What Makes Us So Special

Episode Transcript

SB S1 E12 – Sallyann Della Casa

Kelly: [00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Welcome to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. I am your host Kelly Ryan Bailey. Each week, I chat with inspiring visionaries about the skills that make them successful, how they develop those skills, and their innovative approaches to improving skills based hiring and learning around the world.

Come learn what skills help you live your best life. Today, we are joined by Sallyann Della Casa. Hello, how are you?

Sallyann: How are you? I put on my glasses, I saw you looking all smart and nerdy, and I thought I match you right away.

Kelly: Sadly, I need them now for the computer but I also have one of those blue light filters in them. And I swear when you’re sitting in front of zoom all day long, Do you have that in yours? It is so helpful.

Sallyann: No, now that you told me, I’m going to go ask about that.

Kelly: Oh my gosh, you need to it’s really [00:01:00] amazing. Let me just give a little background on Sallyann and I am so happy to have her joining us today.

So Sallyann spends her days obsessing about Gleac, which is her technology company. It measures and develops soft skill gaps for any job, current and future, in 10 minutes a day. Gleacs client and partners include Prada, Ascenture, Korn Ferry, Monster, and more. Gleac has been chosen for Expo 2020, which is now 2021 as we know, to up-skill all expo visitors for three months after leaving the Expo Future of Work Pavilion to ensure they are future ready for emerging jobs.

This is amazing, which we’re going to jump into more, but Sallyann is also the founder of Growing Leaders Foundation. In partnership with the UN DP, thousands of at risk youth and adults [00:02:00] annually benefit from her foundation’s work, delivering soft skills in the Caribbean, Latin America and Mina region.

I need to say this Sallyann, because like I am just so impressed. Sallyann is one of the 4% of women globally who has a patent pending method and algorithm for measuring soft skills as a sole inventor.

Let me tell you something else about Sallyann you guys, I get to say all the fun stuff that I’m sure we don’t ever say about ourselves, but she also holds degrees. It’s five degrees. Am I right? Five and certifications in law, organizational behavior and urban planning amongst others.

She speaks five languages. She’s a published author. Her education spans the globe from Harvard University to Franklin College, to University of Toronto. I don’t know where you haven’t been. It’s amazing. But right now, you’re in the APAC region and her foundation has worked with so many large companies and in that area and impacted so many, [00:03:00] she’s just really done so many wonderful things and I am so honored to have you joining us today, Sallyann. So thank you.

Sallyann: Well, first of all, I want to say to you and all of your audience members is all of those things, they sound good on paper, but I can assure you, I am absolutely a work in progress and I know absolutely nothing. I’ve come to learn that. Kelly, thank you so very much for having me. I look forward to sharing some of my stories and hopefully some insights that can provoke your listeners.

Kelly: I am so happy. Sallyann mentioned to me the other day, and I will just say this because she’s so modest and I love it. She said to me the other day, I forget what accomplishment we were chatting about. And you were like, well, that took nine years. And you described the challenges you overcame and so I’ll add to what we just described that yes, you’ve done all of these amazing, amazing things and you [00:04:00] should definitely be celebrating that and be so proud, but you guys, this takes work. So just so everyone knows it doesn’t just happen overnight.

Sallyann: A lot of times we need to step back from those things and not take ourselves too seriously. Because I think the worst place we can be is look at ourself on paper and go, oh I’ve arrived. I think that’s the worst place we can be as human beings. So I just want to mention that Kelly.

Kelly: I totally agree. Well on that note. I would love Sallyann if you could, cause I get to say all your highlights, but what we’d love to hear is a little bit about your journey and what led you to Gleac?

I mean, we’d love to hear more about this foundation. That’s just sounds fantastic. Just your story.

Sallyann: Yeah, sure. So I will start with, I spent the first 10 years of my professional life pretending to be a lawyer.[00:05:00] I say pretending to be a lawyer because those five degrees, I got them very young, Kelly, at 21. Just trying to fit in and be everybody’s version of who I should be, coming from the Caribbean with Asian parents. So academia and being accepted is a very big thing.

Those 10 years were the most difficult time for me because, and I think many people will identify with this is, I represented everybody’s version of what success looks like, right? So the right degrees, the right things, the right board position, the right salary. Deep inside, I was dying.

Every day I would go into my office and I would feel like darts were on my forehead going, this cannot be it. And I think my biggest act of courage on this particular journey was stepping down from the wrong mountain, figuring out really who am I and why am I here? It goes [00:06:00] back to our journey of childhood.

There’s evidence of who we are, our entire lives, if we just look. And most of the time, I was always this very confident kid questioning everything, and I was volunteering and mentoring and teaching my entire. So that was 13, starting from Make-A-Wish foundation in Toronto, all through college. My college roommate, who is still a very good friend of mine, I was volunteering at a psychiatric center holding their meetings and everybody would be like, what did you know to go talk to people?

And I’m like, I just connect with people. And all through my law practice, my secretary of eight years, Maureen, I saw her recently, she’s an attorney now, brilliant attorney, for eight years, she’s like, everyone would come into the law firm and go, where is she?

And I was out teaching in community schools. I was seven years in a row volunteer of the year for Kids in the Power of Work, which is part of the child labor committee in the US, I just thought those things were hobbies and did not realize that the thing that [00:07:00] came most natural to me. I didn’t realize that’s not only my area of passion, but I very uniquely, I had it also aligned with my area of strength. My ability to communicate with people and connect with people.

So I had the blessing of stopping. I literally just stopped when I turned 30 and everybody panicked. My mom kind of went to my other family members and said I think she needs to talk to somebody. I literally just stopped and just silenced the noise because there’s a lot of noise when you get to everybody’s expectation of what success or should be.

So nobody understands what’s wrong. And I just silenced the noise and just dug in. And just ask this question, which is also the title of my first book called, Who Would I Become? And I think we forget to ask that question of ourselves and we are allowed to ask that question of ourselves over and over [00:08:00] and every single day.

And then we get to answer it in whatever way we wish. And we don’t have to have our experiences or our degrees stop us from what that next move is. So in looking back, I knew I always enjoyed mentoring and teaching. So I created my foundation Growing Leaders Foundation. And it’s always in the area of soft skills because that’s actually what’s very special about me, but I didn’t know.

I didn’t know. I thought it was all my degrees. None of that has any meaning. What I do now has nothing to do with all of those degrees that seemed important. So I am like a living example of looks really good on paper, but the thing that really makes me who I am and so unique in the world are my human and soft skills.

So my foundation does that work offline. And then my technology company Gleac, three years ago, some friends of mine founded Careem, the ride hailing [00:09:00] company that was purchased by Uber for 3.1 billion. They called me in and they’re like, can you head people for us? And you know, after a long while going no, no, no, no, no, no. I said, sure. I’ll come take a look.

And it was such an eye-opener because I realized I can build a tech company. I got access to engineers and data scientists, and I realized at that moment it was like a kid in a candy store going, I can do this. And I ran off to Harvard and that’s where I came out with my algorithm on measuring soft skills.

So the measurement skills and the why, and there’s a reason I mentioned that. I am the last person in the world, if you know me, I’m not a mathematician, I’m not a data scientist. I get a headache when I see Excel, but the fact that I can be the person that came up with an algorithm to measure soft skills and then have the courage to go on violet and then have the courage to go this can actually make a difference in the world.

I want to share that story [00:10:00] with everyone and particularly women, to go you don’t have to be an expert in something. You can come with all kinds of experiences from other domains and completely change an industry that you’re not familiar with and you have not been in.

So that’s my point of that. I hope that inspires a lot of women to go file a bunch of buttons.

Kelly: I think it will, but I’m going to add to that because what I’m hearing you describe too, in terms of your past journey is that, this is something that before you knew it in yourself, this is something that you lived and breathed. And I think what’s so fascinating is that it, when you say you don’t have experience per se, but it’s just like this natural inclination for you. But if you hadn’t gone through what you went through, you may have never ended up making those decisions at this point to go back and do this?

Sallyann: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, each of our journeys and I say this to everyone. We can all look back at our [00:11:00] lives and go, ah, I can look back at my twenties now and go, I was renting my body, not occupying it because I knew to show up in the world, occupying the length and breadth of your potential and who you can be in the world.

But I wouldn’t have been here but for my unique journey. So never regret, I think for everyone, the good and bad that has happened to you, everything and where you’re standing right now, you stand on the shoulders of all of those experiences. And so my law as much as I hated every moment of it.

Most of the times with my technology company, as I’m integrating into different platforms, I’m with CEO’s and I’m with board members, as they’re changing their whole systems and they’re taken aback and surprised because I’m able to sit and talk about governance. I can sit and talk about issues that a typical L and D person has no idea about.

It’s because I was in mergers and acquisitions. I know how to structure. I’ve done enough contract negotiations. So [00:12:00] you’re absolutely correct. There is nothing, even my urban planning degree, which you will laugh about. When I went to architecture school, everyone said what are you doing going to architecture school?

But my classes in urban planning was great because it showed me how we act differently in different environments. Now those are physical environments, that same knowledge I’ve taken now online in our tech platforms and I’m very conscious about how our users look and feel in our products, in our environment.

And people often go, how do you know that stuff? And I go from architecture school.

Kelly: The physical environment is probably very similar to what someone would experience in like a culture environment. Right. Because your environment physical or mental or emotional or all of those things, like it changes.

Sallyann: Yeah. So online, most people forget that we need to treat people exactly how we would treat them in a [00:13:00] physical environment because we have to engage all of the senses. And that’s why most learning platforms, the engagement is very low. For many of them it’s not more than 10%. It’s because everybody just assumes, but if you start treating it in a very different way and you treat it as a physical environment, it’s like someone coming to your house, right?

How do you keep them at the door? When they come inside, how do they feel? How are those touch points while they’re in there? If they want to go on to the ladies room or you want to send them off in a different direction on your online platform, it’s not easy. It’s not difficult. Are they going to get lost?

If they leave? Is that the last they’re going to hear from you? So all of those things I got from architecture school.

Kelly: Amazing. It’s really honestly amazing. When you, because I know we’re talking a lot about soft skills here, which I really do want to dive into a little bit, but before we do, you do have [00:14:00] a lot of different areas where you’ve developed skills, but you’ve decided in your professional life to focus on soft skills.

You’ve said that what you call soft skills is your power, right? I call it super powers, but how would you have said that? That was just something I know you mentioned, this is something you’ve had all the time. Being able to connect with people. Is there some way through your life or through education that you felt like this really just cemented in you?

And that’s why you chose to focus on that, or do you feel like that combination of skills, that uniqueness, is the power?

Sallyann: So, let me ask you a question and you’ll understand why I focus on soft skills. Think about the person you admire the most in any environment, your home environment, your work environment, and what is the thing that makes you find them so special?

Is it going to be something, they have a certificate from [00:15:00] wherever, or is it something about the way they make you feel?

Kelly: It’s so funny, you said that. I was literally thinking the same words. It’s totally how they make you feel.

Sallyann: Yeah. So if you look at the people who have risen to the top of, in terms of your professional audience, they’re the top of the corporate ladder.

Let’s look at someone like Satya Nadella, from Microsoft. Everyone talks about his empathy. Now yes, he did go to IIT and he does have coding. But if you look at the skills that get people to rise to the top, Sundar Pitchai at Google, it’s his diplomacy. Indra Nooyi, formerly of PepsiCo, it’s her communication skills.

If you look at the people who rise, it is always. When I talk about soft skills, just to define for your audience what I mean, I kind of bucket it into 10 core areas that cover the whole work spectrum. You have your four C’s [00:16:00] communication, critical thinking, collaboration.

Creativity, judgment and decision-making, I have entrepreneurship, mindfulness, emotional IQ. So it’s kind of this bucket, direction of skills and underneath that you can have different sectors of it. Now, if you look Kelly, at all of the studies. So there is something called Google Project Oxygen that was recently updated and they looked at the top skills of their managers.

Nine out of the 10 of them were soft skills. One of them, I’m not kidding you, one of them. If you go look at studies dating back, there is a study from Harvard, from Stanford, 85% of job success comes from soft skills. Even though it was very personal awakening for me, because I didn’t know it was a personal awakening because I come from a very Asian, Caribbean [00:17:00] household where hard skills is what’s valued.

So it was this awakening that hold on. The thing that my parents were most afraid of with me, I was sent away to boarding school because I was too confident and I communicated with complete strangers and that’s unheard of in my culture. But that’s actually my strength. My strength is you can put me in the middle of anywhere and I will make friends and I will communicate and I will be teaching before you know it.

Kelly: This is like a revelation for me. And not because we haven’t talked about this before. This is the funniest part about this is that we’ve had this, Sallyann and I have really like jumped into our stories together and just absolutely love it. But what the revelation for me is that we have some similarities in the way that we were as children.

Even though we grew up in different cultures that was not right for a women, a girl to be outspoken or for a [00:18:00] girl to have that girls versus be quiet and sit nicely and not be out and playing and rough housing and all that.

But the revelation here is that when you described like how the most successful people and what they’re like, that is something that we’ve never talked about. And I’m just like, oh my gosh, you’re right.

Sallyann: Think about it. Just think about it in your current work environment, or think about everyone who’s listening, who are the people you respect the most, who are the people who influence you the most?

Who are the people? You might say, oh, it’s the CEO. But after you say the CEO, you ask the question, why? And when you asked the question, why? It will always come back to a soft skill.

Kelly: For anyone out there who might be like, I mean, for us in the skills world, we all know what that means. But for people, I know around the world we call soft skills, just in case [00:19:00] anyone’s like okay, I get communication, all those things.

But sometimes they’re called human skills. Sometimes they’re called life skills. We joke, I call them super powers. What do you call it?

Sallyann: Yeah. There’s a combination, right? Right now, I think Microsoft is calling them power skills. I call them human skills. I think the education sector in the US, they call it a SEL, social and emotional learning.

We’re all talking. Some people call it 21st century skills. We’re all talking about the same. So to answer your question, the reason why I have focused on this area is because we have always known this area is the game changer. We just never knew how to measure it. And that’s where I spent the time filing my patent because I realized I didn’t come up with a measure for it.

It becomes very difficult. How do you tell people, [00:20:00] how do you signal to an employer? Hey, My communication skills are at a level of five, if I’m using Docs and Bloom’s taxonomy, that’s a new thing. I can, in my communication, I can take things apart. I can synthesize stuff.

I can bring all kinds of stuff together and make it so simple that you’re like, oh my gosh, how do you know that? That’s a great communicator when they can tell you something so simply that you’re like, okay. Then you kind of look at their entire accolades and you’re like, oh my gosh, but they’ve spent 10 years in that.

And they just explained that in a Twitter sentence for me, I would’ve never understood that. You have a master communicator in front of you. How do you signal that? And that’s what the patent is about in terms of creating a way that people can signal to jobs, to educators, to the world.

Here’s where I stand on these in the workplace.

Kelly: Yeah. So let’s dive into that a little bit more because I just [00:21:00] find not only what you’ve decided to patent, but the whole premise around Gleac. I’ve seen it, you guys, and so this is amazing, but let’s dive in there because this is to me, and like you said, there has been no way to measure this.

This is like first time getting into this stuff. Obviously I mentioned when we started that you’ve got this amazing opportunity where you’re going to be up-skilling people through this like ginormous event. For those of you who are not familiar with the World Expo, it’s like the Olympics, what did you call it? The Olympics of Business.

It happens every five years and people like a country literally builds like a city around this event. And so Sallyann’s business is going to be upskilling attendees with soft skills and the whole concept. So I’m going to leave it there. I want you to jump in.

Sallyann: Yeah. I’m very [00:22:00] excited about this, so I’ll tell you exactly what Gleac is doing at Expo, and then I will kind of explain to you the premise behind. So Gleac will be mapping everyone who visits. Their soft or their human skills, power skills, whatever you want to call it, to not existing jobs, but emerging jobs.

So we have gone and looked at jobs that will be happening three to five years, you can’t look past five years. Nobody knows. If anybody tells you they know what jobs there is after five years, they’re lying. So we’ve looked at what is coming down the pipeline over the next three to five years.

And then we started mapping and people will, how do you do that? And it’s really simple. So think of the job of a data scientist, right? So most people say, what is a data scientist and data scientist is that job we knew 10 years ago called an actuary. It’s an actuary who can tell stories.

Kelly: I [00:23:00] love it.

Sallyann: Most emerging jobs are combinations of other jobs. So recently we just did a benchmark for a contact tracer. So contact tracer prior to this year, nobody had a clue what that role even was. That’s a combination of three jobs that we put together. It’s part of a humanitarian worker.

It’s part of research. So we put together to be able to go, that emerging job will require this particular in terms of human skills. So at Expo, everyone will have that opportunity to be able to go, okay, where do I sit? And then what we do after that, you get to choose a unique learning journey and we call it micro-practices, it’s 10 minutes a day.

And you get to practice those skills in that role for a three month period. And then we credential you on it. And our credentialing is very unique and very you know, I’m sure everyone is [00:24:00] familiar with digital badges.

We do not do that. Nothing’s wrong with that. Our credentialing, we kind of looked at credentialing in a very different way. So we looked at credentialing and go, how can we allow a job, an employer, to see you apply those skills, right? Because you having a certificate in leadership doesn’t actually mean you know how to act like a leader.

Kelly: Right. It still doesn’t give you the proficiency level of those skills.

Sallyann: No, and you might just be very good at taking tests and memory. That’s our current education system. It’s very based on memory. So what Gleac does in these micro-practices, it’s almost like a simulation. We put you in situations and you get to see your quality of thought, what you’re going to do in those situations.

And we allow employers to look inside. You can turn it on and off so we can actually allow people to see how you [00:25:00] think and how you act. So the measure is both quantitative qualitative and a 360 feedback. And some of the signaling we do on Gleac is other than continuing, CPD accredited, we are K-12 accredited for high school.

We are recognized by job portals. So for example, Monster is one that we have right now. Job portals, people who have are our soft skills index get to the top of job search. And we are in the process right now of getting going for ACE Accreditation in the US so that if we can get that and get University accreditation for where you can kind of signal and not the traditional of, okay, here, I have it for university, but you know what? Look inside how I think, how I apply it.

All of a sudden it’s this completely different way to look and evaluate someone. If I want to look at Kelly and go, I really want to see what Kelly’s judgment and decision-making looks like in a [00:26:00] management role and whatever industry, there can be a series of micro-practices where I look and I see what Kelly does and things.

Kelly: Yeah. That’s absolutely amazing. So this learning content that’s going to be available in the system, is that something, is that proprietary? Did you guys build as well?

Sallyann: Yeah, so that’s the foundation’s work for the last nine years. So,

Kelly: This is what we talked about. All of these layers that add up. Absolutely.

Sallyann: Yeah. So most people, they’re surprised when they see our content because they’ve never seen anything like it, you know? So I say very with great humility, but also super proud of us that.

There’s nobody out there who can match our content. And that’s one of the reasons why, people often go, but you’re a tiny startup. How have you gotten clients like Accenture and how have you gotten these clients? And I say, they just look at our content and they look at how our learning journeys are [00:27:00] designed and the thoughtfulness and they’ve never seen anything like that before.

And I’m proud of us for that.

Kelly: That’s amazing. When you originally did those learning journeys, you guys were looking at at risk youth and adults, right? Or was it a particular audience?

Sallyann: So how the foundation was set up was from the very beginning, we were a social enterprise and what we would do at the foundation is we would go into corporates, look at their skill gaps and design plugs for their skill graphs.

But. We would only work with companies who, if we were going to spend the time and effort upskilling their people, they had to adopt schools in the community and teach back what we taught them for the entire school year. So what happened, Kelly, is that this robust curriculum got designed not only with us corporate facing, our corporate clients with the foundation are some of the largest entities in the world.[00:28:00]

 Nestle, DP World, banks, usually oil and gas companies. So we were already working with very sophisticated corporates, but we were also kind of doing the trainer model, where they were teaching it back into the community. So we were designing and developing robust material from the very beginning.

Kelly: It’s like all the pieces together, you know what I mean? It’s so evident every time we’ve chatted, how you truly just want people to be able to unlock their special powers.

To me, the way that you started this and where you’ve come to now, it’s so lovely. I mean, honestly, I just can’t even say enough about it and it’s so wonderful. The way that you’ve really wanted to help people from the beginning, the way you set up that loop.

That’s just the pay it forward kind of concept where, okay, we’re going to do this, but let’s [00:29:00] amplify it through our community.

Sallyann: Yeah. Here’s the thing about it? You’re absolutely correct. I allowed corporates to be able to truly have community engagement, but what I also allowed corporates to do with the foundation program is there’s something called the forgetting curve.

And basically what that means is that within seven days, if any material you get, whether it is you read an article, a video. All of us read all kinds of stuff and watch stuff everyday, we get so inspired and we’re like, oh, I’m absolutely going to do that. But the reality is don’t teach it or you don’t put it into practice within seven days, about 80% of it is lost.

So what I was actually doing with sending corporates back into the community is that I was insuring that those corporates were getting an ROI on what I was doing and spending the time and energy of the team, teaching them. Because the reality was even if the corporates were not putting it into practice because I was making their teams, teach it back into the community, the material became very sticky.[00:30:00]

So I was always making sure I was impacting the individual and talking about the reason why I do all of this. It’s a very personal one. I think so many of us and I did for such a long time, we leave the best parts of ourselves at the door in our lives and even in our corporate work.

Sometimes it’s because we don’t know those parts of ourselves. So I did not know. I did not know I was this person I am in my twenties. I just did not know. And some of us, we are forced to. Some of us we have to fit a circle into a square when we walk into the office or when we walk into our lives.

A lot of times women, we have to. We are considered somebodies wife, daughter, all of these roles. We forget that. So the fact, if I can with Gleac, be able to have everyone become self-aware [00:31:00] of what makes them so special? What makes all of us so special to be humans?

That journey is such a awesome journey, and many of us live a robot journey. This is the human journey, and if I can allow people to know what that is for them, and then to show up and not have the fear and recognize it as a strength and recognize the value of it and show up in life and work with that.

I think all of these issues we talk about in the workplace engagement, lots of it. Our inability, laziness, I think all of those things are dissipating because we fully start participating and showing up-

Kelly: Not only does this change how we’re acting at work, but it also changes how we act in every facet of our life. When I think of what you described now, I’ve gone through a similar situation. I did not know my true self. I would say [00:32:00] this happened within the last year for me, although there were inklings of it where I just wasn’t allowing the full me.

I think everyone can appreciate that. And anyone who has tried to do this, you included Sally. You said those years as a lawyer, it was Dying on the inside. That’s exactly how I would have described when I tried to fit into the mold that I thought I was supposed to be in.

And so your confidence is low. The way you are with your family is terrible. The way that you’re acting at work. Although you can put your face on for awhile, you can act the way you need to act for the most part, your body is just rebelling. So I think everyone can appreciate this.

And not only is it going to help, how things are happening in the workplace. Which I think is wonderful, but I think it also changes now how everyone acts within every other area. The way they treat their family. That confidence, that self awareness, that self-esteem, that can change [00:33:00] the world.

Sallyann: Yeah. So I have to say this to you, Kelly. When I first met you, you are blooming. You were absolutely blooming and it’s such a lovely thing to experience because we cannot see in others what we don’t see in ourselves, we can not recognize. And I think when you come across individuals who are so open and who were so embracive and so they’re blooming themselves on the inside, and I felt that immediately when I met you, so woohoo for you.

Kelly: Thank you. We felt an immediate connection because there were so many things that, it just felt right. But anyone that I feel like we can have that conversation, that’s like the universe is making these things just happen in the right order.

That’s the person that is on that journey, but everyone can be on that journey. I would add since we’re talking about skills [00:34:00] here and I often talk about how these skills are developed. So some people might listen to us and if they haven’t yet been able to live outside of the box that the world has determined they’re supposed to live in. That what we’re talking about you might get angry about, because I know if I listened to this 10 years ago, I would have been like, well, Whatever, you know.

I can tell you, like, someone might sit here and be like, oh, well you’ve been doing seals forever. Even I have been doing skills forever. Sally-Ann has been doing skills forever, and this was not something we just automatically knew. So don’t feel disheartened in any way. This, all of what we’re describing right now is 100% learned.

Sallyann: Yeah. I think what happens and one of the things I often say, I’ll give you the funny story. When I first came out to this region, I’m here in Dubai right now. I was invited out to design a program for Abu Dhabi. It’s an Emirate, kind of like a state in the US.

And they said, can you please send your [00:35:00] degrees? So I’m designing an educational, at a national level, program for them. It’s something that comes natural to me. And I sent my degree. I send my, what degree did I have at the time? My highest degree, it’s my law degree.

So I got a phone call back and they say, but it’s a law degree. Where is your educational degree? Like, where is your doctorate in education? And I go, I don’t have one. There was that moment of this apprehension going, oh my goodness maybe they will change their mind.

And it was so interesting. They came back to me and they said, well, anyway, you have a doctorate in law. Anyone who has a doctorate is accepted, but there is that moment in time where I do not have all of those things you just talked about. I have zero qualifications. Zero. I don’t know coding.

I don’t know anything about, as I said to you, data science, applied math to build algorithms and these are the things, and these are the [00:36:00] things of how I will leave my mark in the world. I have zero teaching certificate.

Kelly: I actually love that because I think more people need to understand, right?

You said it perfectly, you going through and getting those degrees was you trying to live inside that box? And I was the same way. I had no choice, but to go directly into university. It was going to be not acceptable whatsoever. You were going to be considered like long gone if you did not go and do that.

And so I can appreciate that, but you now are realizing that. And I wonder if you could like break that down. To me, when I hear what you’re describing I’m like “you what it is though, that you’re not letting that hold you back.” You’re just always curious. You’re like, it’s fine.

Okay. Because I’m here to learn and you’re just being open-minded about it. And if someone really truly, I can imagine if that person came back to you and was like, well, you need to have a PhD in some education thing, you’d be like, oh, that’s too bad. I’ll [00:37:00] find another thing.

Sallyann: You know what? I would offer to help that person who they hire.

Right. So here is, what’s interesting about the time that we’re in now and what you just said. . Most of us have often limited our next move by our degrees and our experience. And what’s really interesting about the world that we’re in right now and the time that we’re in right now is we can’t anymore.

So whereas in with our parents, a degree had a job span of a lifetime sometimes. 15 years. Now, you’re lucky when you go into college, when you graduate in four years, if what you learn actually even matters anymore,

Kelly: I mean, that’s the reality, right? Jobs. I mean, you’re exactly right. Everything is changing so frequently.

And these jobs like that one job now becomes three jobs.

Sallyann: Absolutely. So this is where now the conversation is happening all over the world [00:38:00] where, is the value of whether it is a two or four year degree, is that of any value anymore and should credentialing and badging take place for skills and per semester?

So that’s the conversation the world is having, which is very much based on what we’ve been speaking about. Now, clearly in terms of academia, they’re looking at in terms of hard skills and the soft skills is now weaving in everything. But if you look right now, whether you look at all the big organizations in the world, Microsoft, IBM, you name them.

Every meeting, small system, everyone is looking at semester credentialing, looking at digital badging, and all of it, tied to skills. I think it was last week I read IBM is, they’re beta testing a blockchain where all of these credentials can go on there so jobs of the future can just be able to access what your [00:39:00] credentials are.

Kelly: Exactly. It happens immediately. Like you don’t need to get a transcript anymore.

Sallyann: You know, I always foresaw, in terms of Gleac, when people always say, where is Gleac heading? And I said, one day just automate everything, jobs and projects will need to differentiate and find humans. And guess what? A badge saying you have some type of hard skill is not going to differentiate you from a robot. It’s going to be the human skills and then they’re going to go, okay, let me see how you apply and how good you are at those humans business.

That is the data set I’m building at Gleac. I always saw that and I didn’t know if it was going to be in a blockchain. I don’t know what final channel, but I just know how we as humans, rational or irrational as we are, we’ll look at something and make some kind of judgment and decision-making.

There is no way, I mean, what is automation, right? Whether it’s machine learning or whether it’s intelligent, artificial [00:40:00] intelligence, at the end of the day, we decide things or we do things that nobody can understand. And then the ability to see that and see how we got to that is what’s going to really kind of set us apart.

Everything I’m speaking about, the tim is now. Whereas before, I would talk about it people were sort of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They would look at me and be like, what is she smoking?

Can I tell you, I wake up every day and it’s like you’re riding a wave in something that you have seen. And you have been working on, and now you can have conversations about it and you’re invited at the table. I have to pinch myself sometimes it is right that I’m sitting going. I wonder, are they sure?

Kelly: Like a few months ago you guys were the ones that were like, whoa, that’s that’s a little bit.

Sallyann: Absolutely.

Kelly: Well, it’s so [00:41:00] true. So now, with Gleac, because I feel like if I was listening to this, I’d be like yeah, so I need to do that. Yeah, can people actually access your systems? How do they access that?

Sallyann: Gleac right now is in B2B and also you can access it in a beta version of B2C.

You can go to the Google play on the app store and you can download it and have that version of it. Or you can certainly contact us, go to our website at Gleac.com. And we work with some of the biggest companies in the world, happy to say that. Doing really interesting work right now. Really interesting work.

Kelly: Yeah. Everything that I’ve seen. So I highly suggest checking it out. If not for yourself, for your organization, because everything that I’ve seen so far, it truly is cutting edge. This is the future. I, 100% agree in terms of skills and jobs and how things are [00:42:00] changing.

So definitely check it out, not only for yourself, but for your organization, because I really think that this is going to be the thing that changes. So as we wrap this up, Sallyann, is there any parting words that you’d like to offer to the audience? I know that seems like a really big ask, but I feel like I can say that to you because you always have these nuggets that are just so transforming.

Sallyann: What I can say to everyone is, we’re just passing through all of us. And we forget that. And this journey is as big and wide and tall, as you can imagine. So whatever you have going on right now, imagine bigger and imagine taller and imagine wider. And when you talk about the universe conspiring, I can tell you that when you step up and very often, it’s one [00:43:00] foot with courage and one foot with tremendous fear. When you step up, the world will step up to bat with you. And I wish that for every single one of you watching.

Kelly: Yup. I love that, Sally. And thank you so much for those parting thoughts. So you guys, we already mentioned that you can find more information about Gleac. If you’d like to follow Sallyann she is available on LinkedIn at Sallyann Della Casa and on Twitter @sallyannglf.

Thank you all for listening into this episode of Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby.

You can find me on all the social platforms at Kelly Ryan Bailey. The podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify and the video version on YouTube. We just talked about learning in all different ways, and that’s why I have platforms that [00:44:00] have listening or viewing because everyone likes to do this a different way.

So you have that there, but I would really appreciate some feedback, subscriptions, and ratings from you all. Thank you again, and I hope you have a wonderful day.