Celebrating the Diversity of People - An Interview with Jennifer Rogers

Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

Jennifer Rogers has a deep understanding of how skill and competency management works in the real world. She has led work in this area at two major companies in the energy and resource sector and as a consultant.

Jennifer’s vision goes beyond the practical aspects of strategy and implementation in a large company. She is helping to shape the larger vision for skill and competency management and how it can help create a more supportive and productive environment.

We spoke with Jennifer in late October.

Ibbaka: Share with us a bit about your background and how your experience has brought to you into your current role. 

Jennifer: I have been working in the learning and education space my entire career. I started out in public school reform and working in large public-school systems to transform education. My focus was on the ways in which we could provide more opportunity to students that hadn’t traditionally had that kind of opportunity. Through a lot of different mechanisms, through governance, technology, innovation, all of those pieces.

A decade into that, I was recruited into the energy sector and I went to a large oil and gas company.

Ibbaka: That seems like a big leap. What are the things you took from the first part of your career that helped you approach corporate training and learning differently than other people do? You have a fairly unique approach to this.

Jennifer: It’s interesting, a lot of people ask about the transition from public education to corporate training. Honestly, a lot of the problems and challenges are the same. I was able to utilize the approaches and innovations that we had used in school reform in the corporate space. A lot of that had to do with differentiation, the use of data to truly understand the population and give them exactly what they needed to accelerate their growth and development.

That’s a huge challenge for corporations. It was a great opportunity to come in and look at it from that lens, instead of looking at every single colleague in a large, global organization as being exactly the same. Actually focus on the ways that people are different. The wonderful diversity that exists in a large organization is an asset, and looking at that strategically we can create the conditions to help people really thrive.

Ibbaka: You’ve been a strong advocate for people understanding their skills, skill profiles and connecting those to competency models. What is it about this approach that you find interesting and compelling?

Jennifer: One of the things that is so important is the transition from a fixed, static, competency model to something more dynamic that is skill-based and constantly growing, morphing, and changing. It gives us the visibility of the diversity that exists and the advantages that come from that. 

We can use that to really think about work differently, to recognize the talent and the skills that we have in our organizations in a fundamentally different way, one that breaks the barriers down around the ORG chart and the boxes. 

The other thing that is exciting is that it is dynamic. It enables this thought process that we are never done growing and learning. We can’t necessarily predict a fixed path that will get us from point A to point B. I think this is empowering. 

People can see and recognize things about themselves that they didn’t necessarily even know. They may not have been aware that they have a unique skill set that could be used in all of these different ways. 

It is super empowering for people to see, understand and embrace that and actually chart their own paths in regard to where they want to be. It levels the playing field. It also gives people the opportunity to not spend time on skills they already have and to really focus on the skills they want and need. 

This is different from ticking a box competency model, which is  what we would’ve seen in the past, where we are expecting the same thing from every person. 

Ibbaka: Can you talk about the changes coming to the workplace? Not just what you have seen to date, but also what you think may be coming?

Jennifer: It is no secret that growth is exponential and that applies to work as well. The types of work we do today, the types of jobs, aren’t necessarily indicative of what work will look like in the future. 

This pandemic has brought that to light for many people. Changes happen and they are happening more and more quickly. We have to adapt and go forward in a way in which we may not have been able to fully  see or model. The details will not be known ahead of time, they will be emergent. But to some extent they can be predicted. 

If we can predict the skills and the capability that the workforce requires we can proactively develop people for that. Even if the jobs don’t exist yet, we can strategically develop the workforce to be ahead of that change. We need to start to build the skills now that they’re going to need as we move into the future.

Ibbaka: Given the changes that you are seeing, those changes catalyzed by the pandemic and those that are still a little bit off from the future, what is your vision for skill, skill profiles and competency models and the direction they need to go?

Jennifer: I think this is a brilliant time in history for all of this. Artificial intelligence and machine learning is getting to a place where we can utilize it to help us create and explore scenarios. This can give us insight into how the different scenarios could play out and allow us to strategically develop for multiple scenarios simultaneously. 

In terms of the direction, it is all about embracing the variability and diversity in people. We talk about things, processes, equipment, we want to standardize and get things in as tight of a working order as possible. We want things to be predictable with little variability. People are a completely different story; they are the antithesis of that. 

The more variation and variability that we can discover in the population, the more we can utilize that to approach complex challenges in ways we wouldn’t necessarily be able to do in the traditional mindset.  

For skill development, I think it is critical for us to be able to look at what we are seeing in the trends: publications, white papers, blogs, what are people talking about and what does that tell us about what the future looks like. How are we addressing that from a scenario standpoint? The great variability and diverse profiles that people already have are critical for rapid adaptation.

Ibbaka: What have you been doing these last few months to develop your own skills and to connect with other people’s skills?

Jennifer: It’s been interesting because I’ve been able to look at different facets of my life: health and wellbeing, mindfulness, meditation, and the ways in which these manifest themselves every day. 

All of the pieces come together in a specific way that makes up who you are, and how you are growing. Leadership, principles around meditation, running, all of these have been coming together in a really interesting way. 

I have also been thinking a lot about behaviour change, how we change behaviours, how that manifests in our bodies and the ways in which we can utilize that information from a skill perspective to become more resilient. That’s the message we’re trying to get out there for everyone.

Ibbaka: What do you think the new normal could look like? What is the new normal going to be in the world of work?

Jennifer: I think the new normal is what we see right now. Exponential change that’s not on one predictable path. Whether it is a pandemic or something else, it really doesn’t matter, things are rapidly changing, and we don’t have time to start to execute a plan after a change has happened. 

The pace of change is so much faster and the way we work will forever be changed. That is something that is empowering if you look at it from the perspective of the opportunity to learn and grow in new ways. Making it visible with the skills you already have in a new workforce and a new way of work. I hope that is the direction that things take and that is the message that gets out to people. 

Ultimately, things are not predictable. We’ve seen that. We’ve been saying the pace of change is exponential, but it still feels like people expected someone to come out with a sign saying, “Stop! There is about to be a change, so get ready!”. That’s just not how it works. None of us would’ve expected the pandemic to play out as it has.

Ibbaka: If you were advising an organization that was just about to set off on this journey, maybe they have some old competency models captured in spreadsheets, maybe information about their skills or a talent management system, but they don’t yet have a vision or plan to get to the next level, what advice would you give them?

Jennifer: For organizations that have some kind of taxonomy or competency model that is in place, that is a great thing. I would say that organizations that have taken the time to do that have a great starting point. What you really need to think about from there is broadening that out with regards to the ways in which work will manifest itself from a discipline standpoint rather than a job title perspective. 

The static models are based on fixed jobs. It is harder to translate that to a new way of working where those jobs are fundamentally different. One of the easiest things to do is look at the disciplines within your organization, more broadly than jobs. Disciplines are things like finance, human resources, manufacturing, or engineering. Start to define the ways in which those might manifest themselves. 

Organizations have different categories in terms of how they organize things. Think about people working in a discipline and ask broadly what skills might they need now and in the future without worrying too much about specific jobs. That gives you a better view to what disciplines exist now, what might not exist yet, but also what might be emerging. 

Once you have an initial point of view, map people against this draft competency model to see where they are at. Don’t limit this to existing jobs. Look at what skills they have, regardless of their job they’re in now, and how they map to different scenarios that may play out in the future. 

This is very doable for organizations that have a competency model. Some organizations focus only on technical skills, or their only leadership and social processes. This is a mistake. We can’t really look at just one dimension. 

One of the critical things to think about is how to accelerate this process and keep it open to change and the unexpected.If you were to try to sit down in a conference room with sticky notes, or even on Zoom, that exercise would take a really long time. 

If you already have documentation and you can point to other places in your space like professional organizations, patents, publications, then you can use an AI to scrape the data and give you baseline insights. 

You still need to look at the results and validate from a human perspective. But using AI gives you a lot more diversity than what we typically see with static models. We get into groupthink as human beings, that’s what we do. Opening that up a bit, and letting those insights come, opens things up and points out things we haven’t thought about that may just be our strategic advantage not only as organizations, but also as the human beings within them.