Sasha Thackaberry Voinovich on Upskilling Driven by Tech

Work Forces

Sasha Thackaberry Voinovich, President of SkillsWave, an education benefit company, discusses the challenges and opportunities in bridging the gap between educational institutions and the workforce. She emphasizes the need for faster adaptation in curriculum development and teaching methods to meet the evolving demands of the job market. Sasha also highlights the importance of lifelong learning and upskilling, especially in the face of rapid technological advancements.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in.

Julian; In today's conversation, we circle back to where it all started for us. We met today's guest way back during our time at Southern New Hampshire University. Like so many people who worked at SNHU, as we call it, Sasha Thackaberry Voinovich has applied that experience to build new online learning programs and models.

Kaitlin: Yes, Julian, it's great to see a familiar face on today's podcast, and we're looking forward to learning more about Sasha's latest work and her approach to leading a new enterprise.

In her latest incarnation, Sasha's serving as President of SkillsWave, an education benefit company that recently spun off from D2L. SkillsWave connects employers with education partners to fill skills gaps and develop talent into a competitive advantage. Previously, Sasha held leadership roles in online learning with Pearson, Louisiana State University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Cuyahoga Community College. She's on the Quality Matters board. Has published articles in numerous higher ed publications, and was a co-recipient of the 2013 MOOC award for excellence through the Open Education Consortium, Sasha holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance from the University of Akron and an MAT and PhD in higher education administration from Kent State University. Welcome to the conversation, Sasha.

Sasha Thackaberry Voinovich: Thank you for having me. This is going to be fun. I always I feel like we have a SNHU alumni network, right?

Julian: We really do.

Kaitlin: It does feel that way. It's great to see you today, Sasha, and we're looking forward to diving into this conversation with you. Can you please expanding upon the bio that Julian just talked us through? Can you please tell us a bit more about your background and how you approach your work?

Sasha: I actually, like many of us accidentally ended up in the field of ed tech. So if you go back far enough, I was a K 12 teacher, and then got sort of into curriculum development and then educational technology. I really leaned into instructional design earlier in my career. So I think I approach everything sort of from a backwards design perspective. What is the goal at the end of the day? And then how do we measure the success of that goal? And then what do we need to do to get to that goal? So that's sort of an approach that I've had for a while. I never wanted to be president of anything. I've always wanted to be in a position where I could make change, right? So I've considered myself to be sort of change maker, and it sort of led to this position. I feel like I've been preparing for this position that I didn't know I wanted for a really long time. I've always considered every place you work, you have this opportunity to grow and learn and change things and evolve things. And I think the biggest part of the last decade of my career has been learning how to be a more effective leader, which is actually a very similar skill set to being an educator, if you do it right. And the other thing I've been developing, I would say, and myself, is patience also over the last decade. Dispositionally, that's important for a leader, and it is not something that comes easily to me.

Kaitlin: No, absolutely. Thank you. Yeah, it's great to learn more about, you know, kind of where you started and what drives you to this point. So thank you.

Julian: Yeah, no, absolutely. And so, Sasha, what are the problems that you've sought to solve at D2L, now at skills wave, and we're particularly interested in the bridging of conversations across educational institutions in the workforce.

Sasha: Yep, and there is definitely a bridge that needs to be, I think, in some cases, even built and then subsequently crossed there has been well, you all, you all know this very well. This isn't a new conversation, right? We've been having this conversation for a really long time about, how do we make sure that educational institutions and training providers really are preparing people for the workforce, for entering the workforce, and for changing careers. I think changing careers can be really, really challenging, and there isn't always an alignment between the timetable that it takes to evolve curriculum or teaching methods and strategies and what the world of work needs, and that change is accelerating more so than ever before. There's also sort of political forces at play and generational differences that have really put a lot of daylight onto the relevancy of higher education, but there's still really compelling data that degrees make a huge difference in the lives of individuals and their families in terms of their ability to change their economic circumstances. I think a lot of folks have been in this space that this needs to be a both and, yet it's been very hard to do that. I think structurally, a lot of educational institutions are not well set up to be able to move fast, but we also know they can move fast if they have to right. Everybody, everybody moved really, really fast when we had a pandemic. So that was encouraging to me. It's been a little less encouraging since then to see that some of the institutions are very, very focused on physical presence, again, because the world of work is not entirely based on physical presence anymore, but this from the skill based perspective, continually learning new skills is absolutely going to be essential for individuals and the competitive advantage for businesses, and they know it, which is why they're really investing in this space. But nobody's cracked the code on how to...how do educational institutions respond faster to the needs of businesses? How do we make sure that individuals learn faster and in different ways and different things, right? AI is not the enemy. It is, even though I do still occasionally fear Skynet. So be no nice to be nice to the robots. But I do think that there is we're gonna have to interact and work with technology very differently, and it is going to require everyone, even those who don't, work in the technology field or technology-adjacent field, it's going to require everybody to have more technological skills than ever before to be successful in non technology jobs.

Kaitlin: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think as we as we go in that direction, Sasha, could you tell us a little bit more about what SkillsWave as a company?

Sasha: What we are is a solution, essentially, for businesses who are looking to upskill their employees and make sure their skills are both relevant and preparing them for what's next. And then we partner with education providers to do that, both higher ed institutions and also training providers and associations. And then what we do is we surface that learning in a really compelling way, creating pathways for learners to make sure that they can get exactly the skills that they need in sort of the format that works for them, right? Because these are all, these are all working learners. Their learning has to fit into their lives. So a lot of obviously asynchronous online learning, a lot of shorter form upskilling that happens, and then we, we focus very deeply on the ROI for the business, right? So are you attracting more growth minded, more skilled workers who are interested in taking advantage of education benefits? Are you retaining those at higher rates? Are you advancing those so what are your internal promotional pathways? Or also that matrix of, are you filling sideways, those skill gaps and harder to hire areas? Because some of, even though, even though the employment market is definitely softening somewhat, the essential skills, piece of this is not. It is hard to find the right skilled people for a lot of jobs right now. It's been, it's been an interesting journey. The thing that was newer to me is I never worked at an educational technology company before, right? And so I've learned so much about the platform and the data structure behind it, which is really fascinating. We use these live APIs to make sure the skills that we're bringing in are really the ones that are needed, are associated with the right careers, aligned to the right courses and certificates and degrees and pathways. So it's been a really exciting journey, and I think what we're doing is really at the forefront. And I believe every company is going to offer education as a benefit, not a reimbursement model, but they're going to, literally, they have to, like companies need to invest in. Learning if they want to have that edge.

Julian: Sasha, what are some of the challenges and successes you're seeing in your work?

Sasha: I would say successes is that everyone is interested in doing this. This is absolutely we are skating to where the puck is going to be. In my mind, that's a that's a double funny, because our company is Canadian, and I know absolutely nothing about hockey, so I would say…

Julian: Give Sasha more money, please, Canadians.

Sasha: Yeah. So we've learned a lot that this is a high demand area. I think it's much harder to do the translation piece right, and also the evolution of what higher education needs to do to have that immediate relevancy for companies, that's that's a deeper challenge. And so we've had great luck in partnering with institutions that are more ready for that evolution have become evolving already, understand the needs of adult learners differently. Are able to support adult learners differently, and you both know this from SNHU, like the importance of that advising for retention and really looking deep at how you support people for whom education is not their primary endeavor, right? Their work and their families are so that's a different level of challenge. And it's, it feels like we have the opportunity to help transform this space which is really exciting. It's scary. Sometimes it's challenging, but it's also super exciting that you get to sort of be part of building the future.

Kaitlin: Absolutely well. And you mentioned Sasha, the, you know, the speed at which everything is moving, one, I mean, from rapid tech advancements to a rapid upskilling needs and you know, and really not even knowing, maybe in some cases, like, what are the skills that our employees are going to need in the next year or two? How do you, how do you think about working within that landscape? Like, what are, you know, do you have any principles that you follow, or, you know, I don't know a framework through which you think about.

Sasha: Oh, wow. I don't think, I don't think I'm quite that advanced there. How ‘bout we just call it approaches? I actually think this is where the unique human component comes in. Think this is where there's a certain amount of, you know, skill set, data and keywords associated with data and skills taxonomies. There's a certain amount of that, that is that cannot go and complete that circle, right? I think this is where, in fact, we're learning that we need to work with the technology differently and also the humans differently, because the algorithms and the results of what's coming out of AI are it's only as good as the conversations you before it, during it, after it, how it's implemented, how there's a difference between what's written in the job description that you're pulling the data from, and what the individual actually does on a day to day basis. Because sometimes that changes really, really fast, right? What you call a project manager at a company, if the company is larger, they could have a dozen job descriptions for a project manager, and some of that could be specific domain related knowledge, but there is a certain amount of methodology that you would want to be universal, and how you articulate that and what level of proficiency you need someone to be able to perform at sometimes those are very legitimate conversations that need to happen, and L&D departments are some. Some are incredibly advanced at this. Some just don't have the capacity to do all of it themselves, like they have the skill sets themselves, but they have, you know, a person doing L&D for an entire manufacturing division, right? So sometimes we're capacity building in that, in that respect, but that whole like that, working from a human perspective, I think, has never been more important. And I think a necessary component of that is, what are those durable skills? How do we need to communicate with each other? How do we, how do we work in teams together, in a very different way, where we are more technology supported than ever before. I don't care if, like, you're working in a warehouse, or you're, you know, setting up a construction site, or you're working for a software company, you are using technology differently, and that requires both different skill sets, but moving and learning faster than ever before.

Kaitlin: Yeah, it's that absolutely and it also makes me think about, you know, as we think about when you're talking about, like an L&D leader in a company, you know, how do they also take into account, from an adult learner perspective, all the skills that we all already have, right? Like, one of those other unique elements of working with adult learners is they already have a ton of skills. They're bringing existing domain knowledge and skills to the table, and how do you recognize that or unearth that as part of their lived experience and part of what they draw with them to their next role and build that into their L&D plan? It's just you know, another level of complexity.

Sasha: And How do you even know, right? Like, you know as a manager, you're not sitting there reviewing everyone's resumes who already works there. That's not something right now. And when someone does raise their hand, I still remember this from when I was at SNHU, so I led the course production team there, and, you know, we did a massive implementation of Brightspace. You all remember this? And there was a young lady who was, he hadn't been there very long, and she just came up to me, she raised her hand, she came up to me, and she was like, you know, I have a degree in UX design, and I think there are some things that we could do, you know, to improve the experience in the courses. And I thought, hmm. And this was considered, like, almost a decade ago, right? Like eight, nine years ago, before everyone had UX all over place and experts in that space. And I was like, well, that's interesting. Well, let's see what some options are, right? And then two years later, when I left, we had a mini UX team, and SNHU now has the much, much bigger UX team on the learning side as well, like this is where I would never have known she had that skill set if she hadn't just walked up to me and told me. So how do we surface those experiences for L&D leaders, for managers to make sure that We can, we can fully leverage the talent we even already have, right? I think that's a really good point.

Julian: So Sasha, can you speak to share an example or two of current or recent partners that you think are doing this very well?

Sasha: One of our clients is a rather large retailer, and they actually did a whole analysis of sort of what talent they currently had, what skills were they projecting were going to be needed in the next couple of years, down to what specific positions were they having problems filling now, but were they projecting having more challenges in the future? And then that was all information that they really use to inform their selections of what to put into their marketplace, which is, is our platform essentially provides the ability to register for things based on skill sets or careers and even down to a specific skill that someone wants to develop, and so they very intentionally curated their learning opportunities and even structured their policies in a very intelligent way that enabled people to develop the skills that were most important to them, but also most important overall to the employees. So, you know, the French is a very important part of the culture in Canada, obviously, because of Quebec, but also just in terms of, you know, doing business, it is one of the national languages. And so learning French as a Second Language for people who aren't native French speakers is really important. And that was one of the skill sets they wanted to extend to all employees, even though not in Quebec themselves. So that was something that was really important. I would say that, from the sourcing perspective, another one of our clients had very specific needs in the energy sector, and so that's where we can go to our education partners and say, Hey, what do you have available in this specific space, which is also one of the reasons that we play in in very specific we call them ICPs, ideal customer profiles, and we focus on certain industries, and we intentionally do not do other industries. There are, there are industries, specifically healthcare. There are other companies in this space that really do that. They do that very well. They do that all day long. The market itself doesn't need another player in that space, and it's complex, it's highly regulated. There's clinical sites, all sorts of complications. So we're really leaning into the types of businesses where we're going to be most aligned and most successful, which is, you know, retail energy manufacturing, high tech manufacturing, construction management. There's a lot of. Yes, and interestingly, professional services, for some reason, we have a lot of interest from financial firms, which is sort of just happened organically. But those are, it's like this nexus of supply and demand and motivation all centered around the skills. That's like the skills is sort of the core part. It is the DNA of everything we do.

Kaitlin: Sasha, one question that we like to ask everyone who comes on this podcast, given that it's called workforces, is based on your lessons learned. We'd love to hear practical steps that our audience can take away to become forces in implementing programs or products that are at the intersection of higher ed and industry. So if you have a couple of, like, practical steps, or, you know, things that you would recommend that are tried and true or or emerging for you, that would be great.

Sasha: The first thing would be, look at the data. And I would start with sort of demand based signals in the marketplace. Some of those are very like, are almost data sets you can just grab, like, right, like, you can just grab data from Lightcast or a number of places that follows job data. And then you can, you can also grab data on who is enrolling and what type of program, what programs are being developed at colleges and universities. That data is available. But I think enrollment data is really important, because you have to look at the demand on all sides of this equation. Colleges and universities want to develop programs in certain areas. They may not be looking at all of those demand signals. I know I have interpreted demand signals poorly in the past. So it doesn't necessarily matter what you think about the data. It matters what the data is telling you. You know, the best data wins. Best interpretation of the data wins. And sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don't, so you got to pivot fast. But there, there is definitely a bias towards perception in any field, because developing learning is not cheap, usually not quick and hard to assess. Well, it's even more important that you look at the right data and try to interpret it, and then be willing to pivot if that's not something that that is working, I would say listen to your audience on all sides, is the second thing so that look at the data first, quantitative data always super helpful. But then listen to your audience, and it shouldn't be the people that you surround yourself with day in and day out. It should be people out of your comfort zone, you know, friends of friends of friends in the field, who go farther away from where you are. You need to triangulate data, right? I think in higher ed, on the higher ed side, specifically, we listen to ourself a little bit too much, and we don't listen to employers enough, or we don't believe employers. That's, that's my favorite mistake. Is employers will tell you I need this skill set, and then sometimes, in academia, we're like, but we think you need this skill set. Well, that doesn't exactly work, right? So I would say that's the second thing, is making sure that what you're building is relevant to both groups. And I would say, from a philosophical perspective, it's really important to advocate that those two things are not that the doing what is right for business does not mean not doing what is right for the individual, because part of our job is to make individuals successful across a variety of environments, and we're not doing people any favors if we are not preparing them for what employers need. Because, like, you know, good jobs, what is the most impactful thing we can do for our communities? I would say is good jobs for people. And then the other thing I would say is this is very practical, probably a little less PC, but know how to navigate your environment, because all of these environments are incredibly political in and of themselves. And I don't necessarily mean politics in terms of Republicans, Democrats, though, I guess, in some cases that's also involved. But these are complex environments, within universities, within organizations that have, you know, competing demands and competition for resources and different power structures, different organizational structures, and so to pay attention to those, because no matter what you do, you have to navigate an environment to be successful. And I don't think people always do that intentionally. So this would be, I would say that's. Things in order to really move forward. And if I can remember those three things, it would be, look, look at the data, right? And follow the data, you know, talk to people who aren't necessarily believing the same things you do or aren't in your space, right? And then the third thing I would say is, like politics and power structures, which we don't, we don't necessarily think enough about from a change management perspective, right? If you want to make change in the world, you have to understand where you're starting from, what the levers are, and how you get to different, hopefully better, right? Not just different.

Julian: Well, and you are asking, you know, in so many of these cases, you're asking pretty complex institutions, you know, sort of visual institutions, and the employers to change the way they do things. And that's very political, just in and of itself.

Sasha: It totally can be for sure and for sure, and even departmentally, like departments within the same colleges, within universities. And most colleges and universities have very wide missions, right, with some notable exceptions, but they have missions that incorporate, you know, teaching and like, community involvement, usually some sort of outreach, sometimes serving military students, also research, by the way, also government grants, by the way. You know, it's, it's a lot of priorities to have all at once.

Julian: It really is, and it's, and this is a real challenge and focused kind of work.

Sasha: It is, and it's over time too, right? It's, it's focused work over a period of time. And if we don't build it though, if we don't build it together, it will be built without us, right? If we don't build it together as a community across educational institutions, associations and employers, I do worry that relevance will be lacking.

Julian: So speaking of over time, as we, as we, as we begin to want, not that we're over time, but over time. How can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work over time?

Sasha: Oh, look at that way to set me up. Okay, well, we do have, I work with an amazing team at skills wave, and so we are going to be sort of publishing articles and blogging. I am all over LinkedIn most of the time. I amplify great things other people are doing, and then, and then I would say, just watch to see us grow, because it is sort of the results at the end of the day that are those market signals, but that everybody gets to play in this sandbox, right? Like we all have a part to play in it. So I look forward to learning a lot from the community as well.

Julian: Well. Thank you so much, Sasha for taking the time to talk with us, and you know you've offered all sorts of great insights and takeaways. And we look forward to following your work as the wave unfolds or rolls out or whatever.

Sasha: Yeah, no, I like it. You could surf the wave. You could, you know, ride the wave. There's a lot of different wave related analogies, but thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Kaitlin: Thank you, Sasha, that's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, Lumina Foundation. We are also grateful to our wonderful producer, Dustin Ramsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces.info or on Apple, Amazon and Spotify. Please subscribe, like and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.