Dennis Di Lorenzo, Director of Skilling Strategy at Micron Technology

Dennis Di Lorenzo: We're five days back. So I am adjusting.

Siobhan Savage: I love it. I love it. I found it felt last year, the amount of travel I did. I was in a consistent stream of jet lag and you just become quite used to the zombie behaviors. It's working night shifts. That's what I felt with all the travel.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: Well, between the trip, and the global time and Micron's global footprint, I'm always in multiple time zones, even when I'm in one place.

Siobhan Savage: No, I love it. And I know exactly where you're at. I'm in 68 countries around the world right now. Welcome everyone. Good to see you all.

Well, we're going to get started. So firstly, welcome everyone to Skills Connect. Skills Connect is a series where we have conversations with the most bold and most transformational leaders of our time. Today, I am super excited to welcome Dennis DiLorenzo to this conversation. We've got a really incredible conversation coming up, everything from shaping education to training to leadership programs across multiple different industries.

So get excited people because this one's going to be a good one. My name is Siobhan Savage. I'm the CEO and co founder of Reejig. And we're very excited, Dennis, to have you here. So welcome.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: Well, thank you, Siobhan. Hello everyone. I'm Dennis DiLorenzo. I'm a director of skilling strategy for Micron and a workforce development specialist, and a higher ed leader for the last 30 years, 30 plus years.

Siobhan Savage: Showing a little bit of your age there, Dennis. Yeah, I know. Well, we thought, I thought it would be really amazing as I've got to know you. There's so many dimensions to the way that you think. And I think, there's a lot of conversation happening right now about skills. And we've been in this place about skills for maybe five plus six years.

I know you've spent your career. And I would love you to, tell us a little bit about, high skills has became your passion and where did it get to? And where are you going on this because of what you see?

Dennis Di Lorenzo: Sure. So my passion for skills, I would reframe the question. My passion is really how do we create?

Greater accessibility to work for all populations. Right. And that is really where my career started in workforce development. My 25 years at NYU in the school of continuing education, professional studies. I've worked across every industry that you can imagine for 25 years. And my passion really was driven by all levels of the workforce and how do you create economic empowerment for people to access work, right?

And on the other side of that, clearly work chain has been changing over the last, as you say, I'm showing my age 30 years. And the way we work, the work that we're doing has been impacted by technology, productivity, efficiency, and various shifts in the job economy and in the economy generally.

And so my passion really has been, how do you create readiness for companies? In work, and how to create readiness in candidates. And so this term skills has taken on various meanings. In, I would say, a job economy that was dependent on credentials as a validator of competence and capability. And the term skills really took hold when people realized, or I should say hiring managers realized Credential wasn't enough anymore to assess capability for immediate impact in job role.

And I think that word immediate is an important component of where we are today. I lived in a job economy where as you entered the workforce or you upscaled into new positions. There was always time to learn your role and hit the ground running and in a different way of you can learn while you were working.

and today businesses are looking for immediate impact because what they need in job function is tied to their bottom lines. And if people aren't ready to, and we talk about future ready versus, readiness for day one, I don't think companies are thinking it through, very clearly onboarding programs have extended because of lack of readiness to perform functions.

And so this term skill has taken on the meaning of. How do we find a more qualified workforce in order to perform the tasks we need performed in order to business objectives? And I'm simplifying it, but that's really where the skills economy has become at the forefront of our dialogue the last five years, right?

Capability.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah. And I think that the interesting thing is the world we find ourselves in now. So you've watched my evolution of thought over the years going from really focused on skill to actually really focused on work. And one of the major primers of our connection point is Micron obviously is right at the forefront of the evolution of AI, given what you do as a business, right?

You are actually the bedrock for the curation of the AI when you think about it. And I think there is a really big conversation that's happening across markets right now being led, not from CPOs, but from the CEO

Dennis Di Lorenzo: around

Siobhan Savage: building the AI powered workforce. And how do you see where we were in terms of the skills economy to now orchestrating that in AI becomes an actual worker?

what's your vision? And what are you forecasting for that, Dennis?

Dennis Di Lorenzo: What I'm forecasting for that is, we have to think about AI. In the context of a tool set that's going to create greater productivity and efficiency and to your point, you hear you've heard cheap people officers talk about the impact of AI on workforce.

and work CEOs are thinking about greater efficiency and productivity. Automation and AI enablement, right? And AI isn't just any more, a tool that can help. It's actually an engine driving the business. And if you think about AI as, an engine driving the business, the real question is, how do you bring people along to work alongside the AI versus.

The AI working alongside of people, right, is how I would describe it.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah, and it's,

Dennis Di Lorenzo: , and I think when you, when CEOs are thinking about it, they understand that people are still at the center of work, but the work that they're going to have to perform has to be in partnership with the AI.

Otherwise, You're going to be outmoded very quickly as a business. I'm not even talking about the worker now.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah. And I think what I've seen in market, and I'm super lucky that I get to go into some of the biggest companies in the world and talk to CEO, to CPO, to chief AI officers, and I'm seeing there's exactly what you just said is that, The chief people officer is talking about it in terms of the workforce impacts, whereas the CEO is talking about it in terms of margin machines.

How do I turn my business into a margin machine? How do I create more efficiency and velocity? And I think what's going to be really interesting, and I love your approach because you're super commercial. In the way that you're thinking, you're not thinking about it practically at just the HR level, which is the skill opportunity and how that means for the individuals and your workforce development plans.

You're actually thinking about what does my business need and how am I going to enable the workforce to deliver on that strategy? And I think this is where I think there is some education that needs to happen into market today, where as folks within the HR teams are starting to come up to. Speed really quickly with what this means is that there is a big commercial gap that's missing right now in terms of your CEO has probably more pressure on them today than they've ever had in any time of being a CEO.

Their role right now is to not only win, but to be commercially efficient, to be completely optimized and org effectiveness is really important. While at the same time as the economy and society and the employees will hold them to account. To make sure that they don't leave people behind. And I think this is where we're really obsessed with bold reinvention of your organization, but responsibility in terms of making sure that folks are not left behind.

Right.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: Right. And it's how do you bridge business growth? And social responsibility for economic empowerment of the workforce. And I, and there's large debate about this. I think we both know in the marketplace, but the truth is companies have to focus on both if they're going to win.

Siobhan Savage: I agree.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: And there is. What I would say a partnership model that's being that we all have to focus on in what is the new world of work going to mean for business productivity and economic empowerment of people in the workforce, and those things don't have to be mutually exclusive, right? It means that we need new infrastructure models.

in terms of intelligence about the business at the intersections about of workforce intelligence right and We talk about skills and upskilling and this has been my career for a very long time But the reality is How do you develop a new mindset as well as develop a new skill set in your workforce to meet these objectives is really the bigger question, right?

And there's a lot being written on human centered AI design. There's never going to be a world where people are aren't going to be required to help. And the economic agenda in the workforce. The real question is. How do you become more productive and efficient is when AI takes over the engine of some more road functions, some more critical thinking functions, but there's always a decision maker that has to move the business forward.

I really believe the world of work is developing the strategic side of our team members. Versus the operational side, because it's that strategy, that strategic, influence that people are going to have on reshaping business as you move forward. And those are skills that really need to be developed in team members because it's going to make the business more efficient.

That's the way I see it.

Siobhan Savage: The thing that I think you've got a high level of mastery at is that you are one thinking about it on the workforce development side and. The skill economy within your business, but you're directly linking it into why the CEO should care.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: And I think

Siobhan Savage: that's a really important thing.

And I think the bold and responsible workforce strategy is the bold reinvention of an organization to make sure that you are profitable, that you are a margin machine, that you are all of those things that your board report is requesting. But to your point that you're doing it in a way where you're enabling this new world of responsibility and not leaving folks behind and finding that synergy between where AI and where the workforce plays.

And I think that's something that is really missing right now in our industry, that we're doing a lot of work with, the learning forums and the Josh Bursons of the world, because we're really trying to educate the market right now. To get them to the place where you are, which is that bold, responsible.

And one of the things, that struck me a couple of months ago was, remember when the healthcare, CEO. Thing happened.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: Yes, there

Siobhan Savage: was something pretty scary for me that responsibility for CEO goes far beyond just the PNL. It now goes to this other thing from a society point of view and what is acceptable from our leaders.

And that has never left my brain. We've always talked about zero waste and people and business and society being our whole mission. But actually, if people are now starting to try and hold others to account based on leadership decisions, my fear became God, what happens in a world where we really drive towards AI?

How do we make sure that we're thinking about it at a leader level to make sure that we're being held accountable as well? And that's where your society part comes in which you're discussing It's how do we balance that and I think that bold and responsible way of thinking is critical that And if anyone is listening to this right now if you are in the people team You need to go and find your AI leader or your business leader, who's responsible for this transformation and do what Dennis has done.

lead that conversation because you've got an opportunity not only to position yourself right at the front of this, Dennis has, but also to be in a situation where you're going to navigate the business through not just harvesting people out of work with AI, but doing both. And I think that's what you're really focused on right now, Dennis, which I love.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: Yeah. And I think. Thank you, Siobhan. Our social responsibility really is how is work going to change? And I think one of the things that we're struggling with in 2025 Is we have a traditional mindset of a 40 hour work week. We have a traditional mindset of location time in office.

And we were, this whole remote work debate is aligned with the whole AI debate. We all need to adapt our mindsets into what is the greatest value that we're going to get out of our team members that promotes economic empowerment. And people centered AI, but if people are going to work differently, then we have to structure the work we expect from them differently.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah, and that's, yeah, that's big.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: Yeah, and we're already seeing this. This, the symptoms of this conversation in terms of how do I really measure the value of my workforce? You, and this is where we've talked about workforce intelligence. How do we measure performance has to change from a subjective world.

How do we build intelligence on contributions of our team members that add that are adding value to the business instead of saying, Well, I don't really know how to evaluate. Someone's performance, whether it be through the use of AI, whether it be whether a remote worker or sitting at a desk in the office.

But how do I really, and I think to your point here, ours, CEOs are thinking about those margin machines. But part of those margin machines is what value am I extracting out of my workforce? And as they're asking a lot more questions about how do we know without. And the only way you're going to do that is rebuild your infrastructure, identify your objectives, and actually put measure in that building, that workforce infrastructure, so that you can at least show proven value, because we know people have proven value in the workforce, we just haven't been able to measure it in the way we need to for today's job economy, we're still measuring it based on old practice.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah, I agree. And I'm going to show my age a little bit because I've been doing this over 25 years. And when I look back at The way that we were structuring our companies before it was now I giggle a little bit because it's built for the dinosaurs, the way that job architectures have been structured.

And here's my gripe with the job architecture right now. HR is taking something that doesn't belong to them, which is work that belongs to the business. And then they are labeling it in a way which is mostly being done towards REM frameworks because it's had to because we needed some level of structuring for fairness, which I, that part, take REM out of this whole thing because it's not, my issue is not with REM, my issue is then how we've labeled and structured our companies, we have created these highly siloed organizations where jobs are functions that sit and don't ever.

There's no dynamic or fluidness in terms of this, that the work and if you look at a job architecture and you look at how that's being designed, how they're describing the work is not even how the business would reflect that if they were to have a conversation with you. And then, the time you do your job architecture and finish that project which costs so much money and takes everyone so much time that it's already out of date by the time you sign the invoice and you pay the check, right?

And this is where I'm, And I really do want your view because you're in this big reinvention mode right now, when I'm looking inside organizations, I'm, I don't mean to be rude, but this is not, you're not going to build your AI part workforce if you're building it on the infrastructure for the 80s.

there is that's, tell me more about that because that's the part where I was leaning in when you were talking, I was, okay, tell me more. Well,

Dennis Di Lorenzo: I, job architectures are role driven. Frameworks, right? Because the only way that we knew how to evaluate the value of an individual was based on the role that they were taking.

And we had to find ways of classifying those the level of role. And I'm using the word role because companies never really evaluate the do they evaluate based on title, which is the 80s infrastructure, 20th century infrastructure, where a particular role could be defined at a point in time and probably hold sway for about 20 years with limited modification of how that was contributing to the business, right?

What work people are actually doing, what contributions they're making. In the 21st century have to be tracked differently based on and this a task ontology, but tasks are organic and ever changing. And so how companies define a person's contributions based on the function in the business. A job architecture leaves you behind because it's only focused on your role within a classification system of compensation regions.

And we have to figure out how to evaluate the value of contribution, right? And I have no issues with, companies figuring out. A structure for compensation and contribution and talent mobility. But if we don't start to build, begin building workforce intelligence models that are constantly re evaluated based on people's contributions into work and bringing that forward as part of a business measure that is ongoing.

Then we're never going to be able to adapt into this new world, right? And so how do you begin to build that infrastructure of trap tap task identification of what you need and task contribution of the individual team member, and how do you constantly reevaluate that in a way that says. This resource is providing value, but in, and we can extract that value and or this resource has the capability of contributing value in this other domain or can be working across these other domains.

We have no insights into that in our business, which is why we remain siloed because of the old job. Architecture structure. We know it's a classification system. It's the old tracking systems within education where you would be evaluated based on your capability early on, put in a track in a classification system and stay within that vertical because you were evaluated at a particular point in time with up with never ever being really measured on your potential for growth.

Yeah. Right. And I think this is where the market is going. This is where businesses are going is what are the intelligence infrastructures we need to better measure our workforce. And the demand in order to constantly evolve, because if we do not acknowledge that work is evolving in at least a six month cycles versus 20 year cycles 100 years ago, then we don't understand the world we're living in today.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah, I honestly. Completely full on agree with you to and I'll give you, I'll give everyone a live example of what I'm seeing in real life customers today. Big companies, right? U. S. Based, big. And what we're seeing is exactly what you said around the structure. So the first problem that we typically see is that work is invisible.

no one actually understands the work that's happening other than the title. No one knows. I mean. No one knows that's not actually anything that we're seeing. So that's one problem. The second problem that we have is that there's no intelligence. To help folks think about redesigning it in a different way.

So if you're in Dennis's situation or someone Dennis's situation, and your role is to think about redesigning the workforce, and if you don't have any data, you're going to be just guessing based on tribal knowledge and noises. What you want to be able to do is actually look at redesigning it based on data and fact.

So where is task duplication? Where could AI be most effective? Where causes us the most pain, costs us the most money? Where is there opportunity for greater opportunity for using our existing talent who are already really skilled and are just not in the most valuable place for them? And then what we see is, to your point as well, that, so let's say they go and do the thing around the redesign and they start implementing AI.

AI takes away tasks, but it also brings in new tasks.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: That's right. And

Siobhan Savage: to Dennis's point, this is not a one time thing, this is a ongoing re engineering, or what we call Reejigging, right? The ongoing evolution of work itself has to keep evolving, and the way that the job architecture is currently designed is just so archaic in terms of that structure.

I can see, Rasa, you've got your hand up to say something. Are you wanting to jump in and ask a question or do you want to put it in the chat? Or was that an accident? Sometimes people hit it by an accident, so I don't want to call you out in case that's an accident. It might be an accident. Put it in the chat as well, Rasa, if you've got that question, we can, get that to Dennis as well to ask that question.

But to your point, Dennis, This, we, and the way that I've been describing it to customers, and I'm a workforce optimization expert by background, I started my first career there, and then I sit, I built an AI company, so I'm one of the few people in the world who literally have a deep empathy for the problem, and also I understand AI more than anyone else in our space, because I'm physically building it, right, and what we're saying to customers is that if you're going to create the new AI part of workforce, you need critical infrastructure to enable that, the job architecture, the infrastructure.

Needs to be brought back up to date. It needs to be enabled in a way where it can help folks you make really strategic decisions on redesign, reengineering AI implementation and then looking at the other thing that you said, which I love as well as We don't want to do this to be taking people out of work.

This is not about that. It's about the effective value curation that comes from matching an individual with their skills and capability into meaningful work. That is the, what you're saying that I love. And if you imagine you've got a specific role that has 68 percent of that role has high potential for AI and the company is going to automate that out.

What are the other things that individual can do within the business that is task adjacent? So you're engineering, so think of re engineering your Jenga blocks, you're taking some out, you're putting some on, and it's this redesign. That's essentially what I'm hearing from you, Dennis, is that's going to be the Jenga going forward.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: And to your point, Siobhan, you need the infrastructure to make those decisions quickly, because go back to your point of archaic job architectures. You also have archaic job reevaluation processes that are subjective, not built on any intelligence, but a hiring manager's instincts and a write up of a JD that may not reflect the work that is actually needed in the business.

And if you're going to, if you're going to say. We have a high value skill set in this employee and we want to reengineer work in order to get greater productivity and higher value. We've got to be able to make those decisions quickly and get that person functioning. And right now, Those processes are not designed to do that because of architecture in the way that we think about people infrastructure.

I think we designed the data and the systems in the H. R. World. For talent processes, we did not design them for the business.

Siobhan Savage: I agree. I agree. And what's really interesting? My journey in building this company, so when we first started, do you remember it was all democratizing careers was the marketplace, right?

Dennis Di Lorenzo: Marco, what does that even mean?

Siobhan Savage: And from my perspective, my brain is programmed for optimization and resource allocation. So when we designed it with that in mind first and then the second. And it wasn't because we didn't care about people. Just to be clear, this is not about optimization, squeezing assets.

This is actually about my expertise was naturally around flowing work to worker. And how do I do that? And I think more commercial typically because I was paid for by the company rather than HR, right? So that was my previous career. But what has happened and I'm spending quite a lot of my time at the moment with folks where they're still in the but the talent marketplace is about democratizing careers, and I'm, I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but your CEO right now is not at all talking about democratizing career, your CEO and your shareholders and your board right now are wanting to move fast, increase velocity.

create margin machines. And if you are going to them and talking to them about programs of work and trying to get a skills project signed off and that you're talking about career pathing and democracy, you're going to lose that fight pretty quickly. What you have done in terms of educating your business.

And this is where I think the magic will come from this conversation, Dennis, you have done this great job of bringing everybody on the journey around rethinking this. We got a whole pile of HR folks who are really passionate about solving this problem, but they don't know how to position this with the organization, with the right people.

How would you advise the listeners right now on someone who genuinely wants to do something really cool and do a transformation and help, but how do they seed that in a way that it doesn't feel that old democratizing career vitamin problem rather than painkiller? How do we, how do you start that journey?

Dennis Di Lorenzo: Well, I think you start that journey by leaning into the truth, which is what you just said, Siobhan, in that we're engaging in this process to make the business more productive and more efficient and align our workforce with business objectives. And if you start the conversation there, right, the rest of it.

can fall into place. The idea of talent mobility. I to call it job pathing. I don't to call it career pathing because career pathing is an old notion. The reality is that we are all a series of the jobs we hold, whether we move this way, whether we move this way, or whether we move laterally.

I know enough about workforce assessment and team member assessment. Everybody has their own journey, and it's up to the individual to decide their path. What you want to be able to do for the business is empower people to make the best decisions where they're going to make the greatest contributions.

And this is really about Extracting value from the workforce. And I think career pathing is individually focused. It's not business focused. And so and yes, there has to be an inner, an intersection of those two things, but you cannot talk about one without the other anymore. Because the there's the mindset and I am a job access.

advocate. I do pro bono, consulting for job access non profits. That are looking for non traditional populations to gain access to the workforce, I believe in economic empowerment, but economic empowerment in today's world, isn't a singular vision of a career path anymore. It's how do I get access to work and evolve for growth in order to create business act.

And if we can start using that language, I think. It's that we are always looking for these finite paths that lead that were part of our past versus part of our future. My higher ed background, I've seen the other side of this. Equation in what are we educating our youth for, in our educational models.

And I say educational models because not everyone attends college. There are workforce development. What does a post high school productive life look? What does a post college undergraduate productive life look? Those outcomes are changing and industries are changing. Look at law school, right?

if you actually look at the measures of law school and people attending, the numbers are going down. The ROI on attending law school is changing because technology has disrupted that field. There's questions on whether law school should be three years versus two years because the caught the ROI on that investment held for so many years.

for centuries, but now the actual ROI on that profession, you're starting to see a decline in terms of investment of education versus what you're going to earn over your lifetime and the opportunity that you may gain, right? It's a whole field being disrupted. So making a decision about that career path today requires it.

Different mindset in that how many attorneys are now retooling right and evolving with work because they're taking on different jobs, right? Yeah. And so I think, I know that I'm putting a lot of context around it. The business objectives. Have to be at the forefront of every decision we make regarding the job economy.

And today, there is no room for not having the intelligence to understand. How work is changing because while we're evolving at a much more accelerated pace than we were. Businesses had time to adjust and still meet their business objectives within their workforce capabilities.

And they do not have that luxury anymore.

Siobhan Savage: And it's, what's really interesting, when I started talking this, there was gasps, people, Oh, she's talking about productivity and velocity and operational efficiency. And I was going a little bit against the grain while everyone was talking about career path and I'm talking about.

That's all super important, but these people won't have jobs if I can't figure out this actual bigger problem right now, which is make the company make more money to make sure that everyone can come along this journey. And there was, in the HR community, this sense of, did she just say that?

And I was If you're not thinking about this and the amount of folks that don't read their investor board reports and their earnings reports and are so disconnected from the actual problems of the board. And then, they're complaining that they can't get a skills project signed off.

And I'm, what's the skills project for? Well, we want to make sure that, we have a skills based workforce. And I'm, for what? Why? Well,

Dennis Di Lorenzo: I also think the mistake companies are making is they're embedding it in their L& D agenda. Yeah. And they're not embedding in their business strategy agenda.

Right. And I will say, I feel very privileged at Micron that I'm part of the strategy team, right? My title is director of skilling strategy, but it's skill is skilling strategy as it applies to meeting the business objectives, even though it's through the lens of the people org. But that's an acknowledgement that the people org has to contribute to business strategy.

Siobhan Savage: Yep. I mean, the most expensive asset in a company, unless you are an airline. And own planes is your people. So the way that my friend are thinking about this is super clever because to exactly my point at the beginning, we have been growing so fast in our growth because of what we're doing, but what we're finding and the commonality that's happening is it's either someone you, or it's coming from the business, but the someone you is talking the business.

So that's where we're seeing this really great,. Movement that's happening right now and that's where I'm to folks listening It's stop talking about skills based for the sake of skills base go and read the board report figure out what's happening in the organization What is the pressure points and figure out how do you mobilize your workforce in a way that enables your CEO to achieve those goals?

And I think that's where You have done a really great job of translating the business requirements into how does this look from our workforce and how do we deliver that from a resource allocation perspective? It's less, it's called skills, but actually you're looking at it at a much bigger level than just skills.

I,

Dennis Di Lorenzo: I agree with you. Skills in my mind is just a placeholder term for, workforce productivity. And adding greater value and the, I've done a lot of research on inter, intergenerational behaviors. The impacting the way we work and the workforce and the disruptions. And what's interesting, I have four children, three of them, part of Gen Z one part Gen Alpha, and I'm watching that tho that generation understand that they have to access work and they have to think about their next job and they're teaching themselves.

Through independent access to information, it's what do I need to know today in order to do this job in this moment and not so concerned with, I have to upscale myself for what I'm doing 10 years from now. Yeah, because they know that schools to actually educate themselves in real time for the next job when that moment comes.

Yeah, I

Siobhan Savage: agree. I agree. I mean, what I used to believe that I've changed my thought. It's not that I changed, I've evolved my thought process. I used to believe that every major organization would become quite a professional services environment where work and work. Work allocation move, which is my background.

Right. And I used to think it was based on skill and that whole concept of, you're going to go in and you're going to pay for skills and you have your gig workers and you've got your internal people, blah. Where I've actually got to now, given the work ontology and the work that we're doing, is it's not going to be a skills based economy.

It's going to be a task economy. You're going to price for tasks. Those things in America, what do you call it, TaskRabbit, and all of those things? Actually that's going to be how I work in my kids, I got 10 and 7, they're going to end up just pricing a piece of work, a mini S.

1. W. And essentially pricing it, the Uber model, right? Uber is not based on skill, it's based on task. Well, it's based on,

Dennis Di Lorenzo: and what is a task? It's actually an application of skill, right?

Siobhan Savage: Exactly. So

Dennis Di Lorenzo: We're so focused on, well, this person, is evaluated that they have the skill, but how they actually apply that skill to produce efficiency in task.

We are not talking about that, Siobhan, but the

Siobhan Savage: next

Dennis Di Lorenzo: generation is just, I'm acquiring the capability to do this so I can go perform a task.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah, Yelena from Microsoft, so one of the big debates that I had with her and it was mind blowing for me. So we were talking about skills proficiency.

And we were having this whole debate about skills, proficiency, and I was still on the left hand side of skills, proficiency, and thinking about it, that it was really important. And she said, but in your model, does skill proficiency even matter if task completion is evidence of ability to perform the task and doesn't it become less about the skills, proficiency and more Did Jane complete this task at a higher quality than Bob?

Was the velocity output different? And my mind was, oh my god, I have not been thinking big enough, people.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: I just had this conversation this morning. I was evaluating an assessment vendor and we got to this fraud. Slide about Oh, what if someone uses a I to help with the practice based assessment, will the skill proficiency level be real?

And I thought, I, my thinking was Yelena's and I challenged them. I said, if the person can demonstrate, they perform the task more efficiently with the use of AI. What do I care what proficiency level of skill they had? Right.

Siobhan Savage: It's mad, isn't it? I didn't sleep, I think, for two days. Yeah,

Dennis Di Lorenzo: I mean, and so Yelena is right.

We, but this is where I say we have to come up with much clearer measures of performance output that are less subjective. This becomes part of the infrastructure rebuild. Yeah. Yelena, I, she and I had a brief conversation about this. How do you start to measure performance? On the demonstration of that capability in a real way.

Capability proficiency against task is going to be the new measure.

Siobhan Savage: Yep. I agree. And I think right now we talk, we're talking so big because the reality will be, it'll take time for organizations to shift, right? But we have to

Dennis Di Lorenzo: be the vision, right?

Siobhan Savage: 100%, but the foundational model has to be rebuilt right now.

We've got to lay the road right now for everyone else to drive on. And that is what the expectation of leaders today should be, is that you need to redesign and create your new critical infrastructure that enables the shift and ability for the organization to fully evolve into this vision. And if it's, if we're all, if you're all still stuck on job architectures, we're all doomed to be completely fried.

Well,

Dennis Di Lorenzo: if you're stuck on job architectures, if you're still stuck on content driven L& D catalogs If you're still stuck on, all of these technical infrastructures that are, even in recruitment that are about sourcing candidates, for numbers and not capability. Companies are spending a lot. On what I will call the transition of enablement that occurred in the late 20th century and 21st century with scale that technology allowed for, but it wasn't intentional, right?

And so there were large spends on scales through the lens of tech stack, but no one really knows whether they're having impact on the business anymore from an HR perspective.

Siobhan Savage: Yep. Yep. And even what I'm seeing as well, it's a layer on that. So if I'm sitting with organizations and they're, they've got all of these completely different tech stacks that are sitting there, I'm, that all doesn't matter.

cause you're going to have an agent that's going to talk to your employee from pre hire to retire. You're going to take, I as an employee, I'm going to demand that you, I don't have to go to 10 million different places that I should be able to ask my payroll. How many days leave have I got?

What career is available for me now? I should be able to get all of that in one experience where it's orchestrating off the back end. And the only way that will be possible is actually if you've got good data foundations, because the models will depend on the good data. So again, back to critical infrastructure, we got to get this built in right now.

To enable all of that new transformation, right?

Dennis Di Lorenzo: I agree. It's one of the debates I'm having with the business right now because there are a lot in the skills arena pushing for new technologies. And I said to the business, what, I'd rather take a pause on new technologies in this moment, see what we have in order to continue to enable our practice, maximize that value spend, and rebuild the data infrastructure, and start organizational change management in the practice of use of that intelligence, because I believe that's where our money is better spent.

Siobhan Savage: Yep, I agree. I mean, we've got a UI. Part of our product, but we are really helping our customers think about the future state. So I don't really care so much about the UI. I care some more about the actual data and getting them that enablement. And it really is dependent on if the customer has some complexities, but if you've got systems, we should already be trying to make them actually full of the right data because the ultimate situation will be that there's going to be an agent that'll just become the interface.

And I've got an agent API, right? So I've built agent APIs where I can just plug in and you can have that. And I think that's where it's going to go. And to your point about our kids, my kids are already fluent in chat GPT. They're already all over this stuff. By the time our kids go to school, they're going to be in a situation where they're not even going to ask for it.

They're going to be, you mean you go into a UI, what?

Dennis Di Lorenzo: No one talks to me and says

Siobhan Savage: Good morning. I cannot believe that technology is so rude.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: That's exactly right. And listen, this is where education has to adapt as much as business. Value, right? We talk about CEOs and value and efficiency.

They're margin makers. Universities are no different in being margin makers. Their investment of that margin is just a different direction. You have to reinvest in research and all of those things. But the reality is the value that they bring of their product to their customer has to change because they're where the students are extracting the same value in terms of their return, because they're going out and they're educating themselves alongside their faculty, and they're starting to recognize it, right?

Yeah. Because their expectations of learning are changing.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah. What do you think, given you've had this beautiful career of academic and education and practical and industry, what do you think the businesses can learn from that part of your career? What is there that can be transferrable?

Dennis Di Lorenzo: I would say to you, that's a hard question because there's been so much disruption in education. I would say. Take a lesson from education that did not adapt quickly enough to serve social good for all in the world of work. Right? And understand that education systems did not adapt quickly, did not build the data intelligence and infrastructure they needed and did not build the capability they needed to keep up with The economy and the way it was reshaping.

And there are many are being written about this now. And therefore are failing and are in decline. And there's a whole new world of educational projects going on about how we train our youth for the future, right? Businesses have the capability. Of rebuilding their infrastructures and reinvesting in new capabilities.

And it goes back to our conversation, of role versus task. If businesses don't start to buy into the change and invest in it, they're going to fall way behind the way education has fallen behind. This is if businesses learn anything, I also think that businesses now have social responsibility.

Cause one of the things that I'm at the intersection of is if education institutions aren't providing the readiness we need for work today. Right. Do businesses have any responsibility of putting education out there pre candidate in order to start help building their own pipelines because they're wondering where they're going to get their pipelines from.

So they have to distribute their knowledge, and start pushing education to adapt more quicker. In a more accelerated fashion. And I was at the center of this work and my last project in workforce development in the Rochester region, where skills we, again, we put the term skills on it, but essentially company of industry objective driven curriculum that was relevant.

To job was we were building a framework to develop curriculum and access to work at the job level, not this mindset of we're preparing you for a career, how we chunk education. Has to change and businesses have to be the influencers of that in this.

Siobhan Savage: Yeah. I mean, they are the economy that essentially pays for the skill, right?

So it's the demand and supply has to be in line or we got a problem. And I think the point you made about the lawyers, you imagine being a kid. And invest in your whole period of your time and all your money and then walking out and everyone's using chat GPT to write their legal contracts.

Can you imagine how shit that would feel? And you would just, and also, what else? Why did no one tell me this? Where are the companies? If it was me and if I was running a company that isn't my company, an actual corporate, I would feel, I've heard so many stories. Of real life customers who have put people on learning pathways and career pathways, who have said, these are our critical jobs.

I have no idea how they came up with these being the critical jobs because they were just random jobs. So that's problem number one. They picked all these random jobs and then

Dennis Di Lorenzo: executives in a room to make decisions with

Siobhan Savage: data. Right. Right. And then, so not only did they pick these random jobs, they then drive their businesses and their people.

So A lot of these circumstances, these people are not people sitting in big kushti jobs. These are people that might be working two jobs to pay their mortgage right now. So on top of the life stress of having that situation, they are then making them do courses for jobs that they believe are going to be the future.

And then after the two year period that they've completed this, they turn around and go, Oh guys, I'm so sorry. We got that wrong. They actually, those jobs are gone. I don't think that is in any way acceptable. From an organization and the thing that really pisses me off is that there needs to be you cannot be driving learning strategies right now with actually doing proper due diligence don't pay a consultant to go and tell you what jobs the futures are because they have no idea either by the way go and do an analysis exactly what you said of what is the work what is the impact to our work what does that mean we will need to be because that can give you the horizon of the next one and two horizons of where are we going in the next three to five years Then get people on learning pathways.

That's what you define because that's the problem. And it really annoys me because it's, you're actually wasting someone's actual time and potential by you not even doing the due diligence that you should be doing.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: But let's go back to the time. It's because you're developing two year programs to get to a role.

It's a traditional model of pathing. Actually, learning should be chunked in, okay, we need these capabilities in you in the next three months and here's a set of learning experiences that are going to help enhance the, enhance your ability to perform now. Yep. Yep. Agreed. Agreed. It really helps.

Right. That builds over time and we do not, we have to rethink our model of learning at the same time. And this is where companies, to your point, have outsourced both the education that happens prior to acquisition of workforce and they're outsourcing their training and development without actually directing it towards capability building and higher performance and task.

Siobhan Savage: Yep. And this is why these conversations with you are so exciting, because you see the world differently from me, but at the same level of vision that I have, which is if you do not have the critical infrastructure and understand the work, you cannot direct the traffic in any meaningful way without it just being a guess, it literally, it's just guesswork, right?

And don't get me started about strategic workforce planning, that whole element of it is just based off random crappy data. Yeah. And I think the thing that's going to be really important is, the other dimension to add to what you said about the learning that I just remember was we're working with this customer, they're now at phase three, which is agent now, we've made agent recommendations of what agent they can do with the task.

When you bring in a new task, you create a new task. Or when you bring in a new agent, you bring in a new task. That just on time learning is critical now for the business because if I go and deploy millions of dollars worth of AI technology into the company and I'm the CEO and if no one adopts this because they're not enabled, the whole thing flops.

So there's this just on time learning that enables the business to adopt. And then there will be the learning because of the pivot moment. So if I have impacted Dennis, what could he pivot into that's more meaningful for him and for the organization? What's the pathway to that? And then based on what we had analyzed in terms of our work today and where we're going in the next five plus years, as our AI strategy evolves and our workforce evolves, what does those critical roles look?

That's how, if I was in that, my old job, that's what I would be doing right now. I would focus my energy on that.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: Well, I wouldn't even call it critical roles. I'd call it critical functions,

Siobhan Savage: right?

Dennis Di Lorenzo: It's what are the critical functions of our business going to be in three to five years? Because again, the minute you say critical role, you're putting yourself in a box, you're finding it into the job architecture again, right?

And so I'm preparing someone for this box. To me, it's what are the critical functions going to be? And we talk about pathing. We need to be working on, an upscaling model that is about work pathing, not career pathing, or again. If we're rejecting this old notion of a job architecture, then, and we're really talking about a workforce intelligence infrastructure about how capabilities need to change in order to meet the critical functions, then everything else we do has to change, right?

Because even as we redesign the job architecture model, what we do with that intelligence is really about that hub that's going to impact our workforce.

Siobhan Savage: Yep, I wasn't thinking big enough. I'm not gonna sleep again tonight. This is the problem with these calls. But no, you're totally right. You're actually right, because it's not about career.

It's about the function of requirement for the business based on that. And then How do you navigate the right work to the right worker? And in what context of the environment? You're completely right. You are so right. My product team are going to go nuts when I call them tonight.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: Not my fault guys, I'm sorry.

Siobhan Savage: No, but it's, and this is where, I mean, this is where I think the way that you're, you are, one in a million because of the exposure you've had in your life. Right? The, this is the thing. You are a collection of expertise that's melding together with a really strong perspective and I love it.

I love it because I think this is the exact conversations we need to be having because to my point earlier on, the Siobhan gasps when she talks about efficiency, If you're a HR person, you're not talking this. You're probably going to get fired. You'll probably literally get made because they're going to need to bring in this level of if I was in my CEO role in an organization of that scale, you're going to need to get everybody rolling in the same direction.

So if you're still pushing the business towards the old model that we need, and you're seeing a lot of change in the people's space right now. And this is our moment, Dennis. This is the thing. This is actually the moment, HR people have been talking about getting the seat at the table thing.

This is actually the moment in our industry right now where we can be highly valuable to the organization because they don't know where the best place is to implement AI. They don't know the impacts. No one knows this. You guys are the closest thing we'll ever get to having that intel and being able to use it for really good decision making.

But also there's that society and zero waste moment as well that If our organizations are hurtling towards this AI, how do we navigate them to do the right thing? Because right now they're just thinking about it in the context of AI. They're not thinking about it across the space, right? I

Dennis Di Lorenzo: agree, but I think it's because, let's use the notion of chief people officer.

I believe the world. Of C suite is you need a chief capability officer at the intersection of function and let's use the term skills, right? Because you need people, you need individuals with skills to perform the functions. That's the intersection of the business chief people officer is how do we serve the workforce and build the bridge to the business, but their primary focus is people.

That's great. But as we think about AI, it's capability, right? HR now is as responsible for the effective use of AI and how it's driving the business. As much as it's responsible for people, someone has to be, there has to be a function looking at the intersection of all of that. And right now it doesn't exist.

Siobhan Savage: Yep. And it's that conversation that's floating around about chief work officer and capability. It's that, whatever you name it's that thing. I mean, in some ways, my whole career, I was responsible for the allocation of work to worker, and I wasn't in charge of anything to do with people problems or the,

Dennis Di Lorenzo: the, all those things will still exist

Siobhan Savage: and matter.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: And they matter, and I believe in them, right? But they're a do they're one domain, they're not THE domain.

Siobhan Savage: Yep, I agree. And this wall actually has to sit in business. Yes. Because I used to be paid, I used to be half paid for by the people team and half paid for by the business. And my bonus was connected to the business outcomes.

So I wouldn't get my bonus unless I achieved on utilization rates and performance, right? So. Dennis I could keep you here forever and talk about this. This has been incredible. I just find having these conversations with you where you're just so precise on the way that you're thinking about it because you've spent your career in this moment.

So thank you so much. We really appreciate it. You can follow Dennis on LinkedIn. You can, DM him, DM me if there's any follow ups here, but A massive thank you to you, Dennis, and all the best with this, new evolution of work that you're going on. I'm very excited.

Dennis Di Lorenzo: Well, thank you for having me and thank you for listening.

I really appreciate it. And I hope to have more conversations with you, Siobhan. They're always enlightening.