Joe Fuller: Generative AI is quickly rewriting the script for work—from hiring practices to job descriptions, from performance evaluation to workforce planning. What does that mean for employers and training providers who are already scrambling to keep up with the pace of change? And who is responsible for the lifelong learning workers will need to remain competitive in the digital economy? Employers have an incentive to create career paths, but many are increasingly unsure of how to go about it given the unpredictability of our technological future.

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. I’m joined today by Amy Regan Morehouse, Senior Vice President and Head of [Global] Education and Training at ServiceNow, the cloud software firm. The company’s approach to training factored into its strong showing in the 2023 American Opportunity Index. The Index, produced by our Managing the Future of Work Project at Harvard Business School and our partners, The Burning Glass Institute and the Schultz Family Foundation, rates corporate employers on how they promote upward mobility for workers without college degrees. Amy’s focus on education and training is informed by her own experience entering the tech industry with an arts and humanities background and her need to acquire new skills quickly. We’ll talk about how ServiceNow works with its employees to map out learning plans based on their own interests as well as the company’s requirements. We’ll also talk about the company’s training partnerships with educators and skills providers that not only feature courses in the ServiceNow platform, but also in related digital and social skills to enhance the career prospects of the participants. Welcome to the podcast, Amy.

Amy Regan Morehouse: Thank you so much for having me.

Fuller: Amy, I’m curious about how you came to be at ServiceNow. I think of ServiceNow as a company, started probably on the order of 20 years ago, that has just grown hugely and become a very influential force in the software industry from a standing start. Tell us about your journey into the company and how you find yourself in your current position.

Regan Morehouse: To be candid, I come from a nontraditional tech background. I was an art history major, originally thought I would be a dancer, of all things. Needless to say, since graduation, I’ve had to become a lifelong learner. In fact, my first job in tech; I was hired to work with customers, but in the quick shift of a start-up, we started reporting to the head of engineering, who told me I was unqualified to be there and gave me 30 days. I quickly had to harness the skills I did bring to the table and learn a lot of tech skills along the way. That really made an impact on me and my career and reinforced the importance of learning. I came to ServiceNow about seven months ago to lead global education and training certification and also build a pipeline of talent. I also had a similar role at Salesforce, and I was there for about 15 years. The biggest thing I’ve learned is that skills are adaptable, and it’s an ongoing evolution, but the results can have a big impact.

Fuller: Well, Amy, I think you’re in good company in the tech space. Steve Jobs famously studied calligraphy.

Regan Morehouse: Go liberal arts.

Fuller: There you go. Well, let’s talk about that, actually, because you refer to the extendibility of skills, people’s capacity like yourself, given that first, “You’re not qualified to be here, you got to learn this in 30 days and prove it to me,” that the ability to develop skills among internal staff and given the velocity of technology, keeping them fresh is a really big challenge. How do you think about that philosophically? What lessons did you learn at Salesforce managing things to ServiceNow?

Regan Morehouse: We want to have a culture that supports us doing our best work, living our best lives, and fulfilling our purpose together. We call that our “People Pact.” A huge part of that is building the resources and tools to help people develop their careers, and it’s a never-ending process. We offer flexible learning models so that people can be learning what they’re interested in, as well as what their manager might think are areas of growth, and constantly be feeding new opportunities to learn within the business.

Fuller: You balance the consideration of what they’re interested in with what their supervisor would like them to learn. Can you talk a little bit more about how that gets arbitrated and how you manage that, what I’ll call “optional learning” or learning to broaden employee’s skill set. A lot of companies are wrestling with that—should they be on the clock or not? Is it just remote? If the worker or the employee is relying on an outside vendor, do you only pay when they complete? How does that whole system work?

Regan Morehouse: Well, I think it’s really important that we’re hiring for people’s backgrounds and skills and aptitude, but we want to work with them on what they’re interested in and how that applies to the strategy of the company. There will always be things that the company wants employees to be learning, based on the growth trajectory of the company, like at ServiceNow, or based on new trends or new industries, new markets potentially that we’re going after. I think it’s really about marrying those two so that people can grow and seize new opportunities. Sometimes you may not know that you’re interested in something until you start learning about it. I think there’s a natural conversation. We have quarterly growth conversations between employees and their managers where we talk about these exact things to make sure that we’re in lockstep with what the goals of the business are and the goals of the employees.

Fuller: Amy, we’re speaking in the holiday season of 2023, and the last year has been obviously turned upside down in a lot of companies by the arrival of generative AI. How are you seeing the pattern of what your colleagues are interested in learning? Are you seeing a widespread kind of common move about things they’re interested in or is it more about their discipline, their job role, the specific areas they work in?

Regan Morehouse: I think it’s a bit of both. I think people are looking at how to develop skills for their career right now, but then they’re also hearing about all the skills that are going to be needed with things like generative AI coming out. They hear AI, generative AI, and a lot of people aren’t sure what that means for them yet, because while it might be a CEO priority to consider using AI in the workplace, less than half of CEOs have actually implemented technology and really gotten on board. It creates a bit of anxiety with employees of not knowing what their day job is going to look like. I think it’s really important for people like us, providers that are including generative AI capabilities into our products, that there’s a little bit of education for everyone—that introductory-level information. So I know the vocabulary of generative AI and what people are talking about. That hopefully piques curiosity, as opposed to anxiety. We also need to quickly back it up with deep technical skills that are going to be able to implement these types of technologies successfully. I think it’s a little of both.

Fuller: I’m curious at Salesforce and what your colleagues in corporate learning at ServiceNow feel about learning and the correlation to retention. Our research at the Managing Future of Work Project suggests there’s quite a strong correlation that workers who see their employer investing in their future, letting them pursue interests, build the basics, put in the qualifications to be maybe considered for different positions for the company, advancement of the company, the payback in that is really denominated in reduction in voluntary turnover. Does your experience speak to that?

Regan Morehouse: Absolutely. There are two things that I think get people to want to stay with a company, is where they feel invested in, and they have a support structure with their managers, mentors, collaborators across the company that they feel connected to. I think we can all probably look back and remember someone who took a chance on us. Even the person who gave me 30 days to prove myself, he gave me that opportunity to learn something new and stretch, and I loved that job. So I think it is really important. We see that correlation in the data, we see it in practice, and especially in tech, everything is moving so quickly. Making sure that you can invest, not just to sort of get a promotion, but to expand your broad base of skills, is critical to being successful in tech. It’s really on all of our employers to think through a talent-development strategy, because what people want to be connected to.

Fuller: Well, we’re great admirers of data, and we like to think we create some here at the project. We recently published in collaboration with The Burning Glass Institute and the Schultz Family Foundation—as in Howard Schultz and his wife, the founder of Starbucks—the American Opportunity Index, which looked at 396, to be precise, of the Fortune 500, how they invest in their success in creating opportunities for their workers that don’t have four-year degrees. And there’s no hiding it, Amy. ServiceNow came in fifth out of 396, which even for the most competitive American diehard, achievement-oriented executive, has got feel pretty great. Also, first in software, although to give some of your competitors their due, Meta was sixth and Intuit, I think ninth, and your former employer, 23rd. How do you feel that reflects what your operation is doing and what ServiceNow is doing more broadly? And how do you view this divide between the degreed and the non-degreed, which has become a big, big subject of conversation about equality of opportunity and DEI and things like that? We don’t see, per the American Opportunity Index, a whole lot progress by a lot of companies. How are you approaching that?

Regan Morehouse: Well, first of all, we are so pleased to have been awarded our number five spot on the AOI and, of course, No. 1 in software. We’ve got to work hard every day to keep that designation, right? This is something that is really important for us. If you think of the facets that you’re looking at in that index is, developing people to drive business results, check, foster career growth, absolutely critical as I mentioned. That’s kind of our secret sauce, actually, is having those quarterly growth conversations so that, no matter what your background is, we can help you grow in the ways that are going to be most meaningful for you and drive business results. I think the four-year degree model is excellent for developing such a wide range of skills, but even in the technology space, if you have a computer science degree five, 10 years later, there’s a whole different technology stack to learn. We’re in times we never would’ve imagined 10 years ago. I think it’s constantly making sure that we don’t have barriers to people who want to get into technology. I think ServiceNow is really committed to the work of bringing people in, regardless of their background, is what skills do you bring to the table and then what skills we can help you develop. I think that mindset is really essential to making great strides in making sure everyone feels represented in tech.

Fuller: Well, let’s talk about that, because one of the interesting things about your strategy, which several of your competitors have also pursued, but you seem to have a very significant investment in what I’ll call pathways programs. You’ve got something called “RiseUp with ServiceNow.” You’ve entered into some academic partnerships with some very prominent online university, a big online presence, I should say. Could you talk a little bit about the logic behind that, what you’re trying to accomplish with it, and what type of results you’re seeing?

Regan Morehouse: Yeah. We are thrilled that we have our commitment to skill up a million people on the ServiceNow platform. Now, we recognized we were going to need more people with ServiceNow skills out there in the world, because our business is growing. At the same time, we feel it’s really important to create all kinds of pathways into the jobs in tech. RiseUp with ServiceNow, to reach that 1 million goal, we still need to focus on skilling up our customers, making sure they have the right skills to adopt the platform, that our partners have the right skills to implement successfully, that our own employees know about our platform, because they’re building it and engineering on top. But then we also have to build the talent pathways from everywhere. It’s sort of that all-inclusive world that we want to create with the partnerships that we do for workforce development. As you mentioned, we’ve got academic institutions, we’ve got governments we work with, a lot of nonprofits that we work with, that are helping specific communities get jobs into tech. We know that with those, we actually have to also provide mentoring and coaching and sometimes basic digital experience so that people can be successful when we layer in the ServiceNow skills. We partnered with Arizona State on their AZNext program, and that program is specifically targeting adult learners from nontraditionally tech backgrounds. We have a very fast pathway for them to get on board. We have on-demand curriculum for them, as well as partnering up across ASU on their mentoring and job placement.

Fuller: Talk to me a little bit though about a different partnership I saw—I was very curious about—which is with Randstad, which is a huge supplier of talent. We were delighted to have their global CEO on our podcast recently. How did that come together, and what’s the logic for that?

Regan Morehouse: Well, as I mentioned, we do a lot of work in workforce development. We partner with all different types of nonprofits that are focused on bespoke communities to skill them up. We call that “NextGen,” our NextGen program. What we realize is what we want to make sure that as these students are graduating from our NextGen program—and the retention rates are extremely high, like 94 percent retention rates on skilling from non-traditional pathways—we wanted to make sure that they could land a great job afterwards. It made a lot of sense to partner with a values-based company like ours in helping create meaningful career opportunities. Randstad was a great partner for us in that area.

Fuller: You mentioned earlier a critical variable, at least in our estimation, on skills development programs, which was mentorship. Is that something you’re providing with ServiceNow employees, getting involved with learners? Do you have counselors on your staff? How are you managing that and other ways to surround that learner with the type of support that allows them to move from an aspiring worker fluent in technology to someone who can get a good paying job on the basis of what they’ve learned?

Regan Morehouse: Yeah, with our RiseUp with ServiceNow program, it includes mentoring of these cohorts that are going through the learning process. We’re engaging with them all the time, providing tips and tricks, guidance along the way, answering their questions about careers. But you’re right, we also enlist our employees to step in and mentor. We also even have some of our customers and partners mentoring, too, really being there to show what a day in the life really looks like and answering those questions. What we know, for anyone who makes a career change or a switch—and in some cases, these are big life changes, going from a veteran to now a systems administrator in tech, that’s a big pivot. How do we provide them all the support that we can to help them be successful? We also have a community of people that are all building their careers on ServiceNow, and our mentees, in this case, our learners, have access to that community to jump in and make relationships and also get advice along the way.

Fuller: As we’ve looked at the evolution of jobs and think about—particularly as we get into this generative AI era, if you will—that what remains of, in terms of the tasks that are central, that getting a good job becomes more and more oriented toward what is variously called “foundation skills,” “power skills,” “social skills.” In the old literature, they were called “soft skills,” but happily, that word is kind of becoming more and more archaic, since it just really suggests that these are things that anybody ought to be able to do, and it’s not hard, and they’re among the hardest skills to master. How do you think about soft skills as you hire? How do you think about trying to help employees cultivate soft skills? And how do those social skills feature in things like RiseUp?

Regan Morehouse: We did some research with Pearson this last year that really looked at the impact of AI and automation and all this technology that’s helping empower the world, and what is that going to do to the workforce. We really wanted to know what was going to be really important for the jobs of the future. As machines are doing what machines are great at, all those mundane tasks that we don’t want to do, or number crunching beyond our brain’s capacity, what’s really encouraging about the data is it’s the human skills, these power skills, that actually become the must-have skills of the future. When they look at jobs of the future, what we see in that data is that collaboration, creativity, curiosity, complex problem solving, those are the must-have skills, and that’s really important for employers to consider. It’s not just five years of this or three years of that or a certain degree; it’s how does this person communicate and collaborate? Do they ask deep discovery questions? Those are the types of things that are going to be highest-value skills.

Fuller: I noticed you’ve also partnered with Udemy in that space. Could you tell a little bit about what they’re providing that augments what you can do on your own?

Regan Morehouse: We saw in this data that we needed to help people continuously grow those human skills, those power skills, those super foundational skills. While we have some of that on our Now Learning platform, we also wanted to partner with a company that specializes in that. What we did with our partnership with Udemy, is that we looked at the career journeys that we outline and show learners, “This is a path for you,” and we added in curated recommendations of Udemy content so that, as you’re learning to be a ServiceNow professional, whatever role you’re interested in, you can also be building the right set of power skills along the way. That’s what this partnership with Udemy really unlocks for us.

Fuller: I think this combination of—you call them the “superpower” of the future of work in power skills and AI—when you talk to customers, when you’re talking to your colleagues at ServiceNow, how do you imagine work evolving as these two forces come together? There are increasing numbers of models out there. They certainly suggest the displacement of a significant percentage of tasks in a lot of white-collar roles, roles that have been less affected by previous waves of technology. How do you see that unfolding, both through your work with Pearson and also in your internal conversations about the skill sets of the future and how you’re going to source them?

Regan Morehouse: Well, one thing from a data perspective, again, we looked at particular roles, and we also looked at particular industries that are likely to be disrupted. Here’s an example. Administrative assistant, someone who works inside a corporation, and you think of it as a relatively stable job, there’s more “assistance” than ever before. I’m putting air quotes around the assistance, right? These digital technologies are taking off some of the work that administrative assistants have typically done. What’s great is if you look at the skill set of administrative assistants, 70 percent of that is translatable into being an excellent help desk agent. As more things unlock along the way, we need to help people see those transferable skills. I think it’s really important. Another area is sales reps. They have great opportunities of inspiring and educating. There’ll be great change managers, because as a lot of technology comes into a company, change management is going to be a very important skill set. That’s how we’re looking at it, is really get to know what are the adaptable skills, what are the related skills, and that’s where you’re making the investment in the people.

Fuller: We have a large project that was launched here that I’m participating in at Harvard Business School on the whole topic of reskilling. We’ve spoken to quite a number of very distinguished global companies that have excellent reputations in terms of quality of work life for their employees and their history of being able to maintain a vibrant skill base in their company. Many of them have expressed, a bit to our surprise, concern and uncertainty as to whether or not they really know how to go about it. They find employees are often a bit suspicious about, “Is this a stalking horse for restructuring? Is there any chance I’m going to be evaluated in some way that might lead to me to not get a future opportunity, or worse yet, be made redundant?” When you talk to customers about reskilling, when you think about it in the company, how are you approaching that? Any tips for our listeners about how they should be thinking about it?

Regan Morehouse: It’s not like AI is just going to replace employees, right? There’s depth of expertise, there’s industry knowledge, there’s a historical background that comes to bear. We looked at about 23 million jobs that could be disrupted by automation in the U.S. alone by 2027. That is a lot of jobs, and that’s assuming that everyone’s job stays the same as it is today, which I actually don’t believe is the case. I think our jobs will transform over time. It’s natural for an employee to say, “Oh gosh, I don’t know about this new thing and, therefore, I’m not sure I’ll be qualified for it.” I think it’s really the culture and the tone of the company, that we’re looking for those that are open to learning, those who are willing to ask questions, because as an adult, we sometimes don’t want to admit we don’t know something. Creating a culture that rewards learning, that really embraces the experience that people have, but understanding we’re going to have to get them the ability to reskill and upskill. And building those programs is going to be a focus for all companies. I think every organization needs to be thinking about a reskilling or upskilling strategy right now.

Fuller: It’s a really interesting dilemma, because most companies in most industries are used to a much longer technology cycle, so they could amortize the cost of training, investment in skills over a longer period of time. In some instances, now, I think the half-life of a lot of the technologies emerging may be equivalent to the period it takes somebody to master that technology, really become facile with it. I think this is going to require a lot of breaking of paradigms and rethinking how we structure this learning, how we encourage people to learn, and how we actually use technology to make learning more palatable. A lot of people hear “learning program” and they think a first-generation MOOC experience—massive [open] online course—or going back to school. Certainly, when you get to middle-skills workers and many of those without degrees, the prospect of going back to school isn’t all that inviting. I think we’re going to have to go down to some first principles here in order to get an approach that’s fit for the future.

Regan Morehouse: Absolutely. We need to know our audience. Do they like to learn in 15-minute bursts and an achievement to celebrate? There will be people that still want to be with an instructor and ask questions. I think we both need to have flexibility and a comprehensive suite of offerings, because as we know with people, we’re all not alike. We need to make sure that we have the right type of content, the right modality to inspire people to learn. It’s going to have to be a regular part of the motion of every employee’s day in the life.

Fuller: Amy, when you think about a specific course and maybe some of the participants in it, could you give us an example that gives us a better sense about how these things are structured? What, if you will, a day in the life or a session in the life of one of the learners is like?

Regan Morehouse: We have about 600 free courses that are available online on demand. We also have instructor-led courses and multi-month cohort-based, expert architect type of courses, too. It’s a little different across the board. I think one thing that’s really interesting, if I think of some of the latest things we’ve rolled out, our introduction to Gen AI course. I recommend it to everyone who has a question about gen AI, and I mentioned that. We also then have a course on the essentials for developers, implementers, and admins, so they can incorporate gen AI into the ServiceNow workflows they’re setting up for their company. We even have an executive learning path as sort of a micro certification for executives, because sometimes they need the inside scoop of what is generative AI, how can I use it, et cetera. We’ve got great customers like NTT DATA and Zurich Insurance, who I know you’ve spoken to, who are really building this into the learning for their organizations, too. We have a wide variety of courses, but those are just a few.

Fuller: As you think about how you are strategizing for the future for learning—both by your employees, but also by your business partners and customers—what are the three or four things looking out a few years that are most on your mind?

Regan Morehouse: Well, obviously, as we’re delivering more generative AI in our platform for our customers, we need to make sure that we are empowering all of the users—the people setting it up, et cetera—have all the right skills. That will continue to evolve. We have a catalog of courseware now, but it will get much larger as we proceed down this path. I think for us, we really need to make sure that we are committed to continuously develop our academic partnerships. I mentioned a few with ASU, but we are also in 40 different universities across India. We’re looking to put more business-related curriculum out there, because we know that there are roles like a platform owner or a business analyst that straddles the tech world and the business world, and we need to make sure they have a really clear learning journey. We’ll continue really focusing on our relationships with our customers and partners who are employers, making sure we understand what their talent strategy is, because, as we’ve mentioned on this call today, really understanding how you can empower your workforce is so important.

Fuller: Well, Amy Regan Morehouse, Senior Vice President of Global Education at ServiceNow, thanks for joining us and sharing with us the story of your evolution in the tech sector and everything that ServiceNow is doing, not only to help its customers’ employees grow, but to coming fifth in the American Opportunity Index in 2023.

Regan Morehouse: Thank you so much for having me.

Fuller: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.