Meet the skills-first experts

- Welcome, everyone, to a special LinkedIn Learning course on skills-first talent management. My name is Aneesh, and I head up an effort at LinkedIn to move skills-first thinking to the center of C-suite decision-making. And that's why we're so excited you're watching this course. We hope out there are C-suite decision-makers, hiring managers, people that have been hearing a lot about skills-first thinking but are unsure why they've been hearing about it, what it means, and how they can actually bring it to the center of talent management. I want to thank all of our partners who are here today for this conversation. I'm going to have everyone introduce themselves and explain who you are and what excites you about this course. - Yeah, hi everybody, so glad to be here, Cat Ward. I'm a vice president at Jobs for the Future, and JFF is a national nonprofit focused on equitable economic advancement. And one of the areas where we really focus is thinking about the role of the employer in creating a more inclusive economy. And one of the big things that employers can do is adopt that skills-first mindset and practices. So my work really zeroes in on that, and I'm excited to be here today because this is a hot issue right now. Like you said, Aneesh, everyone's talking about this, but we're at the ground floor. A lot of people are just getting started. So we have the power to shape how this gets done and gets done in a way that really creates widespread economic opportunity for people. So I'm excited to be here to talk about what that looks like and what it can be. - Thanks for being here. Elyse. - Great. Thanks for having me. I'm Elyse Rosenblum. I'm the founder and managing director of Grads of Life. We're a nonprofit with a mission to close the opportunity divide in the country. And the way we go at that big challenge is thinking about how to change the system of employment in this country so that employers are really playing the critical role they need to play, creating greater access to economic opportunity, while at the same time, solving some of their core business needs. So really excited about the growing conversation around skills-based talent practices. They are really the most powerful lever employers have to pull in addressing some core business needs, access to talent, while creating greater access to opportunity. And I think we're at the time when it's important for us to roll up our sleeves and make sure people know how to transition to a skills-based talent strategy. - Hi everyone, my name is Shad Ahmed. I'm the chief operating officer for Opportunity@Work. We're a social enterprise focused on the 70 million workers in America who are skilled through alternative routes, or STARS. These workers are more than half the US population, and they've learned skills on the job, through military service, through community college, and other routes. And our focus is to rewire the labor market, alongside many of you and employers, to open access to these great jobs. - I'm Jessica Muench. I am chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer at United Airlines. We are currently an employer of about 90,000 team members, and we're growing really fast, this year hiring 15,000 new team members. And so skills-first hiring is super important to us right now to bring all that talent into our funnel. I'm super excited to be here today because I want to share what we're doing in order to solve some really important business problems. - Well, and I'm really excited for all of you business leaders to hear that this can be done. United has been out there, Accenture, IBM, Walmart. So many employers are moving in this direction because it creates workforce agility. It really is good for business, which brings is to Teuila. (laughing) - Hi, Teuila Hanson, chief people officer at LinkedIn. So I oversee the internal piece of what we're doing at LinkedIn regarding skills, also partnering with our product teams to ensure that we're providing a skills-first approach to our members and our customers, and then from my perspective, what are we doing internally to provide that same experience for our employees. What excites me about skills, it's I see it as an unlock, an unlock to talent pools, an unlock to ensure that we are providing economic opportunity, also just an unlock from a talent intelligence perspective. So that as we're sitting down with our business leaders and we understand what the business strategy is, we have the opportunity to understand our skill strategy to go along with it. So I'm excited to share but also excited to learn from you all.