PwC's Tech While You Trek: Revolutionizing the Way We Upskill

Tune into another episode of Tech While You Trek to hear PwC Partner Suneet Dua and Director Kristy Lizarraga talk about PwC’s digital story, including the new ProEdge product. ProEdge is a cloud-based platform that helps companies and their employees get the digital skills needed to drive innovation and inspire continuous learning.

Transcript

Tech While You Trek: Revolutionizing the Way We Upskill 
Guests:  Suneet Dua & Kristy Lizarraga

Adam (00:08):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of PwC's Tech While You Trek. I am your host Adam, and today I have with me Suneet Dua and Kristy Lizarraga from PwC products and tech who are going to tell us more about PwC's digital story, including the new ProEdge product. So Suneet and Kristy, welcome.

Kristy Lizarraga (00:27):
Hi.

Suneet Dua (00:28): 
Thank you. 

Adam (00:29):
Why don't we start by having you all tell us a little bit about yourselves?

Kristy Lizarraga (00:32:
Hi, my name is Kristy Lizarraga, and I've been with the firm for about seven years. I am part of the Commercialization Org where we're bringing ProEdge to market.

Suneet Dua (00:41):
Hi, Suneet here. I've been in the firm for 24 plus years, partner in technology, and I'm truly passionate about building products to solve societal issues. 

Adam (00:53):
So in the past on this podcast, we've talked a lot about PwC's digital history, but we've never really discussed this aspect of it. ProEdge is a cloud-based platform that helps companies and their employees get the skills that they will need to not only keep them relevant, but get ahead. What can you both tell us about the journey to ProEdge? 

Suneet Dua (01:12):
If you think about us as a firm, where our businesses have been and where our business is going, especially professional services, in some cases the tasks that are somewhat redundant, we knew we have to not just disrupt ourselves, but take a real look good in the mirror about how do we take our firm through a digital journey? How do we excite our people through giving them new skills so they're fit for the future , as we move into this realm of automation and robotics and AI. 

What we're trying to teach is infinite learning, right? And we wanted our employees to feel like they should be part of the infinite learning and there should always be continuous learning. And then thus, ProEdge was developed because we did it to ourselves and we did such a great job and ProEdge is now in the market, why not share this with our clients? Why not allow our clients truly get the benefit of our digital upskilling and then help them around employability, help them around re-skilling their workforce in a very digital way?

Adam (02:19):
Closing the digital skills gap is not a new problem. So why now, right? We've heard recent reports that automation plus the COVID-19 recession is creating sort of a double disruption scenario for workers. The World Economic Forum recently launched a report showing that by 2025, the time spent on current tasks at work by humans and machines will be about equal. So with that kind of as a background, why is up-skilling so crucial and why should leaders be so focused on it right now, specifically?

Suneet Dua (02:46):
If you look at the study, 70 plus percent of CEOs in our survey are worried about these key skills and they're worried about their people, both pre-pandemic, even more post-pandemic, but only 20 percent have done something about it. The jobs of today are not going to exist tomorrow so what's actually changing are the skills. Robotics, robots, and AI is coming much more prevalent in the industry now across every job, whether it's a laborer or a white collar worker, and you have to be equipped to one, understand the technologies, that's just the awareness part, two, how do I now re-skill myself? And then three, this is where ProEdge really comes in, is give me an adaptive learning of a job of the future or a skill of the future. 

And you have to make these digital journeys easy. If the digital journey is hard, our clients, our executives will resist, and what we can't have them do is resist because this affects the heart of the organization which are the people, and the people are the one that are going to drive the organization to the next level, whether it's productivity gains or revenue gains, but you've got to equip them with the right skills of the future.

Adam (04:06):
So it sounds like the culture and people experience you have created are just as important as the learning. Any other lessons learned on what works and what doesn't when it comes to the up-skilling?

Kristy Lizarraga (04:17):
Yeah, we've definitely learned a lot along the journey. When we first launched Digital Fitness App, what we realized from that product was that the conversation around digital was a scary one for a lot of people. People are actually afraid of what was coming; technology, the idea that technology would take their jobs, they wouldn't be able to get up-skilled quick enough. With that app, one of the key points was removing that fear and with ProEdge, we continue that conversation.

Digital and change is just a fact of life. It's something that we all need to get comfortable with, and everybody is capable of working towards a digital role of the future. So I think it was more than just this general term of up-skilling. It had a lot more to do with someone's day-to-day life, how they view their future, how they viewed what was actually possible for them. 

Adam (05:14):
Could you expand on that a little bit? Meaning how they were going to fit into a world that felt like it was leaving them behind? I mean, I'm curious if you could give me a little more about what you mean by that. 

Kristy Lizarraga (05:24):
It is not about technology replacing the human being ever, it's about technology making the human being more valuable, being able to shift some of those tasks, those repeatable tasks to being things that are automated. For the individual, it's helping them understand that technology is a friend. It's a way that you can get more quality out of your job, out of your day-to-day life, and you can continue to evolve. So it really is about how does technology, how does it not leave them behind? 

Adam (05:57):
Okay, so then along those lines, can you share more about how ProEdge has come to life? 

Kristy Lizarraga (06:03):
We took a look at our own upskilling journey and what was it that we did that was different, that was effective, that worked at the end of the day? Because when we spoke to most of our clients, they just weren't seeing the change and the effect that we were through our journey. We realized that it was more than just learning about technology. It was more than just learning about skills. So there was definitely a lot of that in our journey, but we pushed further than that.

We also spent a lot of time helping people actually gain those skills, and more than just gaining those skills, it's apply them to their day-to-day job. So when we built ProEdge, it was a combination of learning about topics, getting that hands-on experience, and that hands-on experience that is specific to their function, to their job, and then providing a way for people to share that to then drive that automation and that technology with the rest of their organization so it is that upskilling at scale. And so really that's how ProEdge came to life, it was looking at our journey and putting that into a product. 

Suneet Dua (07:20):
I would add ProEdge has brought learning into an enterprise in a very fun, gamified way. But at the same time, the seriousness of the new skills that you're learning, to your point, Kristy, has created a value add of that individual in the organization. If today you were a controller through ProEdge, you can become a digital controller and we know a digital controller needs certain types of skills, such as human centered design, such as able to write RPA bots. And we know that's some of the skills they need to learn to create what we believe are digital citizens and if we can create the regular controller to be a citizen, to be a digital controller, that's what ProEdge is to do. It should take you to a journey to the next role and skill for the future, which is really exciting. 

Adam (08:15):
Well, I was just going to say, I mean it's clear that you all are both very excited about this product so I was wondering what are your thoughts on how it will be able to help people the most? 

Suneet Dua (08:25):
I think there's two pieces. I think people use the word upskilling too generally, and I think what we have to do is we have to break down that a little bit. We believe that you first have to up-knowledge the individual. No matter where they came from or who they are, we have to up-knowledge the organization, whether it's leadership all the way to the laborer on the job, and that's really important on these digital disruptive technologies. To get them to even up-skill and apply it to their job, they have to understand what they're upskilling to.

You have to then make micro learning and time available for that for the organization so they can start building upon their learning paths, and then start working through "Here's what I can be tomorrow, here's what I want to be, and here's the path to get there," right? And that's a very different way of attacking this problem because today people are attacking by just throwing courseware at the individual, but there's no "So what" at the end. What Kristy and I are so passionate about is if we can up-skill a billion people, we've truly made a dent in society here.

Kristy Lizarraga (09:35):
I couldn't agree with that more. I think it's just a very real way that somebody can make sure they're not left behind, and I think that is the most important thing that this will give people, is the ability to learn what they need to learn, to acquire the skills that they need to acquire so that in today's world where technology is so prevalent, they have a place in it. And as technology continues to evolve and continue to change, they can change with it and that fear of being left behind or that fear of not being able to keep up is gone. I think that is one of the most important things we can give people.

Adam (10:23):
Well, so before I let you all go, I was going to ask you one kind of fun question to leave it on a light note. What do you say?

Suneet Dua (10:30):
Let's do it. 

Adam (10:31):
I'm curious what the you of 20 years ago would be most surprised that you use today from a technological standpoint? 

Kristy Lizarraga (10:38):
One of the things that would shock my much younger self is really the way that I communicate with my parents, my aunts, because at that time we still used phone calls, we still wrote letters, and today the way that I communicate with my parents is through text message, through all the various communication apps that are on the phone, there's so many different ways that we communicate and the frequency that we communicate is so different and I think my much younger self never would have imagined that that's where we would be today. 

Suneet Dua (11:19):
I would say that 20 years ago, I would never have imagined that robotics, robots were just a thought that people had, some folks in some of the big schools talk about maybe playing ping pong. But now, today, we have a robot for every function that is repetitive or back office, or we have cognitive agents doing simple tasks for us that I don't have to do anymore, I'm so amazed by that, and the cognitive agent sort of knows what's ahead for me already so keeps me out of trouble as well, and that's the beauty of having a robot per employee or multiple robots per employee, which is really cool. 

Adam (12:01):
Well listen, Suneet Dua and Kristy Lizarraga, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by and talk to us today. 

Kristy Lizarraga (12:07):
Absolutely, thank you for having us. 

Suneet Dua (12:09):
Yeah. Thank you very much. 

Adam (12:10):
And thank you all for listening to another episode of Tech While You Trek. I have been your host Adam, and we will talk to you again next time. 

Speaker 4 (12:21):
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