People Analytics at IBM
In this podcast I heard about the exciting ways IBM is using People Analytics as a part of business strategy.
Throughout this course we have seen a number of examples of businesses making a decision related to people analytics in a specific situation. This podcast was cool in that Diane Gherson, former Chief Human Resources Officer of IBM shared some of the ways the thinks about people analytics as an overall strategic lever for IBM. This included many of the topics we have covered: sentiment analysis applied to emails to surface topics that should be addressed, making and communicating clear decisions on privacy and ethics about how and when this data will be used, etc.
The topic I am personally most excited about is IBM’s use of its internal learning platform YourLearning. YourLearning is a platform that offers courses not dissimilar from Coursera or Udemy. What makes YourLearning so cool though, is that it is tied into IBM’s view of its people and their skills. Employees are able to take classes to earn badges for different skills. These badges are then used to facilitate discussion and decisions including what pay people should receive, who should be up for promotion, what internal jobs might be a good fit for the employee’s skills etc. AI is leverages in a number of ways in this tool, including personalized recommendations on what skills to work on and what classes to take. IBM has also thought about how to validate these skills and infer skills based on the employees work. Just as they have a philosophy of transparency around how email data is used, IBM is transparent with their employees around what skills they have inferred for them.
I am so excited about this system as I believe that it, and similar systems have the potential to help us take a big step forward towards equity. As we are able to quantify skills, and design better tools to help people learn new skills, we can demystify the process of getting a good job. While attending a given school or having a set of experiences can still indicate that you have certain skills, platforms such as YourLearning can help provide alternative onramps. These can help people that have less traditional backgrounds including people of color and from lower socioeconomic status that are just as capable of learning in-demand skills, but often don’t have the same access to educational opportunities to learn them. I am also passionate about helping people to continue to grow in their careers and lives. YourLearning strikes me as an excellent way to help employees do this. And we need solutions like this because as the podcast pointed out, new skills are needed in today’s economy at a faster and faster pace, especially in tech.
Article: https://www.myhrfuture.com/digital-hr-leaders-podcast/2020/9/8/how-ibm-is-reinventing-hr-with-ai-and-people-analytics
Great post, Tyler! I appreciated learning more about IBM’s use of people analytics and AI for internal employee development. It can often feel like we are hyper focused on using analytics to evaluate performance or culture, so it’s great to see how this technology can be used proactively to help employees build the skills they need to succeed. As you alluded to, this is particularly important as the economy requires workers to develop new skills; therefore, I hope to see other companies in traditional industries like manufacturing adopt similar programs.