looking at capabilities. Some are really focused on retraining, upskilling, reskilling like IBM. And then others, like Workforce Solutions, Alamo, they process 150,000 people just in eight counties alone. So think [00:42:00] about how many more people that encompasses that outside of their ecosystem.

And they’re looking at training, retraining people, and getting them back to work. And so we’re really looking at organizations that want to, for different purposes, and we can work with the different purposes of getting people back to work. Re-skill, up-skill, finding future-proof careers, careers that have greater earning potential.

And your example of the waiters waitresses, just to bring that back again. I think that with COVID, I was reading an article this morning said about a third of the small businesses are going away forever. And we know that most of the people that are employed, are employed in small to medium sized businesses, not huge corporations.

It’s small to medium sized businesses that are the center of our labor and our jobs. So that’s huge. Yet there [00:43:00] are emerging roles, like cybersecurity that have tremendous numbers of roles. Data science, I know I said the wrong numbers earlier and I’m remembering it, there’s 500,000 data science open jobs in the US and colleges are only producing 50,000 people a year.

So that’s a huge deficit that we’ll never be able to catch up on unless we find other ways to re-skill and up-skill people. And there’s a lot of people that would be great for these roles and these roles are really good paying roles. They have a great future. There’ll be a lot of people that would be great for those roles, but they don’t have that experience.

And they think I don’t have a college degree. I didn’t do these sorts of things. I went a different path. They’ll never consider me. That’s changing. These companies, you can do some of it on your own. You can use a tool like My Inner Genius find out where you’d be the best fit, where you have the greatest chance of success and get training.

Or [00:44:00] you can look at some companies that are using tools like this to say, I want to change my life. And I want to change my career. You have jobs that I’d be great fit for how do I re-skill and upskill for it.

Kelly: It’s completely true. My family owns a bakery actually, and thankfully we’ve been able to stay ahead of everything and do the best that we could with doors closed initially, just doing pickups.

But I did see as an example, we also have some food and beverage locations in New York City. And I did see like a well-known bakery that’s located at Rockefeller Center, I saw the post yesterday that they were just announcing that they were going to have to close doors. I mean, the rent there is crazy and, but they have a ginormous, in terms of like small medium-sized business, they had a really big business structure.

I can’t even imagine how many employees and that is a really sad day. But again, it’s how to reframe that for people again. These small and medium [00:45:00] sized businesses don’t necessarily have the resources to provide these things. But the more that we get the word out there, that these are available, hopefully they could then at least, at the very least recommend them to their employee is in this transition process because they’re just as much trying.

They also, as business owners potentially have to figure out what the next step in their life is going to be.

Right.

Denise: And that’s such a good point that if a company, unfortunately, does go out of business, it’d be a great service for them to offer that doesn’t cost anything to say you need to look at rescheduling in other areas because there’s not going to be another bakery job necessarily for you.

So look at some of these other options and look at, a lot of the training in a lot of these roles that are growing is free. The barrier to it is you taking the initiative to do [00:46:00] it and taking the time to retrain yourself, and if you’re out of work it’s the perfect time to learn new skills and get yourself ready when companies start hiring and some of them are already hiring. Make yourself more visible to them.

Earn digital badges, start building your digital portfolio. Take this time to prepare yourself for the new workplace that’s emerging.

Kelly: The thing that I thought of as we were talking about this too, just because we both have been talking about our families and your experience, very similar to my experience and why I needed to figure out a new way to work when my children were being born.

I think this is all the time too, where we’re trying to figure out a lot of us don’t know if we are parents and we don’t know how our children are going back to school. And that also limits how we’re able to go back to work. There are a lot of things to think of.

The reason that I say that out loud is because a lot of times I’m finding that for some reason, this is being left out of the conversation quite a lot. And a lot of people feel [00:47:00] like this is a barrier. I can’t go and look for another job because I can’t leave my children home alone. And I raised this and say this out loud for companies to recognize that there are people that are looking for work, but they obviously need to look for work in a different way.

But I also raised this because a lot of people that feel like they can’t go and look, don’t treat that as a barrier. There are ways to figure this out, still go do your best, figure out ways that you can retrain. Sometimes it’s hard with kids being at home and I think we all get that, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it.

You just gotta want to do that. And a lot of these companies are trying to figure out how to make this a better environment for parents and working and all of that happening. I know there’s a lot of awareness being raised. So I just say that again, out loud to use this platform, just to make sure that that conversation keeps going on along with all of this other stuff.

Denise: Yeah. I’ve have a lot of concern about that [00:48:00] and these decisions to not open up schools, there’s other repercussions that maybe aren’t being considered. I know a lot of people are talking about that a lot of children depend on the getting nutrition at school.

And that is a real concern. And there’s also a real concern about if you have to homeschool your children and you have to work full time, there’s not a lot of families that can say, okay, I’m going to homeschool my children until school’s open back up.

Some people are doing it. And some people are changing and said, I’m going to change to homeschool. There’s more choices, but at the same time, not everybody has those choices. So what do the people do that have to work, that are now homeschooling their children. How are they supposed to make that happen?

And I have some real concerns about that too, because something’s going to get left behind. It’s either the work or the children or both. And then [00:49:00] the other thing that and just get it out there because we have a platform to say it, another thing I’m really concerned about with remote work and remote education is that one of my concerns is are we creating a situation, at least in the short term, where we are increasing that divide of opportunity because not all communities have high-speed internet.

Not everybody has a device, a computer, or even a tablet that they can do work or education from home. And so I think one of the things that I’ve heard, and I think it’s a great idea that when you look at the cafeteria style benefits that companies are offering, one of the things they’re starting to offer is high-speed internet and devices. So I think that’s a great thing that companies can do to provide that so there’s more opportunities for people [00:50:00] in communities that don’t have access to that. And not everybody’s going to be able to go to the library to work or to go to school every day.

Kelly: No, no. And I mean, I’m sure that they’re even going to limit people depending on where you’re located. So that makes it even extremely more difficult. I’m really glad you said that. I think for anyone too, there are a couple things, I know we’re coming close to the end of our time, but one of the things you said about students needing nutrition at school, that really resonates with me.

I know in my community, our schools were able to still and there were parent volunteers that were still able to deliver meals to those students that didn’t have any other option for nutrition outside of school. Not every community is the same, but if you are happening to be one of the more fortunate of us in these times then definitely figure out if there’s some easy way for you to help.

That that might be happening in your community, you might not be aware of it. And then of course the same thing with the internet. I mean, there are plenty of different ways that we can all get involved. We just raised that right now to [00:51:00] companies like, Hey, you got to start looking at these potential benefits that you’re offering, to think through some different ways to engage with your workers and help them in their lives as well.

But also just in communities, I feel like there are ways to look up and see what other ways are might be available to get involved and help those that might be a little bit less fortunate in this scenario. So again, Just using the platform, but we will when we can. So I’ll raise those.

Denise: Yeah. Well, when you think about it in the fifties, we created the interstate system because there was a real need for people to start traveling across country and there wasn’t a good way to do it. I think government agencies, cities, counties, states, and I know there’s some states that are doing it like North Dakota, South Dakota. And I know there’s other states doing it, but they’re actually creating high-speed internet for every single citizen.

And they’ve got initiatives to do that. I think if we can get governments involved, nonprofits involved, and try to help improve, [00:52:00] instead of the interstate, the internet, and really make sure everybody has access to high-speed internet. And then we can start working on making sure everybody has devices.

One of the things about working from home and educating from home, if you don’t have a device, then what are you supposed to do? And there’s a lot of kids that aren’t able to do the educational work at home because they don’t have a device. And I think there’s a lot of people that could work from home and be very effective doing it and they have all the capabilities necessary for the job.

But they don’t have a device. And so I think non-profits would be a great source for that organizations as in adding as a benefit. I think we just have to realize that not everybody has all the tools and options that that other people do and that we need to create those to create more opportunities for more people.

Kelly: I absolutely agree. Well, Denise, thank you so much for joining us today. I just love learning about this. I love learning about your passion and [00:53:00] kind of what led you into this. I think it’s so fascinating how we take some things, like you said, the life gave us lemons and we made the lemonade.

I love how that was really part of your story. So for anyone that would like to follow Denise, she is available on LinkedIn and Twitter at Denise Leaser. You can learn more about Great Biz Tools, Web Assess, and My Inner Genius at trywebassess.com and myinnergenius.com.

And you can also follow Web Assess and My Inner Genius on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. So plenty of places to find more information. When I post this on social media, you’ll get all the links as well, so we’ll try to keep it pretty easy.

If anyone does have any questions about how to get more involved in some of the areas that we talked about, definitely let Denise or I know, and we’ll make sure to make some connections.

So thank you all for listening in to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. [00:54:00] If you enjoyed this podcast, I would love to hear about it. Please subscribe, leave some feedback, suggestions, go ahead and give a rating. I wonderfully appreciate all of that. I am also available on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn at Kelly R. Bailey, if anyone has any questions.

I hope you all have a wonderful day today. Thanks again.