Lifelong Learning and Organizational Technology Adoption with Eric Wise

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This is a podcast episode titled, Lifelong Learning and Organizational Technology Adoption with Eric Wise. The summary for this episode is: <p>In this episode of The Future of Teamwork, host and HUDDL3 CEO Dane Groeneveld speaks with the founder and creator of skillfoundry.io, Eric Wise. Together, these two discuss Eric's career path and the evolution of technology in business operations, with a special emphasis on learning and development. If you're curious about data queries and analytics, generative AI, and the effect of software on skills training, this is the episode for you. Join Dane and Eric for a fascinating conversation about strengthening your organization's onboarding philosophy, and encouraging a systematic method for empowering your team's development while creating and retaining loyal employees that go above and beyond.</p><p><br></p><p>Key Takeaways</p><ul><li>Intro to Eric Wise, Founder of skillfoundry.io</li><li>Eric on bootstrapping his business</li><li>Getting started as an entrepreneur earlier before some life events</li><li>Generative AI and cost reduction, still not good enough to do a human's job</li><li>Experience and Hallucinations</li><li>Access to answers and questions, Stack Overflow</li><li>Where the responsibility falls for learning and development, and how companies and teams curate learning</li><li>The "Hire, Train, Deploy" movement</li><li>Learning and development trajectories from day one</li><li>Onboarding knowledge and relationships</li><li>Addressing a skills gap, hiring freezes, additive and transformative learning</li><li>Understanding data queries and analysis, Python training programs and possibilities</li><li>Pathways to creating transformative work</li><li>Learning together and bonding, loyalty to team and business</li><li>Building learning, culture, and community</li><li>Lifetime value, thinking about the relationship between college institutions and missed opportunities in lifetime training</li><li>Lifelong learning for everyone, not just executives</li><li>Peer group learning, being dynamic to thrive in transformative businesses</li><li>Connective tissue: Gaps between academic courses and job functions, partnerships between higher ed and businesses</li><li>Computer science is one of the most dropped-out degrees, and the teaching hasn't changed</li><li>Bringing more technical talent to a world where businesses are adapting to AI, automation, and focused learning experiences</li><li>Not going to be replaced by AI, going to be replaced by someone who doesn't use AI</li><li>Eric's hope for the future of teamwork, and how to contact him</li></ul>
Not going to be replaced by AI, going to be replaced by someone who doesn't use AI
00:00 MIN
Intro to Eric Wise, Founder of skillfoundry.io
04:08 MIN
Eric on bootstrapping his business
00:54 MIN
Getting started as an entrepreneur earlier before some life events
01:07 MIN
Generative AI and cost reduction, still not good enough to do a human's job
01:22 MIN
Experience and Hallucinations
01:58 MIN
Access to answers and questions, StackOverflow
02:35 MIN
Where the responsibility falls for learning and development, and how companies and teams curate learning
02:28 MIN
The "Hire, Train, Deploy" movement
01:01 MIN
Learning and development trajectories from day one
01:27 MIN
Onboarding knowledge and relationships
00:47 MIN
Addressing a skills gap, hiring freezes, additive and transformative learning
02:51 MIN
Understanding data queries and analysis, Python training programs and possibilities
02:03 MIN
Pathways to creating transformative work
02:32 MIN
Learning together and bonding, loyalty to team and business
01:15 MIN
Building learning, culture, and community
02:26 MIN
Lifetime value, thinking about the relationship of college institutions and missed opportunities in lifetime training
02:00 MIN
Lifelong learning for everyone, not just executives
01:22 MIN
Peer group learning, being dynamic to thrive in transformative businesses
03:34 MIN
Connective tissue: Gaps between academic courses and job functions, partnerships between higher ed and businesses
02:05 MIN
Computer science is one of the most dropped out degrees, and the teaching hasn't changed
03:11 MIN
Bringing more technical talent to a world where businesses are adapting to AI, automation, and focused learning experiences
02:48 MIN
Eric's hope for the future of teamwork, and how to contact him
02:24 MIN

Voiceover: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork Podcast, where we explore cutting edge strategies to keep teams human centered, drive innovation, and empower you with the tools and insights need to help your team excel and thrive in today's rapidly changing world. Your host is Dane Groeneveld, a seasoned expert with over 20 years of experience enhancing team dynamics and innovation. Today, we have a thought- provoking episode for you. Wondering how to transform your organization's learning approach? Join Eric Wise and Dane as they delve into the strategies of transformational versus additive learning methods. Eric, a seasoned entrepreneur and visionary in the world of technical education startups, is here to share his expertise in designing transformative learning experiences and revolutionizing how organizations approach reskilling and upskilling programs. In this episode, they'll explore three key topics. First, they'll navigate the world of generative AI, gain valuable insights into the dos and don'ts of utilizing generative AI. Eric provides guidance on effectively harnessing this cutting edge technology while avoiding common pitfalls. Then, they'll dive deep into the distinctions between transformational and additive learning approaches. Listeners will learn when and how to implement these approaches, helping organizations make informed decisions on the most suitable methods for employee development. Finally, they'll discuss the importance of fostering lifelong learning for all employees. The conversation underscores the significance of promoting lifelong learning for every member of an organization, from entry- level roles to top executives. Eric highlights the missed opportunity for businesses to support continuous skills development and growth throughout employees' careers. So teamwork makes the dream work, and we're here to inspire your next collaborative breakthrough. Gather your team or put on your headphones and let's dive in together.

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork Podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of the HUDDL3 Group, and today I'm joined by Eric Wise. Eric is a serial entrepreneur. He is also a creator and the founder of SkillFoundry. io. So I had the pleasure of meeting Eric up in Cleveland recently, and we talked a lot about bridging the skills gap and allowing people to reinvent themselves and have greater impact on teams. So it's going to be a great conversation. Welcome to the show, Eric.

Eric Wise: Hey, thanks, Dan. Good to be here.

Dane Groeneveld: That's great. I really enjoyed our first meeting and just the energy, passion, expertise you bring to bridging these skills gaps, helping people step up and have great impact on great teams. Could you maybe share with the leaders a little bit more about your backstory, what brought you to be doing all this great work?

Eric Wise: Yeah, yeah. I actually came up as a software architect. I started coding when I was 12. My dad, not to date myself, but my dad bought a Commodore 64 and I discovered Qbasic and I started coding and really never looked back. Ended up going to college. I dropped out of computer science and went into information systems because I was also interested in business. And after doing all that self coding, I didn't feel like I was getting as much value out of the computer science degree. And I really wasn't interested in the electives, physics, chemistry. Just wasn't as fun or as interesting as finance and marketing and accounting. So I switched over to the College of Business and then became a business programmer and never really looked back. What I learned, and this is something I advise technical people to this day, is to take those business classes because chances are you're going to be working for a business, you're going to be writing code for a business. And the more you understand about the business, its motivation, its departments and how technology can improve that, the better off you're going to be as a technology professional. And I very quickly learned that my more introverted, less business savvy peers were being passed over because the business people wanted me to come to meetings because I could speak their language. So I kind of jumped up the ladder, became a software architect. And I found myself in Canton, Ohio working for a pet insurance startup. Canton's out in the sticks and it's really hard to recruit talent in general and especially if you're out in the sticks in Ohio. And we just couldn't get enough technical talent. And eventually in a fit of frustration, I told the CEO, I said, " Well, I need some people to write some reports and do some testing for me. I can teach them what they need to know. Just give me some people who are smart and interested." And I ended up taking two women out of the call center and teaching them SQL, and they both started writing technical reports for me within a month. And the one was so good at it that I started teaching her C# so that she could write some automated testing, and that went well as well. And this was around 2012, 2013. And then I became aware of the concept of a coding bootcamp because Dev Bootcamp out of San Francisco had just started to great media affair. They had Forbes articles and stuff being written about them. And I looked at that and I said, " I could do that." So I quit my job and I liquidated my 401( k) and I built a C# and Java curriculum and started a business.

Dane Groeneveld: That's cool.

Eric Wise: It had a 93% job placement rate, zero to hero, and I sold that to an OPM, and then they got bought by Wiley. And ever since then, I've just been building education businesses, working with corporations and consumers, just helping get non- tech people technical skills,

Dane Groeneveld: Which is so neat. It's so bold too, just jump in with both feet and go, " Right, I'm going to go and start my own business."

Eric Wise: Yeah, I go to startup events sometimes and I tell people my story. And at the time, not only did I liquidate my 401( k) and bootstrap it, but my kids were three and five years old at the time, and I had a mortgage and my wife was a stay at home mom. And they were like, " Wow, you literally just put everything. Just pushed all the chips into the table." It worked out. It worked out. But that's kind of the nice thing, if you're a technical person, getting a job in most times... I mean, this year's been rough, but in most times getting a job isn't super hard. So being a young tech worker, it's the time to take the opportunity because I was like, well, if I had failed, I just would've gone and got a job.

Dane Groeneveld: There is some research out there which talks about entrepreneurs getting started before they're too far into their journey with kids, mortgages, everything else. But at the same time, I'm seeing more and more founders in their 40s, 50s, 60s than ever before because technology on the other end allows people to come in and build something pretty quickly around a problem in the market. I guess there's a wide cross section of entrepreneurial activity these days.

Eric Wise: The gig academy is amazing. I mean, versus when I started my business, I mean, you can go out to Fiverr and you can get logos and letterhead and copy and website set up for a couple hundred dollars, which back in 2012 when I was starting, I had to do all that myself, or you had to go to a marketing agency and pay...

Dane Groeneveld: A lot of money.

Eric Wise: Yeah, a lot of money. And it's just getting started is so much cheaper than it's ever been, which is super cool to see. Because I've started new businesses, every time I start a new business, I can get farther for my dollar than I used to.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I hear a lot spoken these days, and I'm not sure how much of a fan you are of the generative AI movement. I know you and I had a few chats on that, but they're saying that with generative AI roll forward 18 months to 36 months and we're going to see a whole nother level of cost reduction on what it takes to just get set up. How do you see that playing out?

Eric Wise: I use generative AI on a weekly basis at this point. It's not good enough to do a human's job. That's for sure. It will never think. That's not how generative AI and LLMs work. They don't think. But as somebody who creates content for a living, the hardest part is when you're staring at the blank screen. And with generative AI, you can give it a topic and it can spew out some stuff that is okay, but it gets you started. And then you can say, " Oh okay, yeah, I want it in this order instead of that order," and then you start rewriting it and adding your flavor. I mean, by the time I'm done with something, if I use generative AI to start something, by the time I'm done, only like 20, 25% of the stuff that the generative AI used remains, but it speeds me up because you spend less time in writer's block. It's a really great tool for writer's block.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. So it really moves you quickly to where you do your best work.

Eric Wise: Yeah, yeah, but you got to be careful with the hallucinations. As a tech person, sometimes it spews out stuff and it's just wrong. And you're just like, if you didn't have the experience, you wouldn't know.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah, I've had a few of those experiences. I wonder then when you're building training content and coursework now, are you looking still more at the traditional picks and shovels, the real language and approaches and skills, or are you starting to look at how people are experimenting with emerging technology too?

Eric Wise: Mostly it's picks and shovels. I don't feel comfortable with what generative AI and stuff is going to look like in the next 12 months to commit myself to building a course around it, but I do have some material in my courses now because I build a lot of programming courses and SQL courses, and I do have some material in there now that advises students on how to use it effectively.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat.

Eric Wise: Because you can use it as kind of a TA to reinforce things and things like that, but you don't want it to do the work for you. Because if it doesn't work for you, you won't learn the skills. You won't know when it's wrong. You won't be able to figure out when things go wrong. You don't want it to be a crutch, but it can be a helper. And I actually think in education, that's probably the next step for LLMs is learning institutions figuring out how to use it as a tutor, how to use it as a TA, and improve the student's experience because the open office hours will only get you so far. Somebody's working at midnight, they have a problem, being able to ask the LLM, which never gets tired and never sasses you and never gets frustrated with you, that could be a real game changer for people that just need some extra help here and there.

Dane Groeneveld: It's interesting when you say it never sasses you. I know in the academic community, it can be a bit intimidating sometimes to come and ask a professor a question which, hang on a minute, where were you on Monday at 10: 00? I presented on that for an hour.

Eric Wise: Right. Right.

Dane Groeneveld: So maybe it makes it a little bit safer being able to go and talk to the generative AI and throw a prompt in there and not feel like you're being judged.

Eric Wise: Well, you've even seen in the tech space, there's a really popular site called Stack Overflow where people go to get their questions answered and stuff. And that company, boy, I think they were bought for$ 1 billion years ago, and they're like the de facto Q& A technical question site out there, and their stock has cratered since LLMs came out. Because their community, they do the upvote thing like Reddit and other social media sites, but their community can be absolutely vicious. And it's very intimidating to go answer a question and then have somebody just shut it down, oh, that's a stupid question, or that question's already been answered over here. Why don't you do your research dummy? And that's how humans treat each other on the internet. I was talking about this to my friend the other day. I said one of the downsides of the internet and social media is people feel free to say things that would get them punched in the mouth In real life. It seems like as a society, we're losing that politeness because there's no repercussions for it anymore. And then when generative AI gets where it's going, a site like Stack Overflow where the user community hasn't been kind to all the users, no users are going to want to go there anymore. They're going to want to talk to AI.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, they just opt out. That's fascinating. Actually we talk a lot about asynchronous meetings and how they're really beneficial for businesses with remote workforces and people in different time zones, people with different learning and processing styles, but that concept of people attacking each other may actually cause some hesitation for certain teams doing asynchronous meetings if everyone's putting in their thoughts and then they're seeing them getting torn down. If you're in a meeting in person and you say something, well, you said it and someone told you no probably in a more polite way. But if you put a comment in a chat box online, it's memorialized. It's there forever that you were wrong and someone else tore you down.

Eric Wise: Absolutely.

Dane Groeneveld: It's pretty different. I guess going back to the picks and shovels then, so building technological skills, but also building business skills for people that come and engage with your content. How much do you see in the future of teams that people are going to be responsible for going and doing their own learning versus companies and team leaders curating that learning? Have you got a sense of balance there?

Eric Wise: It's always been fascinating to me because, I mean, ever since I started the coding bootcamp, which was the consumer business, we had companies coming around and saying, " Hey, what would it look like to bring a bootcamp in house? And what would it look like to do corporate training," because there's a desire for it. But at the same time, a lot of companies I've worked with over the last decade or attempted to work with, they don't want to pay the price of the time. They're keeping people so busy, they can't imagine. I've had companies approach me like, " Oh, we want to run a bootcamp in- house," and I'm like, " Well, are you willing to give somebody to 20 hours a week to learn?" And they're like, " No, they couldn't get their job done. They're so overworked. The productivity costs would be too high." And it's particularly interesting to me because then what happens is the employees that really want those skills, they have no choice but to go out and do it themselves. And then they do it themselves at their own expense. And what happens? They get recruited, they get a higher salary offer, and then you lose an employee that had the motivation and the drive to improve themselves. And that is the last person that you want walking out the door in your company. It's that old adage, I've seen it on LinkedIn a couple times, what if we train our people and they leave? And it's like, well, what if you don't and they stay? It's tough, but that's something I've worked with a lot of companies on building some asynchronous learning. I call it async plus when I talk about it, but there's a mix of using async where it makes sense and using synchronous content when it's effective that I've helped companies build more scalable training courses than anything else out there if they're willing to set up the structure.

Dane Groeneveld: Interesting. That's really the bigger cost then. It's the 10 to 20 hours that they're away from their day job versus the cost of building the content and hosting the teachings.

Eric Wise: There's a movement now called hire, train, deploy where staffing firms are now taking that role, and they're saying, " Well, we'll pay people apprenticeship wages, and we'll train them. And then companies, you can rent them from us for two years." And it's a very profitable model and it takes the training burden off the companies. So I guess the question companies have to ask themselves is, do we want to do this at scale and transform our workforce and have total control over everything, or do we want to outsource it to other companies and pay the costs? You're going to pay either way.

Dane Groeneveld: You are going to pay.

Eric Wise: Yeah, you're going to pay either way, but I guess the question is how much control do you want to have over it and how much value is that as a recruiting tool? And I would say it's a huge value as a recruiting tool. Back when I was looking for work, I don't know, I mean, Dane, you're also running companies and stuff, but did you ever have a company when you were talking about hiring that were able to express to you what your learning and development plan and what your career progression would look like?

Dane Groeneveld: No.

Eric Wise: That would be incredibly powerful if as an organization for every role you could talk to somebody and be like, " Hey, here's what your role looks like today and here's the pathways you have to grow and move in our organization, and here's some stories of some people that have done it."

Dane Groeneveld: That is powerful. I know some of the big blue chips used to have that for their graduate programs, and you knew you'd get two years in each department. And if you've done well by the time you're 32 or 34, you're in a director role. There was some of those stories, but that was really only affordable, available to massive brands that actually had very detailed pathways, but not to most normal companies.

Eric Wise: But even for normal companies, if you don't want to invest in an in- house training program, just having somebody to curate, there's so much content out there now that you can that build. Just curating Coursera courses and YouTube courses and Udemy courses. I mean, you might have to custom build a little bit of stuff for your company, but it's not as much as...

Dane Groeneveld: You can just pick it. That's a really interesting piece. I guess the other factor, staying with that business to business theme if you're curating content, not only are you keeping people that you said are motivated, excited to be on the team, but there's a corporate knowledge, corporate memory relationship factor that has to be an accelerator. Because if I'm bringing someone in new with a new technical skill, but they don't know the seven people that they work with or the customers that we support or the products that we offer, then you've now got to onboard them on just that level of knowledge and relationship too.

Eric Wise: Yeah, and a lot of companies are missing that entirely. They do a one day orientation. It's just not sufficient.

Dane Groeneveld: No, it's a box tick. No, that's neat. So let's go down the types of content that you see, whether it's individuals or teams that are proving to be most relevant right now as people continuously reskill. The world's changing. Is it heavily in the BI analytics or is it more in building customer facing technologies? What do you see really capturing eyes and ears?

Eric Wise: Well, I mean, there's a lot of change going on right now. We still have a skills gap. Even though the market has pulled back, all that does right now... The work doesn't go away. The demand doesn't go away. And I know you have experience in the staffing industry as well. We always see this where there's a hiring freeze for a little bit too long, and then there's a feeding frenzy. And then because there's been a hiring freeze, now we've seen multiple coding bootcamps go out of business. We're seeing enrollment dropping and technology programs. So when it comes back, we're going to be back in that position where the shortage is just massive. Those types of programs when... I talk about additive versus transformative learning. Additive, I'm already a programmer, I need to learn cloud. And if you already have that core skillset, you can be heavily asynchronous. You can take online courses. You can do it pretty much on your own because you have that solid foundation. But if you're looking for transformative experience and where I've seen this a lot in businesses, you mentioned data analytics, it seems like a lot of IT shops now are drawing a line in the sand and they're saying, " Hey, business, we're going to make your data available. We're going to secure your data, but we're not doing your analytics for you anymore. You finance people, you marketing people, you are going to have to analyze your own data, make your own decisions, make your own plans. We'll help you, but we're not..." It used to be you'd want to report and you'd send it off to IT. I think those days are going away. They are now expecting finance and marketing and accounting people to be able to query their own data and build their own dashboards and analyze their own data. I mean, Microsoft just announced that Python can be embedded in Excel sheets now. So you can write Python scripts in Excel.

Dane Groeneveld: Wow.

Eric Wise: So now I see an opportunity for businesses. You want to attract top- notch financial people and marketing people? Offer them Python training, teach them how to do that in Excel, because that's a thing now. And nobody knows how to do it. And wow, what an attractive training program for your business people.

Dane Groeneveld: I've heard that there's actually some pretty good online resources for downloading Python scripts too.

Eric Wise: Oh yeah, yeah. Python's really friendly, open. They have a lot of components, a lot of downloadable things. There's a company DataCamp that runs some online training stuff, which is pretty decent. I know their stuff pretty well.

Dane Groeneveld: I had a friend actually living out in the Carolinas who told me he was able to buy a device, I think it was like a door for his chicken coop, and he was able to go online and find a Python script to attach to a camera with the door such that the camera would recognize if it was a chicken and let it in. But if it was a fox or a coyote, it couldn't come in. I'm like, man, for a consumer to do that at home is next level.

Eric Wise: Python is amazing for home automation and things like that. I had a friend who had humidity sensors that they wired up a Python script and they put humidity sensors in their garden bed and it would water the garden if the humidity or whatever. I don't know, it was sciencey. I'm not into that part.

Dane Groeneveld: But that's cool though.

Eric Wise: But yeah, it would water their plants when it detected that it was getting a little dry.

Dane Groeneveld: So going back to your additive versus transformative, it must therefore be very transformative if you can take the non- technical people in your business, whether they're in customer service, accounting, HR, sales roles, and to give them some tools which all of a sudden allow them to almost construct the way that they're going to do their work.

Eric Wise: Yeah, yeah, and the transformative stuff is where you need the peering. That's where you need the humans and things like that. That's where the instructor really provides value. And it's one of my bigger success stories in the last couple of years. It was under a different business brand, but I helped a Fortune 500 company design a zero decoder pathway. And they had call center people and other business department people going into that program and coming out and joining the IT team. And that's amazing because one of the biggest challenges of an IT team in an enterprise is understanding what the business wants. But if you take somebody from one of those other departments and you can rotate them into IT, they're bringing all that business acumen and all that process knowledge with them. One of the executives was sitting down with me having a cup of coffee and they were just like, " Yeah, so- and- so that came out of this department, they went onto their team and they were planning on doing this big project to do this thing," and the person took one look at it and said, " That's not going to work."

Dane Groeneveld: Wow.

Eric Wise: And they just saved all this time and money because they brought the business knowledge into the tech part. And they're like, " Well, you guys didn't think about this. This is something that's really important to that team, and you've completely disregarded it."

Dane Groeneveld: So you almost accelerate past some of the deeper UX learnings and user research because you've actually built a team of users before their developers. That's very cool.

Eric Wise: And those people are loyal. I mean, since I've been doing corporate training, very few people that I've encountered that experienced corporate training that is transformative and it's successful and they move into a new role, very few of those people are willing to just stand up and say, " Well, screw you company. I'm out of here. Thanks for investing in me." That's just not something many people are willing to do. And honestly, you probably didn't want that person in your company anyway if that's how they react to those opportunities.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, absolutely. That does raise an interesting point, Eric, is that if... And I heard this on a podcast the other week, you may know more of the phenomenon, but they said if people learn together and they have a revelation together, it actually creates more team bonding. That group of people that you bought through from a call center into the IT team, not only individually are they more loyal to the company, they're individually more loyal and comfortable to the team members.

Eric Wise: They are. And I saw that when I was running the coding bootcamp back in the day. Some companies, they hired multiple graduates from the bootcamp and they kept them together on their teams. And they grew together and experienced the work together. It creates such a tight bond and friendship, which is what we also did in the program. We didn't just learn. We had game nights at the guild where people would play board games and things like that, and we did all these community building things. It was very hard for those people to leave a job where all their friends were adjacent to them. So our placement rates were good, but our retention rates were really good. I think I saw at the time the average retention of an IT worker was like 18 months or something and ours was running three to four years.

Dane Groeneveld: Which is huge.

Eric Wise: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: It's interesting that you say you ran board game nights, so you're doing more than just learning. You were building a culture while they were there in the bootcamp. What did you do or what do you see other customers, competitors doing to keep that culture alive once people get deployed out to the field? Do you build community, keep community going there?

Eric Wise: Well, that's something interesting because I do a lot of consulting for bootcamps and other learning programs even today. It's an opportunity that I think a lot of them are missing. Because a lot of them, once they get the job and they throw them over the fence, they're like, " Well, our work here is done," and they treat them like a university alumni. And I don't know what your relationship is with your university, but I mean...

Dane Groeneveld: Ask for money every 12 months.

Eric Wise: Exactly. Exactly. They send me a thing and they're like, " Hey, entrepreneur guy, you want to cut us a check?" And I'm like, " Well, what have you done for me over the last 20 years?" There's no events. You don't do anything that I'm interested in. You don't engage me. You haven't kept me in contact. It's such a missed opportunity, especially In technology. If you're a training program, I mean, everybody that you train needs more training within a year or two. I don't understand why some of these programs aren't looking at what is the lifetime value of somebody that goes through your program and what is the lifetime value to your corporate partners? I mean, shouldn't you be evolving your program to match where your partners are going? Going back to the bootcamp space, one of the biggest name bootcamps, they're still teaching Ruby. And I'm just like, there's 700 jobs in the United States for Ruby today.

Dane Groeneveld: Why are you still doing it?

Eric Wise: Yeah, why are you still doing that? You should be teaching anything else, Python, JavaScript, anything else. I don't know. It's just something I've noticed. Even when I sold my business and I got into the for- profit. A lot of the for- profit education people, they think that you educate somebody once and you're done, and then you got to go find a new customer. And I don't think that's true anymore. I think a lifetime of learning is what they should be focusing on, and you don't see it enough. I just don't think they think that way.

Dane Groeneveld: Lifelong learners is interesting. It's a little bit of a tag out there in the industry for people in the coaching world, certainly executives. They always talk about lifelong learning. But what you're sharing there is that, well, we should be doing lifelong learning for everyone, whether you're in the call center or a middle manager in a finance function. We should be driving that. And it seems to be a gap. There's lots of brilliant learning and development teams out there creating a lot of content, but often there's a loss of transmission between what learning and development is there to do and then what the line and the function is supporting their team members to be doing.

Eric Wise: It's hard to set up. It's a long tail. It's hard to measure. I get it. I get it. I think it's a missed opportunity. I think about my career, and I don't know, I'd like to hear your thought on this. I mean, back in the day when you were in your early 20s and you were just getting started and somebody came to you and said, " Hey, if you sign a 10- year contract with me and you give me 1% of your salary, I will make sure you have access to peers, learning programs, certifications, skills," I would've absolutely signed that contract in a heartbeat.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, me too. Every day.

Eric Wise: In a Heartbeat.

Dane Groeneveld: It's interesting. My view on that is that it's out there for executives at a price point. I was part of the Vistage Network for seven years and had a great time with them and monthly get togethers with peers and access to a big portal of lots of different information, different conferences, different speakers. So that was really good, but that was 15, $20, 000 a year. There's a price of entry there. I don't see it lower down in the org, and I don't even see it at a direct to consumer level, but there are some businesses out there that are starting to pop up. So I think that you're starting to see these community platforms or marketplace platforms that aren't just learning courses. It's hey, come and we'll curate you into a peer group, and there's a lot of power in peer learning in that setting.

Eric Wise: I wonder how much of that is the gig economy stuff. Because if you're going to be a gig worker, if that's where we're going, you're going to have to be really dynamic if you're going to continue to make a living.

Dane Groeneveld: You are, and actually that's a healthy thing. I think I was fortunate early in my career to work for enough companies that were going through transformational change or growth where I just got thrown into opportunities to learn. It wasn't intentional. There was no learning and development team mapping out my path. But whether it was having to go in and set up a immigration process to get some of our teams into Papua New Guinea or dealing with a medical evacuation out of Iraq, there was always something that was like, oh my gosh, how do we do this? And you were forced to go and find peers, find specialists to help you do it, where unfortunately, maybe partly takes the problem. In the last 10, 12, 15 years even, I find people are in more curated environments anyway and they're following more workflows and processes, and they're not doing as much of that pioneering like, go find it, go learn in many settings.

Eric Wise: Early on in my career, I started with a company that ended up getting acquired by Microsoft. And I found that over the first 10 years of my career, I kept working for smaller and smaller companies because I liked that. The bigger companies, you tend to get pigeonholed into a team with a specific role. And when I went into smaller companies, it was just more, hey, everybody has hats to wear. And sometimes we're going to trade and sometimes there's a new hat and somebody has to pick it up and figure out how to wear it. That's how I got to where I was really quickly is our database administrator quit. And I was like, well, I guess I'm the database administrator now. I'm going to have to learn how to do this. I know SQL, but I don't know how to administrate a server. And I had to go buy a big book and started watching videos and poking at things. I mean, that's fun, but it's not something that's afforded to a lot of people. I agree with you. It's a missing part, I suppose.

Dane Groeneveld: It actually ties into your point earlier on corporations not wanting to give up the individual for 10 to 20 hours a week. Maybe it's, well, if you can't do 10 to 20 hours a week, can you at least give them a five hour stretch project to jump on a team and be trying something different with the aid of some outside coaching, whether it's asynchronous or not? Before the show, we were talking, Eric, about one of your pieces of content, looking at the gaps between certain academic courses and what the job function requires out in the real world. What's your view on, is that gap growing? Is it being shortened? How is industry and academy academics working together on that future of work?

Eric Wise: I mean, I'm tech focused, and it's really hard. I used to be very critical of higher education until I really got into consulting with higher education. And I saw what it takes to get an accredited course from zero through approval to the students. It's not easy and it's years, it's long tail. And it's not really their fault. But there's definitely some things in higher education especially... The biggest gap is what I call the connective tissue, because you'll take a programming course in year one and a database course in year two, but you never really learn how to weave all those together. They tend to be hyper- focused in those courses on just that thing because they don't have a lot of time. So the number of students, we used to joke about it on the job, me and my peers, that the college students, they knew things, but they couldn't do stuff. And it would be nice if colleges would, in technology at least, if they would accept that there's a vocational part that is very important to technology jobs and that they would build that into their programs towards the end where they actually had to go out and build things and use source control and use project management software and do UX design and things like that just like a real project. Because if you don't get an internship, you're really at a disadvantage coming out of a technical program, trying to break into a professional environment.

Dane Groeneveld: That is real, and I like the way you phrased it as the value of the vocational effort or vocational work product. Internships I think is one way to do it. I have seen a number of project- based learning institutions as well where they actually say, " Hey, go in there and build a website and build some kind of landing page that allows people to come in and click and purchase something," but they actually start creating real world things, which is powerful.

Eric Wise: Well, and something else, I think it's still true today, but even 10 years ago, computer science was the number one dropout degree in college. And I think that still continues today. And I look at that and I'm like, okay, you PhDs, you're smart people. You don't get a PhD without being smart, but you're sitting here and perennially, this is one of the most dropped out degrees and you haven't changed how you teach it. That's just boggling to me that that's a thing. Because one of the colleges I was working with, I was really challenging them because one of the first courses you take as a computer science major is data structures and algorithms. And these kids have never written code before. They've never worked on an application at scale. I'm like, why are you doing this to them? I mean, it's an important topic. It belongs in the computer science degree, but I try to get them to move that back to your junior or senior year. Start teaching them Python or C# or Java and let them build some applications and get some wins and start to understand how software works, and then teach them what's going on behind the scenes after they get the need, the hunger, the desire, the good feeling that you get when you compile your code and something useful comes out. They don't care about sorting algorithms as a freshman. They've never built an application before. I don't know.

Dane Groeneveld: But I agree with you. My sister actually did a project- based medical degree, so they actually started getting thrown in as an undergraduate. So she went home to Australia and they started getting thrown in with actors playing patients and complaining of symptoms, and they started learning what it was to be a doctor before they really learned the science behind being a doctor. So once they got to the real science stuff, they were like, " Oh yeah, I remember we had that patient that was going through this and these are the things that I need to be looking at to have that conversation." So they joined the dots of adding value and learning stuff.

Eric Wise: It's just a different way of learning.

Dane Groeneveld: And I guess everyone's going to have their own learning style, but in a real life business environment, going back to your earlier point and what took you more towards information systems, it's a more obvious way to be interacting with other people, particularly those that aren't going to be technical. That's super cool. So if you think, Eric, forwards now into companies that are... It's almost like every company is trying to become a tech company. That's been the case for five or 10 years. But where they start, are you seeing any particular functions of service businesses or product businesses where they're bringing more technical talent to bear as they think about technology?

Eric Wise: Well, everything is being automated now. What was the famous article? Software Is Eating the World or whatever. I mean, it's absolutely true. I mean, I was thinking about it the other day. I got in my car and I'm like, I'm not really driving a car anymore. I'm kind of driving a computer.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it's true.

Eric Wise: And we're looking at the impact of this AI and these LLMs. I think one of the earlier impacts is going to be on the customer service and the chatbots and getting people to get help. I don't necessarily need to talk to a human to change my password or troubleshoot my cable modem at home. That should be able to be automated and the bot won't have its feelings hurt when a customer is angry with it or frustrated. It'd be able to handle it, deescalate it. I think about the impacts that those companies are going to have, and it's all about automation. It's about freeing your people up to do human things and leaving the grunt work. People are really nervous though. I don't get as nervous. This has been happening in agriculture and manufacturing for a long time. It's about to hit white collar world, which is new to us as society, and it's scary. But I think about my top tier student support people that I've worked with in education companies. The chatbot can take over all of the check- ins where the student's doing just fine. I see it as now that person can focus on the people who really need them.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Eric Wise: So I see it as making that customer, that learner experience better and more focused and more targeted and being able to truly give white glove service to the people that need it. That's the opportunity. Some people are going to lose their jobs. Yeah. I mean, it's going to happen. But if I'm sitting in that shoe, I don't think you're going to be replaced by AI. I think you're going to be replaced by a human who uses it effectively.

Dane Groeneveld: That's the quote I heard last week. It's a professional that uses AI that's going to take your job, not just the AI. And I think that's a great call to action for any team or individual to say, well, I want to start playing with this. I want to start upskilling, reskilling, reinventing myself so that I'm not waiting for someone to come and say, " This is the new way we do things." I'm on the leading edge of it. I'm looking for ways, to use your words, to reduce the grunt work, increase the value of the human touch on a day by day basis.

Eric Wise: I mean, going back to curriculum development, one of the major ways AI has sped me up is I can have a lesson completely written out and I can give it to ChatGPT and I can say, " Generate me 20 multiple choice and true and false questions for a quiz for this," and it generate them. And I'm like, garbage, garbage. This one's good. I'll tweak this one. This one's good. Garbage, garbage, garbage. But in content development, that's grunt work. I've just taken what I already wrote and just trying to come up with some questions to see if you were paying attention. That's not a good valuable use of my time. And if I can do that now in 15 minutes instead of two hours, I can spend more time working on the parts of the lesson that are impactful to the learner.

Dane Groeneveld: And not only is it two hours of lost time, but when I come out of that type of work, I'm like low on energy for the next two hours of whatever else I do too.

Eric Wise: Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. I've been there where I'm like, ugh, I just got to slog through this thing. And then I get done with it and I'm like... And luckily being on my own and being a one man show right now, I'm like, I'm going to go take a nap and I'm going to pick this up at 8: 00 in the evening and I can do that.

Dane Groeneveld: But yeah, think about the impact it's having on your teams when you're more front lines and everyone's got to be there. That grunt work's a real burden.

Eric Wise: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: No, that's neat. Well, this has been a great conversation, Eric. I think it's really cool hearing your story both as an entrepreneur, but also as a consultant and a leader of businesses that have really helped people both add skills and transform skills. As a parting question, what would you say your hope is for the future of teamwork? What do you hope people to be experiencing in their teams in say five or 10 years time?

Eric Wise: I'm hoping that the continuation of automation and AI technology and things like that, that people get to focus on interesting and impactful things. That's the end goal of this automation AI society. I remember reading maybe it was a popular mechanics or something back when I was a kid and they had a teaser for self- driving cars. And the car was driving itself and two people were sitting in the backseat playing chess. And I thought, how much more meaningful would my life be if when I was traveling I could just focus on things that had meaning to me, whether it was writing, work, creativeness, whatever? I think that if you're creative, you're going to have a good time coming up here.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that optimism too. And your self- driving car reminds me of the amount of trouble I get myself in with my wife and kids when I'm trying to park. It's that last five minutes and you're in a busy parking lot, and I get into a really bad head space. And then I start the day of sport or the day at the beach or the day at the mall in a bad place, so it would save me a lot of trouble too. Well, this has been a great conversation, Eric. I really appreciate you taking the time. And if any of our listeners want to reach out to have some help from you consulting on how they bring more tech skills into their workforce, how they build learning programs at large, how do they best find you?

Eric Wise: Eric @ 4thwallstudios, the number four, 4thwallstudios.llc. You can look me up on LinkedIn. There's not many Eric Wises. It's pretty easy to find me or drop me a note at SkillFoundry. io.

Dane Groeneveld: Neat. Well, I'm sure a few listeners will be really interested in keeping tabs and working with you here in the future, but thanks again for the time.

Eric Wise: Hey, thanks for having me on, Dane. This was fun.

Dane Groeneveld: You bet.

Voiceover: Thank you for joining us. Remember that by embracing vulnerability, trusting our intuition, and approaching challenges with compassion, we not only strengthen our teams, but also pave the way for a future where collaboration thrives. If you're hungry for more insights, strategies, and research on collaboration, head over to thefutureofteamwork. com. There you can join our mailing list to stay updated with the latest episodes and get access to exclusive content tailored to make your team thrive. Together we can build the future of teamwork. Until next time.

DESCRIPTION

In this episode of The Future of Teamwork, host and HUDDL3 CEO Dane Groeneveld speaks with the founder and creator of skillfoundry.io, Eric Wise. Together, these two discuss Eric's career path and the evolution of technology in business operations, with a special emphasis on learning and development. If you're curious about data queries and analytics, generative AI, and the effect of software on skills training, this is the episode for you. Join Dane and Eric for a fascinating conversation about strengthening your organization's onboarding philosophy and encouraging a systematic method for empowering your team's development while creating and retaining loyal employees who go above and beyond.

Today's Host

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Dane Groeneveld

|HUDDL3 Group CEO

Today's Guests

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Eric Wise

|Creator and Founder of skillfoundry.io