Transcript for "From Skills Strategy to Business Impact: Dow's Journey to a Skills-Powered Workforce": Alright. Welcome, everyone. We'll give you all a few more minutes to join before we kick this off. Alright. I think we will hop in here and get started. I see we have a lot of you on the line, so thank you so much for joining. Welcome to today's webinar from skill strategy to scalable impact. We're thrilled to have Dow here to tell their story, so we're gonna jump right into this. So it wouldn't be a Workday presentation without our product statement. We will talk about futures at the end of this, so please make all purchasing decisions based on current functionality. It doesn't say it here, but please come to Workday Rising as well and see our our future products and what we're building. So you will receive a recording of this within twenty four hours after it. So, keep an eye out for that. Please submit questions in the q and a box. We will try and look at those throughout as well as at the end, and you'll receive a survey at the end. So please fill it out if you have a chance. I'm Loretta Alderman. I'm the director of strategic customer engagement for Workday's HCM products. I spend my time talking to customers like you. I help you understand our vision, building what we're not building, and I also bring customer voices back to products so we can make sure that we're listening to you. I'm thrilled to have Jason here today, so I'm gonna let Jason introduce yourself in your own words. Hi, everybody, and thanks, Loretta. I'm Jason Scheffer. I'm a global learning content strategy leader. But prior to this, I was the skills at DAO leader, and globally responsible for the skills work that we're gonna be discussing today. I will be transitioning that to a new person as I move into, building the next step of the learning content strategy to continue the maturity, and we'll talk a little bit about that. Prior to that, I spent time in health care and also in consulting. So looking forward to having a great discussion today. Feel free to put any questions in the chat also. I think, I'll be looking at that, but also, my friend Jessica is here too, and we'll be answering those promptly. Perfect. So we've laid out an agenda for you today where I'm going to frame the context at the start. Why shift to a skills based organization? Then we'll hear from Jason for the majority of today, and we'll wrap up the end with some future looking features that will help you, and also resources that will help you uptake skills if you're looking to just get started. So why even think about this? Why shift to a skills based organization? What we're seeing from Workday is that top talent is leaving, attrition is increasing from industries, and growth at the same time is stalling. 10 out of 11 industries have told us that they report a decline in internal promotions. And at the same time, there's a widening skills gap. So companies are having a hard time. The majority of companies, in fact, are having a hard time reporting and finding if they have the skills that they need to fill those positions. And so this really drives the why for why we would drive it, why we would have a skills based organization. And what we mean by this is placing skills at the center of talent strategies and driving business outcomes, and that's exactly what you'll hear today from what Dow did. Just a a brief, overview in case you are new to Workday and and Workday Skills Cloud. So what this is is a AI powered skills ontology that both extracts your skills, it matches them, it verifies them, and then it helps make recommendation recommendations across recruiting, talent, learning across all of the different pieces of your Workday system so that you can then really make sure that you are recruiting top talent, growing your talent internally, and really planning for the future effectively. When I talk to customers in my conversations, I I meet with them daily, weekly. I'm hearing a lot of the same questions and they all come back to SkillsCloud. The number one question is where do I start? So hopefully, we'll address that one today. And then even beyond that, it's how should we govern it? What should our counsel look like? What should our taxonomy look like? How do we define our skills? Right? How do we use those skills to improve our motility, our retention, our internal hiring, and our planning? How do we bring it all the way across all of those pieces and really have skills as the backbone? And then we're hearing customers say, how do we make skills real? Right? How do we do it top down? Do we do it bottom up? How do we prove what's in it for me to my employees and make sure that they enter their skills and see the value of adding this in? And so all of this will get to today, and we'd love to hear from you as well if you have any insights to these questions. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Jason to take it away and hear more about Dao strategy. Thanks, Loretta. And those are some good reminders, right, that we have to start somewhere. And and as we go into the first slide, I wanna just specifically share a little bit about Dow. I'm setting the stage with a quick picture. Right? Dow is a material science company with about $40,000,000,000 in annual sales, roughly about 34,000 employees. We manufacture at around 91 sites in 29 different countries. So that scale that we have, the diversity in the roles we support is significant. We have about 1,400 job profiles globally from plant operators to commercial sales to technical experts in very specific, technologies and processes. Everything we do at Dell starts with asking the right question. And the curiosity and how we apply that material science expertise to solve these challenges that our customers bring to us really challenges our workforce. We're always trying to do better. Right? And this context really matters for the skills journey. Dow is a global, highly technical workforce. Is it and why we need skills is really to continue to help us drive the the most appropriate and timely talent decisions, but also that we have a common language amongst all of our different countries. When we move into the next slide, what I really wanna talk a little bit about is what are some of the problems Dow's workforce is trying to solve? We operate in four very distinct market verticals, and these are not all inclusive. From packaging, to infrastructure, to consumer work stuff, and also mobility. As we move through these items, one of the things that we really need to do is when you're when we're thinking about working with another client, right, we're thinking about how do we help make the building, like, the glass that maybe you might be in, some of that those windows seal better to to protect it from the weather. How do we make sure data centers run cool and less water? How do we make sure that, the cell phone in your pocket, the glass is stronger? Dow provides expertise in all of these areas and many more. Right? But what we're trying to do though is to continue to solve how do we use our science expertise, our talent, to to really meet the organization where they're at, that we're working with. There's a lot of areas, right, that are big problems in the world, from plastic pollution to how specifically we we use electrification in vehicles. Dow is trying to solve all these problems. As you can imagine, AI is also really asking us how do we do better quicker, but also what does our workforce agility need to look like. Hey, So. you might ask oh, yes. Please, go ahead. question there to that point. Does it take a specific skill set or a a safety rating or something to fill any of those roles who are working on any of those, proprietary items that you're building? Yeah. So so great great question. There is a very specific skill set that many people need to have and possess, and we build in house in some cases. So there are some very unique to DAO IP'd items that we train internally to make sure that that workforce meets the requirements. But is it is something like there might be only 30 people in the world that know how to do this single process. This is a really important differentiator between Dow and its competitors as we we have developed and sourced and only IP in a lot of these very unique processes. And that's a great question, Loretta. And that's something that we have to take into consideration for our skills work. Thanks. Any other questions so far? I think we're all we'll proceed here. If something comes up, please put them in the chat. More than happy to address these. So, specifically, like, you might say, as you're starting this journey or you are in this journey, how do I maintain momentum? How do I get executive buy in? Well, we Dao was very privileged to have a a CHRO back in 2021 who really said, you know, how do we make sure we have the organization of the future ready? How do we know that we have the right talent and the right locations, the right skill set to meet the demands that we might have? Dow did not have a turnover problem. Specifically, we had an agility challenge. And what I mean by that is we could not meet the customer demands where they were where they were at. We might have had a location mismatch. We might have had demands that we couldn't keep growing fast enough for the demands that were coming at us. This is a very different problem than some of you might be facing in your value case around turnover or or or internal mobility, etcetera. We needed to have a different answer than just a retention program. So the mission really became transforming our operating model from our talent investments and using AI and modern infrastructure to really become a skills first organization. When we looked at this, right, we knew we needed to look at all of our talent processes. We had a a a very comprehensive team that crossed learning, talent, succession, leadership, HR, and operations, to specifically look at what were some of those key things we needed to look at as we went to the modernization. And for some of you who probably have heard of this, you also might know that Dow has been really a leader in decarbonization, but also making that profitable. So, again, going back to making sure we have that workforce of the future, our our team, our leadership, and also our chief HR officer, Lisa Bryant, supported the vision of of what was started by now our CEO, and really we continue that on. One of the things that is really important to note is we had many leadership changes during this. And so as a program leader of this, we always had to check-in and make sure that we were still aligned to those business outcomes, that we were meeting the needs of the talent, priorities, and really aligning that as strategies change on our talent side and different risk factors came up, that we took those into consideration and had the our team agility to also handle it too. There was also a technology shift during all of this, shift being in a good way, and we'll talk a little bit more about that here in a moment. So as we go to the next slide, what I really wanna try to highlight is how we linked and how we thought about critical skills and linking talent to business priorities and then business outcomes. So at Dow, and just like many of you on this call, you have many critical business outcomes. You know, they look probably similar to some of them you see on this slide. We wanna continue to grow, meet those customer demands, be profitable, have strong productivity, have safety number one in mind to make sure our our employees and team members go home safely. We wanna do it in a sustainable way, but also we know there's some other things too that could make us work faster, which we have that two letter word there, AI or artificial intelligence as we move forward. We knew we needed some enablers through part of this. And if we follow down through this, you'll see, we we we had some part, target behaviors. This was a new ad for us and really important in how we deliver our skills work. And we also needed to have a common language. One of the things that we had being a, you know, almost 30 in 30 countries and being over a 100 year old company is we had a lot of different languages we are using around how we developed. That could be for our a need for an employee development plan or an EDP to succession and beyond. We knew that that's a skills framework or a common language was a critical thing we needed to deliver, but also it needed to deliver in scale. And we so we needed a digital enabler also. So Workday Skills Cloud did meet those needs, and I'll talk a little bit more about that here soon. But those of you who are just starting about that, really think about how are you gonna drive towards a common language. So we did have some business outcomes, and you'll see these are very generic. That's purposeful because if we had very targeted ones, which we did have targeted ones, they would only be short term usually. So having these larger ones, like a stronger bench, faster deployment, that faster deployment could be rapid team creation, etcetera. These are important as we really looked at how would we measure these as we move forward. And so I as I think about this, right, this graphic here really helped drive some of the work we did and also where we started. So we knew we needed to start by having a really good job architecture. We knew we needed to really look at all of our job descriptions. We used different vendors as part of that. Some came and some went. But also internally, we stayed true to, like, saying, well, how does this really matter? How do we prepare our data for any AI functionality in the future, that we knew we could hopefully take advantage of at some point? Alright. I see a few questions. We'll work on answering those here in a moment because I think I might address some of those here soon. So if if we look at the overall progression, one of the things that was important, right, as I mentioned was having a strong foundation. Dow had already started a job architecture project prior to 2021. It went from about 3,700 job profiles down to about 1,400. This was a critical piece for us to really, like, have a successful launch because we actually did a job health assessment and made sure all duties and responsibilities, requirements such as certifications, licenses, etcetera, were listed. But also gave us a good hierarchy so we could cluster some roles too. So an example might be supply chain planners. So as we look at this, one of the things that we really feel was good is having that strong foundation. We knew we needed to have a a common language. So I mentioned skills cloud. So as we were working through with another vendor, what we found was is that, well, it's not gonna match up to the Workday skills cloud. So we did that conversion and made sure all of our jobs had skills on them. One of the things that are was unique about our journey is part of the change management was meeting with each of the business leaders and with our HR advisory team, our HR business partners, and having a discussion around what are those skills for both today but also the future, and we tried to limit those to 20 skills. That was three years ago. Now I might say I might try to limit them to maybe 10 to 12, mostly because we wanna assess on those critical skills. So this is part of the maturity as we've learned, right, that maybe 20 was too many. But what it but at the time, we made the best decision we could, and I think that's one of the key messages is you can only make the best informed decision for today, and then how do you pivot and adjust in the future. As you can tell, this has been a multigenerational project. And as we think about how it looks, right, it looks different as we start progressing from 2022 into 2026. The way in which we source skills, the way in which we have created copilot prompting and other items along with some of the Workday, Sonnet tools and the the AI tools in Workday help help reduce our time, but also our cost that we might have went outside for a vendor for before. So I'd I'd encourage you all, if you don't know some of the functionality, go out into Workday community, type in type in skills, start looking for some of the job architecture stuff around skills, and start pulling some of those reports such as suggested skills to jobs, etcetera. If you have some of that enabled in your tenant, it'll really help you as you move forward. It did for Dow. The last thing I just wanna add here on this slide, and I think it's a a critical piece, as as I I actually put it, actually put it in my notes to make sure I don't miss this. Right? Is the key piece is to dream big. Right? And so we don't know what's gonna be in 2028, but we have a vision of how skills will help some of the talent as we move forward. There will more than likely be more Workday future purchases. I don't know of any, but it seems like they buy some really great tools. They develop really great tools. They really help us be really the best selves as long as we continue to update our tenant and be there, be doing all those updates and, you know, being very active. What I can tell you is is it seems like all these tools and agents and stuff are really gonna help us be more sustainable. Because one of the things that some of you might be experiencing is how do we maintain this once we get started? And being ready and having these AI tools help you will really reduce some of that burden on the talent teams. Alright. Hey, So as. yes. We we have a few folks asking questions. So someone just wants to confirm it was 20 skills assigned to job. And then on top of that, we have a lot of interest in the question, how are managers validating those skills and our teammates entering their own skills into Workday themself? Yeah. So great questions. I'll start with the the the first one. Well, why don't I start with the second one first and then we'll come to the back to the other one. So yes. So what the way we did with work with managers and the way in which we worked with them is we we had pretty much groups. With Jessica Poole, who's on here, led the governance around that. Our HR partners were involved, and we wanted to validate those. So two things. One is we did ask employees to put their personal skills on there, and we did not limit them to that. And one of the examples I really like to share is, you know, we have a lot of we've got a really great military equivalency program, and we wanna know some of those experiences because they are more than just a job they're applying to, and we might be able to source some of those skills if needed. We have some great examples around energy and how we manage our energy and plants from people who had came from the military. We discovered those by then putting them on their skills profile. We also, though, when we look at the overall skills job profile skills on job profiles, that's the 20 that I was talking about. That was our guiding star. And for many people leaders and, leaders of the areas, 20 was really hard for them to get to just 20. But we we worked with them. We said, what were the critical ones? And then we also said, like, what would we be sourcing for? So if we were to do an interview or we were thinking about promotion or even the case of succession, what would be those critical few, those vital few skills you'd be looking for to really set, set your team up for success. And so I'm hopeful that as we move forward, right, like, we've made some really great, who we are doing skills based interviewing, our succession and leadership teams, our our learning is all coordinated to this now. I think these are some key ways in which we'll continue to adopt these, and I'll answer some more of these questions that are coming in the chat. Because I see some stuff around skills proficiency, and I actually have, like, a very standardized answer for that. And I'm sure I'll be able to get to that maybe in the q and a. But I wanna just make sure I have time for a couple more items. So as we go through the next slide and kind of look into the future, just remember, dream big. I love appreciative inquiry. I call it the other AI. Right? And so really making sure that you're thinking about if if if there was no barriers and resources were a 100%, what could we do if only if we had everything? And so set that vision high, and that's my one of my key pieces on this, road map. As we look here, I mentioned DAO's framework. And this is how DAO decided to do it. It worked for us. It may work for you and you some of your businesses that each of you reside in. We knew we needed to have a multi stage framework. And this framework really also helped us replace some of the legacy items we had for over fourteen years. And actually, through many, you know, purchases of other companies, this helps standardize it across the organization. Each one of these areas, whether it's the enterprise competencies, the enterprise skills, the skills categories, serve a very unique purpose in our talent processes. If we think about skills categories, that's the level in which we're gonna open up interview questions with. So we're gonna ask our team members, our prospective team members, to really give us an example of around times you've led in a project. We're not gonna go right down to, scrum a scrum master type, type question or a specific skill, but we are gonna start at a very high level. This also is how we're gonna catalog in a future our Workday Learning, content. And so we'll talk more about that if there's more questions, but then we have the job specific skills. So that last teal area, those are the 20 that are very specific to each job at Dow. Some jobs only have 10, some have 20. Right? But this framework root fully embodies Dow's ambition. It helps support our business outcomes and is aligned to almost every all hands meeting or what we call DOW world news meeting. There's a section on every one of these six areas usually always as part of our our strategy. And so really reinforcing how we do skills and how the business operates really helps us try to help inform those business outcomes. As we move to a couple more slides here, and then I'll take a pause. This is what it looks like in action. So part of the change management in that standard language was making sure we had clear definitions. We know there's now workday definitions also, so we're really excited for the releases. And as we start thinking about how we might incorporate that into the future, we will we'll take that to consideration. But in 2022, right, we needed to have some strong definitions as we move forward. And they've really been continuing to evolve because new skills come in and out of our job profiles, almost daily. But we've put some governance around that and how best to handle that. So if we look at this, this is just an example of keeping us safe. We've got specific skills categories where you will focus specifically on emergency preparedness. If you look at some of those very critical items under emergency preparedness category, we'll see like incident reporting, which is a very important thing for Dow to make sure we keep our our organization safe. As we scroll down, just a few more slides here and I'll take a break. Oh, excuse me. Is we were asked, as part of this, Loretta said, hey. Like, what's this look like? Right? So what are some of the things you're gonna talk about? What are some of the things you're measuring? So I grabbed one from 2024 specifically because what we had put on here now would look different than what we put it we put on it today. And I'll talk a little bit about what we're putting on today here in a moment. But as you're in different spots through your maturity and the skills, right, like, different metrics matter. Specifically, job architecture and getting that foundation right, going back to my progression slide, was a key important thing for us to do. So making sure we had jobs with skills on them, using the AI tools, understanding skills cloud and its functionality, enabling CareerHub, doing the change management around CareerHub, and some of the really cool things that we didn't even think were gonna happen, like mentorships. And I'll talk a little bit about that here. Mentorship relationships. As we think about the framework, how do we bring our executives along with us? Right? Our executives being the top 200 in the organization. How How do we make sure we're getting to their meetings, talking a little bit about talent, development, and learning? We were really focusing on learning and development, rather than assessment first, and that was purposeful. So making sure we measured that and that we are getting to the right organizations. We had a steering team that consisted of, for Skills at Dow, that consisted of leaders from r and d, operations, HR, IT. This project was actually funded through our IT digital acceleration portfolio, which I think also makes it unique as sometimes it sits in in HR portfolio, an HR responsibility, but the the funding and the staffing, funds came from the IT organization as we looked at digital DAO investments. Couple other things here, you'll see here is we also did a lot of pilot testing. We wanted to get feedback on these tools. You can see we did proof of concept testing with, CareerHub. We also worked very closely with one of my colleagues, in Latin America, Adriana. When we were launching flex teams, we wanted to do many pilots. And for our skills based interview and interview guide process, to give an example, we piloted in India, we piloted in APAC, we piloted in Europe. We went through six pilots just to get it right because we knew we had to get the right feedback to support the framework, but also the the leader experience, candidate experience, and also the panel experience. We needed to make sure we were taking in those inputs and feedback and always fine tuning it. So, as we look forward to kind of the future, you might say, okay. Well, that's great, Jason. What are some of those, things you're measuring now? Right? So based on the foundation where we're going, right, we we are continuing to measure these items. There are some items though that you can't measure, and these are the stories on how we've affected certain members at Dow. We've got stories like a paralegal who had been working in a role for many years. She came to a career hub session. We had a skills at Dow session, many of them on our digital display board, inviting our team members to come learn more about how to do their explore their career. From the skills she put in the tool, she was able to find a job that really was very close to what she was doing in paralegal based on the skills, but it was in our purchasing organization and there was a hierarchy there where she could continue to grow and meet some of those career goals she was trying to achieve. We have many stories like this that don't hit the scorecard, but they actually continue to advance and make our organization stronger. And going back to the business outcomes, we're able to have stronger agility to meet these challenges that our our customers are asking. So with that said, I'm gonna stop here, Loretta, and see if there's anything else we wanna talk about real quickly, if and any questions that are coming up. I can't hear Loretta. I'm thinking that no one else can. So, Loretta, do I just, check your hear? me now? We can hear you now. Yes. I just was wondering if it was me, but I think it. was everybody. Can you hear me? So we can hear you. Yes. Loud and clear. Awesome. skills validation seems to be a lot of interest in that. A lot of people are asking, how did you incentivize folks to validate skills? What percentage of your. employee skills are validate? Yeah. Great great question. So I I sit on a a a got invited to a finance team meeting, and then they invited me to this group called FDTI, which is a a group, and I got to meet a lot of different executives from a large large companies just like Dow across The United States. And we got talking to their talent folks, and I got to hear different strategies around skills validation. And we took it to our steering team and said, hey. Do we wanna lead with, like, hey. You must put skills in as part of a mandatory exercise? Do we wanna take a a carrot approach where we we just thank people for doing it and we promote them to go out and add skills? And do we really care about validation at this point? And the steering team weighed in, and this might look different in your other your the organizations each of you on this call reside in. But our steering team weighed in and said for right now, the best thing to do was to understand who they are beyond their job. We'll coach the people leaders, which we have as part of our change management, and if they see something on a skills profile in Workday that they didn't know about that team or if they actually have a conversation with them and say, hey. I see you've got the skill. I know that's not a regular thing in your job. Tell me more about that. What what's your expertise in that? For things that are, like, part of their job, right, having conversations around is in the performance cycle and coaching cycles through check ins and other types of methods, how do I continue to make sure they're meeting the minimum requirements for those skills that are needed? We are exploring piloting, and it was part of our road map, piloting skills assessments in Workday. Jessica's. leading that. And one of the things that I think is really important, though, is to say, for what purpose are we assessing? What is the purpose? And could we have a conversation first? I understand as a talent and HR person for over twenty years that we wanna know and have a calibration of our talent. But But we also gotta remember, we we wanna start at a place where it might not feel like performance, and that's Jason saying that. I would like to have a curious mindset around, tell me about these skills you have. How could how could that provide value? Rather than saying, hey. We need you to move up right away. There is a time and place for that, but as part of the progression and what the steering team chose at Dow was to do with a carrot approach to say, please go and add these skills. Did you know that you could discover mentors, for example, or some of our, some of our things based on your skills, that you wanna grow in career hub? Did you did you know you could get more curated content to yourself or or jobs by adding the skills in? We showed those value stories versus one the set had, kind of like a a stick approach. Hopefully, that helped Loretta answer, that. some other folks are, yeah, some other folks are just wondering about scale here. How many how big is your job library? How many people are on your HRBP team? What were. you working with for this? Yeah. So at the time, remember, I said the organization has shifted. Right? I'm sure all of your organizations or people on this call, there's been leadership changes. This was not Skills at Dow was not just like a section of the business, like our sales team. This was the whole organization. And it takes a lot of patience and a lot of grit to actually go through and make sure all of the HRL team members at that time, there was about 11 HRL team members, that I needed to have discussions with as part of our overall leadership team. They were aligned to businesses and functions and also regions. The steering team consisted from eight to 12 individuals who are very active and at a vice president or senior director level, and they also had influence on some of that digital funding that I mentioned also, that Dow had privileges to use. I would also say, as part of that makeup, each one of those were trying to solve talent concerns or or specifically, I'll use the r and d example, where they're trying to get fellows more exposure to short term work or growth opportunities like flex teams. Specifically, we were not just interested in the peer person who got it, but also the people who are raising their hands. And the steering team also thought, hey, if we have 10 people raising their hand, we only select one. We need to make sure that we continue engage and retain and think about growth and development for those other nine individuals. This is a key piece to keep those individuals engaged as the program leader and also the rest of the team did regular updates with them. And there was a lot of changes in those teams too as the organization progressed. So there's a lot of catching people up of where we've been and where we're going. Great. We had a question just come in looking for a little bit more of a double click into the value of flex teams and gigs and how skills supported that. Yeah. So by having, flex teams in career hub enabled, and by piloting it and really understanding some guardrails and having a flex team guidance, we have a knowledge based article, We have what it is and what it is not. We do not provide monetary, reimbursement for an additional work assignment. These individuals have strict criteria around their their job classification, etcetera, so we can continue to offer that. We'd like to get into the hourly workforce at some point in the future, and we're working through that. We also had to go through many working councils globally to get this accepted as a developmental opportunity. So when I think about the flex teams, what we were in the career hub when you for those who haven't enabled or who those who are thinking about it, there's a question that says, what types of skills would you like to grow in? When a flex team or or mark talent marketplace opportunity gets gets put out there, they select some of the skills the individual would be, able to build upon or grow. And by doing that matching, these are surfaced. Those team members can learn those skills in a short term opportunity. And I know many of you on this call just like me, probably those are some of the best learning opportunities you can have in your career when you get that growth opportunity to do something that's a little bit of a stretch out of your normal role. We do we do survey both the, person who is part of the flex team and who who is doing it, but also their people leader to say how do we make it better, as we continue to enhance these more and more across the business. What we found though too is that we need to have a very active sponsor in flex teams. So for example, if the vice president of r and d is very supportive of having flex teams, the the senior team that reports to him or her will more than likely be more engaged in having these opportunities and posting those out there for the team to grow and develop. As we think about areas that we might not have that support, you need to think about how you would engage your HR advisory team, your HR business team, etcetera, to meet those demands. I would say make sure, just like any change project, you have a strong sponsor in flex team specifically. Sustaining them are are it's really to me, the the key to success in sustaining a flex team over time, not just keeping it shiny at first, is to have a strong leader and a strong talent strategy for that business or function. Last, you know? last question here and then. oh, it's a double one. And then maybe we can spend some time at the very end. There's a lot of interest in assessments and validations and hearing more about that. But we get you in here, talk about maybe why you decided to use your skills in house and not work with a provider, and why you decided to do your rollout big bang and not kind of a small piloted approach, some of your thinking as as you were Yeah. evaluating those options. Yeah. So, in 2021, we did sign with a vendor. It's a popular vendor. Very good experience. It helped us get some of that framework I mentioned earlier. Really good to help us with the change management and the overall process. It helped us think about the framework. But one of the things is is that the language in which that vendor uses that use used at that time did not match the Workday skills cloud, and there was no integration. So we had to do a complete conversion, and that's why we said we need to you know, the question we ask is, why shouldn't it be Workday first? Right? What it's Workday first, then then what? And so we knew that we needed to have all of our all of our specific skills and skills cloud. We actually built Power BIs and everything else for the definitions that we had as we were trying to bridge that gap, and we now have some solutions to build bridge that gap. We just knew that long term, the maintenance of that, we needed to own. We also have about 200 unique to DAO skills that we have that are called tenanted skills in the system. We've added those in there so when team members think about skills and skills development, it is very specific to meet their language that they use in our plants and in our in our in our, different regions also. So that's a really important piece on how we stop and said, okay. How do we make sure we sustain this? We also, you know, I'm very I'd like to be very, very fiscally responsible. If if Workday has it, why would we pay for it again somewhere else and just have to convert it? And so that was one of the the decisions we made as a steering team and as a program leader. And so when we talk a little bit about why not a pilot, for us, we felt that it was the right thing to do to push it in in a large scale, and it helped meet some of our talent goals and priorities. We could have done it in just a region or section of the business, which frankly would have been a lot easier. But because if we think about the vision of skills that I mentioned in the beginning, and this idea dreaming big, if we would have only maybe opened up the aperture to maybe just a few functions and focused in on that, we would not have the cross discipline movement and the cross functional movement because there's not wasn't enough visibility to the others the skills and other job areas and functions. Specifically, I think about our sales organization, our IT organization, and how that connects into things like our supply chain organization. There's a lot of very adjacent skills, and we wanted to make sure we had those the ability of those to, for people to see all of that. And also was, as part of my interview, I wanted it was said, I wanna do it for the whole organization, back in 2021. And I said, okay. We will do that, and we'll get the steering steering behind us. Now, I have on the slide here, just kind of wrapping this up. I mentioned some of these, but I just wanna continue to say, okay. So I've been on this journey here at Dow for quite a few years. And you might have noticed my job was learning content strategy. And as we think about the maturity, right, of where we've gone through implementing skills cloud, turning on career hub, piloting and and sustaining flex teams, maintaining governance, maintaining the skills data that we have, continuing to educate our HR leaders around skills and how we update that with our skills ambassadors, our change agents. One of the things that was missing is we did not have a learning component, connected to our skills. So Dow is now making an investment. We're actively working through an implementation of workday learning, where the framework and the skills work that I mentioned in this will be some of those in first the the most critical infrastructure we'll do in aligning the content to the actual roles here at Dow globally, And really looking at how do we address any of those future gaps. Again, trying to adjust the agility issue that we might face here in the next four to five years. We'll also continue to put end to end integration in a couple other processes that we wanna enhance more, like our succession, early career, and high potential. We started that, and we have a common language among those. But as we think about selection, promotion, and even, select relocation of individuals, having a very strategic plan on how we do that with our now our skills data will be important. And it would not be a skills discussion if we didn't talk about continued governance and change management. We know that we got a lot of stakeholder management. I could talk about this twenty four hours a day, and someone will still say, well, I never heard about that, or I didn't know that we are doing that with skills. But really making sure that we continue to talk about this is a key piece to some of the journey Dow is on. And we hope to be around another hundred and twenty, two hundred years more. We have to make sure we continue to have agility in our workforce, and that's why Dow has invested in this. And so, I see a quite a few questions here, Loretta. I know we're getting close to time. I'm gonna hand it back to you because I know there's some slides you wanna talk about. And if there's more, I'll answer them in the chat. Would it sound like a Perfect. Thanks, Jason. Yes. Definitely hop? in there. There's a lot of lot of questions, and people are very interested. So apologies if you. can't hear me super clear. My Internet is in and out. Can you hear me, Jason? Yes. I can. Yes. I can. Okay. Perfect. Perfect. So so I'm gonna take us through the Workday road map for what is currently live today and where we're going a little bit more while Jason looks at those questions. So the first item has been live for a little while. It's included in core, and it's available for you to turn on today. And I actually saw this question in chat. How do we get your our hands around our job architecture? And so this is the job architecture hub that gives you one view into all of your job architecture and helps you manage it. So whether that's finding similar jobs and identifying where you can consolidate, looking at market skills compared to the workday market and understanding what skills are trending, emerging, or declining, whether that's data gap detection, understanding in your job profiles where you have gaps. Maybe there's country by country compliance, such as job classifications that you're missing, making sure that you have visibility into those, and then what we call skills based operational analytics. So the problem that organizations are having of wanting to become skills based but not knowing where to start, this is where you can actually understand your skill supply against your skills demand from here to understand if you have what skills you need or if you need to upskill, reskill, acquire talent, or really think about it differently. Looking forward to what's next, we are rolling out a new consistent experience that really unifies that experience across Workday in a lot more consistent and uniform way for end users when they're looking at skills to view and interact with them. We're rolling it out to a few pieces first, but we will be rolling this out across the full platform. And it introduces a new skill section on worker profiles and a new edit skills task. And there's a drop down menu that you're seeing, for example, here on the screen that allows you to see something like when you select a skill, look at the details or look at the sources where the skill came from or look at the skill levels and open up that skills level report. We also, are allowing you to add in skill interest and relocation fields into the career section of your performance review. So just adding in that flexibility so that you can have that as part of your annual review or whenever you do your process to allow workers to express that themself. And something we've done on the military skills front is allowing you to help translate military skills and experiences into skills relevant for civilian roles to help ease their experience into the workforce as well and really increase that efficiency of the folks who are doing the hiring. This is not exactly skills related, but I wanted to include it just so everyone could see where we're going here. And it could be skills related if you want, but we're going to, in the future, beyond '26 r two, support additional question types in performance reviews. We've heard this a lot on community, so we're thrilled to be able to finally, roll this out soon. But this could allow you to add in another or multiple types. Maybe that could be skills based to to allow you to get more content and just be more flexible when you're creating your, performance review templates. Lastly, I wanted to touch on our performance management agent. There are a handful of five key skills. Skills is the word that we use as well for our agents. Skills underneath it. But the first one being, performance reviews. And so the problem that we're trying to solve here is that the average manager, prep time for performance reviews takes a long time. Quite frankly, nobody enjoys it. All of the data is in different places, and it's a disjointed experience. So what we're looking at doing here with the performance agent is it's an agent that helps collect performance, HR, and productivity data across the systems. We're starting with both Workday and user uploaded, systems as well as the Microsoft suite, but we're looking at a road map of adding in all of the systems where you keep all of your performance data. We're then taking that to draft and recommend reviews to help you have a human in the loop, see what Workday creates, make edits to it, and and interact with it to then also provide that rationale like you expect across any AI to say, here's the source of where we got that, and this is why it showed up, on the review. And then when we zoom out that we're gonna help you also identify trends, key insights, and really look at it at a greater level. To just give you a glimpse of where we're going with this, I'll touch on the timeline in a second, Tiffany. That's a key part and Christina as well as asking that. The performance management agent is starting with performance reviews, but we're going to be moving throughout all of the pieces of the performance life cycle. So we're going to next tackle feedback, then check ins, and then we'll wrap up goals and calibration further off into the distance. The timing on this is that we are starting our early adopter right now, actually in August. So we are still collecting, any customers who are interested in joining our early adopter group, and we'll be going, we'll then work through that over the next few months and then be rolling it out GA for everyone. I can follow-up with a specific date on that. But if you are interested, please let us know, and we'd love to have you join our early adopter group to give product feedback on where we're going. Lastly, I wanted to point everyone to some resources. So it was great to hear from Jason and Dal and where and how they navigated their journey, but we have a lot out there on community for you. Whether or not it's easy to find and understand, my first place I'd point you to is the deployment agent, which is that AI natural language interface that helps you ask questions. What's key here is you can ask both how do I add a skill to job profile, or you can ask what's the best change management strategy. So it can handle both types of questions, and it can be a really helpful resource as you go throughout your skills deployment. Also, on community, we have a whole entire skills page where you can explore different stories from other customers like HPE, Best Buy, Thompson Reuters. There are success paths for HR admins to be able to watch videos on how to set this up. We have skills deployment strategy videos as well. We have marketplace, on the Workday marketplace. But then we even have a skills user group, where you can actually interact with folks like yourself to, really ask those questions as well and learn from their experiences. We have of course, we always post our skills road map, so you'll see our next one for '27 r '1 after Workday Rising in October. And then I always want to ask, encourage customers to raise their hand for design partner groups and early adopter groups. That's really how you help shape the product with us. Get to know some of our product managers and how we're thinking about this and share how these features really work for your organization and and make sure that whatever we're building really works for you. So with that, I I suggest everyone go to community to get more of what you need. Jason, we have ten minutes left. Were there any questions that you looked through that you'd love to answer live out loud? Yeah. There's there's a couple actually. Specifically, I was typing a couple here, but, you know, I think one of the things that I think keeps coming up is, like, specifically around I had mentioned that there was a release on, definitions, right, in the in the tenant. And so I know that was on one of your slides we had talked about here. I think it's slide 26, if I remember. Alright. Give an example of what it might look like. If we could go back there. We just think that this has been something that Dow has been advocating and talking to with our our our our, c customers, success manager, right, for about two years. Right? And, you know, I've seen it up voted in the community. We've always talked about it. I think about how this might look, right, in the future. It really helped continue to drive our standardized language. And this is part of Workday listening to us in the community and thinking about how we could do that. The thing is is how I might define customer service might be different than how another customer would define it. And I think that's one of the internal decisions that each one of the talent professionals on this call need to make. Is it are you okay with a generic type definition or do you want it to be specific? As we look at though from what we've seen, we see this as a huge benefit when we think about how skills might be into some of the other items, and how specifically, it might look like across the the and so, Loretta, I don't know if you have anything to add. But I think from what I understand, it it's coming and we we've started to evaluate it as part of our overall work. And I I think what what I think it is is for us, it's now when do we enable it, for to meet some of our timelines. And so that's true with a lot of other items. Another thing here I'm seeing here common is, do you have to have skills on the job profile for for really, for some of this to work the best? And what's nice about is once you enable skills cloud and some other work, and you can talk to your technical teams on this, internally at your businesses. But once you enable that, you'll start to see it reading text. It needs some learn time. But what I mean by that is racks that are posted for job postings, job profile text data, Workday, Asana reads that, and they can make some suggestions on it with a report called suggested suggested, skills to job report. It gets you close. It helps you have a conversation, and then you can sharpen it based on that. Dowdhead does use that, and we also use a combination of some copilot prompting that uses specific resources like the World Economic Forum and other types of, free data to actually have even another look on it just to see if there's anything we're we're missing. We did that specifically to help validate also as part of the change discussion with those individuals, and we can actually show them real time with, with these AI tools. Along, we can see that with work they just mentioned as Loretta said. Right? With that job architecture, that job profile agent that's being discussed, that will take a lot of that work I just mentioned and put it into one single source. Again, in a way in which we said, this is where we'd like to be. We're not there yet, but what could we do until a solution comes? And I think that's kind of the mindset, I've and the team has taken is to say, if we can't do it yet, what can we do? What's fiscally responsible? And something that if we need to pivot quickly, we did invest hundreds and hundreds of hours into it. I was starting to respond to one of the comments. You know, one of the things is is there's new technologies and new vendors coming out all the time. It was really important for us at Dow to not get shiny object syndrome and really stay focused on that core foundation. I would encourage anybody, right, to think about that foundation. How do you continue to sharpen it, keep it, you know, whether it's a lean model or whatever you wanna use, a six sigma model, to keep it clean, updated, and keep up keep up to date on the releases and and adoption of those features so you can take advantage of them, as you see fit for your business. So I see a couple other ones. And I did put my, email in the chat if anybody wants to reach out also, specifically, myself and other team members. We'd like to do collaboration. We learn a lot from those discussions too as part of the Quirkday community. Right? We like to to share, but also we learn a lot of in those conversations from each one of you too. So Dow is always interested in having conversations about how we can improve and how also maybe we can learn from each other. Was there any other ones that I should that you think, Loretta, that I should answer? I think we're coming up on time here, but more than happy to stay targeted or or go a little deeper on any of these topics. I think what we can do is gather our thoughts and and follow-up in writing as we send over all of the recording and and slides for you, so. we can make sure we're not missing anything in the moment. There are there are so many questions here. I don't I wanna make sure that we catch everything, but I think I will say a huge thank you on behalf of both Jason and I and our team. Oh, Jason, there's a request to resend your email and chat, Oh, yes. We'll do. We'll do that. so make sure you. add that, in before folks, drop. and if and if I could just say, right, like, one last thing, I really do mean the dream big. Right? I I don't know if anybody's, done appreciated inquiry, but part of that is is really to focus in on what what what what what could it be. I think we always sometimes in HR, we get locked in on some of our policies and knowledge, but it really helps set a vision of where we wanna go. As we think about, you know, I'm sure there's just senior directors, vice presidents, and even, you know, learning specialists, talent specialists on here. Having a vision, right, but also being being willing to adjust and pivot quickly is a key piece to this work. And having good partners like Workday, Loretta, you know, it's coaching it's coaching, clients all the time. You gotta make sure you're using these resources that they're giving you. And some of the biggest ahas to get through, like, working councils and other things came from Workday community or from the knowledge. You know, you mentioned human in the loop. You know, I memorized the the the data governance. Workday did that work for us. It was our job then to articulate it into our working councils. So you don't have to recreate everything. There's a lot out there, and I would continue ever continue to share with everybody to dream big. And yes. And, Kevin, Perfect. you firstly, Great note good end on, intervention. Jason. Yes. I am a yeah. That's where I came from, that area. So thank you, everybody, and thanks, Loretta, and to the team. Really appreciate it. And for anybody that wants to put my, email in the chat right now. Perfect. Jsheffer@dow.com. Thank you everyone for joining today, and we will send the follow-up resources. Appreciate it. Yep. Thanks.