With the half-life of professional skills shrinking every year, is the traditional model of corporate learning and development fundamentally broken, and what role should employers play in the new era of continuous education?
Agility requires a workforce that can adapt and acquire new skills as quickly as the market changes. This means the old models of education and professional development must be re-engineered for a world that demands continuous learning integrated with professional life.
Today, we’re going to talk about the evolution of higher education, specifically how online programs are being redesigned from the ground up to meet the complex needs of working adults. We’ll explore how concepts we often discuss in customer experience—like personalization and flexibility—are being applied to learning to help professionals advance their careers without putting the rest of their lives on hold.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Ruth Veloria, Chief Strategy and Customer Officer at University of Phoenix.
About Ruth Veloria
Ruth Veloria is Chief Strategy and Customer Officer at the University of Phoenix, where she leads strategic vision, customer experience innovation, and the use of student data to support progress, graduation, and career success. She joined the University in 2009 and has held roles including chief customer officer and executive dean of the Business School, with prior strategy experience at Booz Allen, BCG, and Charles Schwab. Veloria holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from New College at the University of Oxford and a master’s in management from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University.
Ruth Veloria on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruthveloria/
Resources
University of Phoenix: https://www.phoenix.edu/
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrtöm: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlstrtöm, host of The Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you: with the half-life of professional skills shrinking every year, is the traditional model of corporate learning and development fundamentally broken? And what role should employers play in the new era of continuous education? Agility requires a workforce that can adapt and acquire new skills as quickly as the market changes. This means the old models of education and professional development must be re-engineered for a world that demands continuous learning integrated with professional life.
Today, we’re going to talk about the evolution of higher education, specifically how online programs are being redesigned from the ground up to meet the complex needs of working adults. We’re going to explore how concepts we often discuss in customer experience like personalization and flexibility are being applied to learning to help professionals advance their careers without putting the rest of their lives on hold.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Ruth Veloria, Chief Strategy and Customer Officer at University of Phoenix. Ruth, welcome to the show.
Ruth Veloria: Thank you, great to be here.
Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely top of mind for for many here. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at University of Phoenix?
Ruth Veloria: Yeah, great. I mean, I like to start with this story when I introduce myself and my relation to education. When I was a small child, my father actually passed away, and my mother always told me, never be dependent on anybody else for your own financial independence. And so, you know, I got busy educating myself and, um, you know, I now empower students basically to get their own ability to be independent. Most of the students that we serve are in their 30s, often single moms, and it’s a great privilege that I have to be able to help them realize their dreams.
Uh, you know, today my role sits at the intersection really of strategy, customer experience, and thinking through, you know, operations and technology, how we improve things for the customer. So I’m just always asking, what decisions do we need to make as an institution to make it easier for working adults to make progress?
Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, yeah, well, that’s a, that’s a great mission and yeah, looking forward to to talking through this. Why why don’t we start with start with the the strategic shift here and just what I what I teed up in the intro. And just this this focus on adult education and how it’s changing. So beyond just the shift to things like online delivery, which has been around, you know, for for a while now. What are the fundamental strategic changes that you’re seeing in how higher education serves the customer who is also a full-time professional?
Ruth Veloria: Yeah, I mean, you’re you’re right, uh, spot on there on the idea that online access really is the baseline. I think I was just reading this morning that there’s now more official students enrolled in higher education, at least one class now than there are traditional students on the campus. So absolutely, online is the baseline. But you know, the the deeper strategic shift is really designing around that working adult, which is who we serve certainly as the primary learner. And, you know, we’re not just like an exception to the traditional model. That is our primary learner. And so they’re managing a lot of competing pressures. We have to design for that. They’re managing work schedules, caregiving, financial pressure, career uncertainty, and often they’ve had prior college experience that did not result in a credential.
Uh, I don’t know if you know, there’s actually 38 million working-age adults that are under 65, do have some college experience but no credential. There’s a number of barriers, frankly, just to jump to the chase. There’s a number of barriers that get in the way, um, you know, the financial pressures, the the ability to balance work and family, uh, those are kind of pretty acute pressures. So students want to learn, but there’s a mismatch in how institutions are designed. So, you know, here at University of Phoenix, that reality really does shape our model. Um, you know, they’re balancing schoolwork with family, uh, responsibilities. So we think about, you know, that progress very differently. It’s not just about speed to finish a credential, but it’s also trying to get sustained and visible progress that fits into real life. So adult learners are really expecting, um, clarity and responsiveness, you know, like if you call a customer service person, they want to be right there. Students have a lot of barriers, they need answers immediately to their questions. They’re even looking for the type of personalization that you might get when you’re interacting with some other brand online. So they want all of that, of course, with the combination of the seriousness and academic quality that that you’re expecting from a higher education institution. So it’s not like online is not the main transformation now, it’s designing education around the working adult. That’s the real transformation.
Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, well, and and that seems like, you know, not many other institutions treat the that demographic, those working adults, almost as a secondary audience. Um, but it sounds like University of Phoenix has really built an operating model around this. What what I know you mentioned some of the things that the audiences looking for. What what I guess what tradeoffs or what what is different about how the operating model exists for this audience versus the maybe the what people traditionally think of as the student?
Ruth Veloria: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, a tradeoff is that we’re not trying to replicate every element of a traditional campus experience, right? There’s no cafeteria where everybody’s hanging out, there may not be a sports stadium, needless to say. Um, but that’s because we’re trying to prioritize flexibility and predictability, of course the digital access and support for the learner, which again is often going to be at the end of a telephone call. It’s not somebody in, you know, a in a office down the hall. And the other thing that’s really important is, of course, workplace relevance. So I don’t know if you know, it’s the 50th anniversary this year of the University of Phoenix. It was actually founded in 1976. So we’ve been working to expand access for working adults, you know, ever since ’76. And, you know, we never built the model to begin with. We never built it around this residential coming of age student. Um, it was built actually, the first people who showed up at the University of Phoenix were people who already had jobs, and they even had to have a letter from their boss saying, you know, that they were a serious student and they really needed to, usually they were degree completers, they might have done an associate’s degree somewhere else. But they were really looking for that application, uh, to take that knowledge and and put it into a specific discipline that they have. So, um, you know, we’re doing that, but it might be some time, right, since that student was in college. So we do recognize that, um, they might not have all of the networks that they need, they might not, sometimes have a family who’s supporting them going back to school. So they need some social support as well as social capital, how are they going to navigate the job market, you know, once they have their credential? So, and also we do have a number of first-generation learners at the University of Phoenix. So being very clear on what’s expected, expected, very proactive on the support that we’re giving to people, and, uh, designing in a way that’s predictable. You know, we have these five or six-week courses that you do one at a time. Once you’re in the rhythm of doing that class, then you know what’s expected the next time that you have a class. So, you know, it’s it’s a lot more structured than you would say, even though we’re very flexible. You know, we’re flexible because we’re online and asynchronous. That means, I know a lot of people think that when you go to school, you’re sitting at the computer and you’re going to listen to a live lecture, maybe, and, you know, send questions in real-time to the faculty member. That’s not how the University of Phoenix works. Um, you might be watching videos, you might be getting information asynchronously or discussing with a group in a in a chat, a thread chat that goes back and forth, but it’s not always live. That that’s what we mean by flexible, but also structured, because it has this course repeating pattern time over time, which for a busy working adult makes it a lot easier for them to get through than a format that’s really different, you know, from one course to the next. And certainly not balancing multiple courses at once. That is that’s the tradeoff that you’re going to sign up for if you start to attend the University of Phoenix.
Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, yeah. Well, and it sounds like, you know, in addition to the flexibility, personalization is also a a a focus as well. How does that translate to education? You know, certainly we talk a lot about personalization in like the e-commerce and and retail, uh, aspect here on the show. What does a personalized learning path actually look like in in practice and how do you use data to tailor it to each individual’s goals?
Ruth Veloria: Yeah, I mean, a lot of different ways, but I would just start out by, uh, letting you know that people are coming to us from various different points in their life with a lot of prior work experience. So, you know, first of all, it starts out with just respecting that people are not arriving as a blank slate. They may have prior credits, they have prior work experience, and we put them through a process upfront to kind of learn about what they know already. There may be credits they already have, there may be life experience that is part of actually earning credit in a program. They might have military training or police officer training, certifications, or other things. So, you know, we use that to assess where they should even begin from the get-go. And so, first of all, we’re personalizing, if you’d say, um, knowing where they have come from, what they still need to learn and then where they want to go next, which, you know, allows us to build a package of courses that makes sense, given the degree program they’re signing up for. There’s certain specific outcomes that people need to achieve, but you can have already achieved those even before you start. So, that’s like designing the learning program. Um, but then, uh, you know, we also have a big data team that looks at everywhere people are clicking, where they’re going in the classroom, all kinds of signals are available to us to let us know, is this person spending enough time in the library, or spending enough time interacting with the faculty in a chat board. And we can see right away if students may be falling off, maybe their their, um, attention is not as acute as it needs to be. And we actually do have a whole program that sends messages out to students and lets them know, hey, you might be falling a little bit, um, behind. And and we kind of motivate them, we send them messages and encouragement. Or, of course, we make it available for them to speak to some of our counselors, and the counselors can solve problems, you know, they may be able to get in and make suggestions, and honestly, keep students motivated, right? It’s a long time when you start a degree to the end of a degree for, um, you know, a student who’s working efficiently at the University of Phoenix, that can be a three or four-year journey, depending on where they start. So the counselor is a big piece of building a personal relationship too with the student. But we, you know, we we really help use personalization to make the path clearer and make it more relevant and more useful for each student.
Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, and I mean, it sounds like that personalization, you know, a lot of times solely data-driven personalization certainly can be helpful, but it can feel impersonal, like impersonal personalization, I guess. But what you’re describing is a mix of both, which I think is is really powerful in that, you know, not only is it a highly tailored program based on something that I’m sure data plays a part in it, but it also takes some human empathy and understanding of those things and, you know, kind of interweaving that with the data-driven components. It sounds like that actually makes a more meaningful personal experience, right?
Ruth Veloria: Yeah, the counselor’s role is very, very important with the student, both when they’re first enrolling, when people are being explained their financial aid, and also the ongoing course corrections that our academic counselors will make. And then, of course, the faculty is also a personal relationship as well. So, the human touch is very important at the University of Phoenix, even though we have a lot of digital data to help us be informed about where students might need more help.
Greg Kihlstrtöm: So let’s talk a little bit about measurement then. And so, you know, I’m sure from a from an acquisition standpoint, there’s there’s metrics that might be similar to other types of things that, you know, we often talk about on the show. But, you know, let’s talk a little bit more about the longer term. You know, how do you measure success of the learning program itself and certainly, you know, there’s probably some things like completion rates and things, but, you know, how do you how do you measure and understand how successful the program is is?
Ruth Veloria: Yeah. No, I mean, completion obviously matters, um, but as you’re right, it’s really not the only indication of value that, um, our students might be feeling or we might be feeling on their behalf. So, early on in the program, we’re of course looking at persistence, right, moving on from one course to the next to the next. Um, so we want them to have course success, right? We want them to feel confident by looking at their grades. So, we’re looking for that momentum of building up credits that shows them they’re on the right pathway. And we’re also looking to see, you know, how much time and money have they saved, especially through prior learning. So, we have a whole dashboard that measures that. How much are we helping them save rather than paying, you know, for all of the single courses? We’re also looking at skills acquisition. So, we have all the skills tagged in every single one of our courses. So, we know from our data banks again, um, what’s grade students have received in every single one of the skills that have been tagged in the courses. We know if they’ve reached a mastery level. When you reach a mastery level at a certain number of skills, we may actually give you, um, a badge, a digital badge. That that might be across multiple courses. But as soon as you receive a badge that says I’m now, you know, an expert in, um, like emergency preparedness for nursing, as an example, you can immediately put that on your LinkedIn resume. So, if you can put that on your LinkedIn profile, then that helps to build a student’s confidence. So, we are very much focused on, are students confident in being able to explain what they’re able to do to that next employer? I mean, to their current employer, they should be able to learn things today and use them tomorrow. Uh, but we’re really looking to see whether learners can apply what they’ve been focused on. Um, and then I would also say a very important thing is we do measure the customer experience. So, for our our own selves, we’re looking of course at the Net Promoter Score, and we use other widely benchmarked studies, so we’re putting a lot of ourselves on that student experience. There is, um, a survey a lot of different institutions do, it’s called the Ruffalo Noel Levitz, it’s a priority survey for online learners. We can benchmark against multiple institutions, including our peers that we have. And, um, you know, we’ve got very high satisfaction on career alignment, or is the course format working for you? Um, is the classroom technology easy to use? And 91% satisfaction in does the program align to your career path, and 91% satisfaction that course format is easy to navigate and fits into a busy life. So, you know, we’re measuring ourselves on, you know, is the student able to actually fit this program into their life. So, you know, uh, our why for adult learners is both economic, um, like getting that badge or getting that next credential and moving on. But it’s also a human outcome. You know, are they building skills, are they feeling more confident, are they moving towards the role that they want? And, you know, can they keep going without destabilizing a personal situation, work and family life? So, those are the measures that we’re really keeping account of because we’re serving a student who may have extra challenges. And so, we’re measuring whether or not they’re actually able to persist and complete all the way to the end and collecting these awards, badges along the way.
Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, yeah, that’s great. So, so looking ahead, how do you see, I mean, certainly there’s there’s been a lot of evolution in well, in the 50 years of of University of Phoenix, but um, I would imagine even just over the last few years, you know, how do you see the relationship between employers, employees, and educational institutions evolving? Certainly with all the, you know, AI is the is the most recent thing, but there’s going to be another thing and there were things before it that that kind of caused a lot of uh a lot of upheaval and upskilling, reskilling. Um, are we going to see more tightly integrated ecosystems? You know, what how do you see this relationship between those those three elements evolving?
Ruth Veloria: Well, look, I I feel it’s absolutely imperative. I mean, if you look at, um, the things that the White House is asking for, you know, more accountability for outcomes, more connection into the workforce, more emphasis, frankly, this current White House is putting on certain programs that maybe not necessarily always higher education, but is very focused on driving, right, to a a livable wage. So, uh, we take that very seriously. And so, what we’re doing again is imagining the world is going to just become increasingly skill-centered. So, look, we do think people still will need degrees as clear professions where they, for for some very long period of time, people will still want degrees. Um, but there are, you know, other professions where some certifications and other things are relevant too. And we are involved also in in offering those shorter programs, whether it might be in project management or something to do with Agile, or, um, you know, something to do with, um, retail management, etcetera. So, but the relationship is going to become more skill-centered. And employers, we we speak to them all the time. And they’re very focused on, um, trying to understand what skills they still need to hire in or train up their employees to do. So, we work with employers who already have all of their employees in situ, and what we’re doing is bringing a tuition benefit often to them to help them maybe learn through specific courses or finish out a whole degree that will help them get upskilled in the things that they would need. But obviously the curriculum has to be very connected to work. And learners also need a good way to be able to share, you know, what they’ve done and and how to communicate to their employer. This is what they need to be doing. So, again, you know, the skills tagging that we have, the digital badges that we have, we have a whole career navigator suite that our students are learning. In fact, our employers also have this tool called talent sourcing tool, and it can look down into our student base. It can see the students that have the skills that have been tagged in our database, and it can identify people who might be good fits for them in their roles. And if students give permission, you know, we can connect them over to the employer. And, uh, you know, they could go on and and have a good conversation about getting getting a job over there. So, you know, but certainly AI is definitely accelerating this shift in the focus on the skills. In fact, so much so that employees are really taking AI upskilling into their own hands. Frankly, some employers have been a bit slow in getting behind what AI tools people can use and is it allowed, and how do I protect against risk and hallucination and all these things? So, employees are actually taking the bull by the horns. They really are self-teaching AI skills. And so, one thing we’ve done as a result of that is we have baked AI skills into every single one of our courses in some way. Like is there a research tool you could be using? You know, could you be doing some background research, could you be using it to propel like a first draft of an article and then you’re, you know, working to refine that draft? This is what people are doing in the workforce now. So, you might as well learn how to use those tools while you’re embedded, uh, here at at the school, you know, at college, while you’re while you’re also learning. So, again, we’re embedding these tools into programs so that, um, you know, if students attend the University of Phoenix, they kind of have a little bit of a head start on using the AI skills that they’re going to actually do that when they get out into the workplace. So, you know, if we had an old center of gravity that was really just about credentials alone, now it’s really credentials plus demonstrable skills, and that is what the employee the employers are really looking for when they’re when they’re, uh, you know, recruiting people coming into their organization or helping people upskill.
Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, well, and I mean that’s that that’s it’s really good to hear that to me it sounds like a realistic approach about AI because, you know, certainly there’s we we could have a whole show talking about plagiarism and writing and and all those those kinds of things. But I think to take a realistic approach of, yes, people are going to use AI, hopefully not to write the final draft of of things at at in the workplace. But, you know, first draft, revisions, you know, things like that, it can be extremely helpful. I mean, I know this personally obviously. But, um, so to, you know, to be realistic and embrace it in that way and and also I assume, you know, to show what the guardrails should be as well, seems like a a realistic approach as opposed to just kind of, you know, looking the other way or I don’t know, I don’t know what the alternative is. Yeah, people are going to use them anyway. So you might as well teach them how to be effective in the way that they do do it, because there are there are pitfalls. So, the more we can teach people how to get past the pitfalls and really be more efficient and effective, that is a big value add for any organization.
Ruth Veloria: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s that that’s it’s really good to hear that to me, it sounds like a realistic approach about AI, because, you know, certainly there’s we we could have a whole show talking about plagiarism and writing and and all those those kinds of things. But I think to take a realistic approach of, yes, people are going to use AI, hopefully not to write the final draft of of things at at in the workplace. But, you know, first draft, revisions, you know, things like that, it can be extremely helpful. I mean, I know this personally, obviously. But, um, so to, you know, to be realistic and embrace it in that way and and also I assume, you know, to show what the guardrails should be as well, seems like a a realistic approach as opposed to just kind of, you know, looking the other way or I don’t know, I don’t know what the alternative is. Yeah, people are going to use them anyway. So you might as well teach them how to be effective in the way that they do do it, because there are there are pitfalls. So, the more we can teach people how to get past the pitfalls and really be more efficient and effective, that is a big value add for any organization.
Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, yeah. So for those leaders, I know you mentioned some some tools that you have for for leaders looking for talent. Certainly, you know, finding and retaining talent is is always top of mind for for leaders. What what’s a piece of advice that you’d have on how to offer better support? I mean, you mentioned that some employees are are taking it on their own to to learn some of this stuff. I can only imagine that, you know, if they had an employer that was more supportive, they they might feel better about their their employment situation. You know, what would you what’s your advice for leaders to really support employees in in the right way as as things are are changing rather rapidly?
Ruth Veloria: Yeah, look, I’d say this always occurred to me whenever I would talk with employers, especially in the old days when we had this tuition benefit and people would put degrees up on the shelf and people would pull them down. But if you want to really retain the talent, you have to connect the learning to opportunity. And what I found was that was sometimes an absent step. It was just a general benefit. But you want to really connect if I take this learning, what is a possible future pathway for me moving forward? So, you really have to connect anything you’re doing with education to employee goals. And of course, business priorities. Like we don’t want to educate people to go off and do something else, you know, we should be, I think, honestly, I think we should be nurturing the programs that make the most sense for our employees to go on and do the things that are valuable to us. Um, but you know, if you are going to go back to school or even take on a big certificate program, um, it’s going to take discipline and manager support. You know, it will be, if you were at the University of Phoenix, it would be the flexible but structured program. But, you know, make sure that the manager has some level of empathy for the extra thing that the employee is taking on. Because, you know, if you treat this development as a retention strategy, it really can pay off. Um, and then there the other thing I would say you have to do is just celebrate along the way. People, it’s a lot of work, you know, to go back to school and take on all of that. So if you’re encouraged by your employer, you’ve connected to progress, and you’re not overly expecting, you know, to have twice the job load, the learning load and the workload, I think it really is a good recipe. Uh, we know this from our own career optimism index. When people feel invested in, they do retain and and they’re more loyal to the company and then they want to go and take those new opportunities.
Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, yeah, love it. Well, Ruth, thanks so much for joining today. Got two questions for you as we wrap up here. First, uh, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
Ruth Veloria: Well, you know, of course I’ll have to really mention AI. You know, I think there’s no doubt that, um, AI is going to reshape kind of career mobility in many, many ways. We don’t know what those jobs of the future really are right now. We know, I think it requires critical thinking and judgment, kind of supervisory skills, right? The transactional tasks are gone, the critical thinking and those higher-order skills are going to be more important, not less, moving forward, because you’re going to be supervising a bot army, right, at some certain point in time. So, you know, it’s the question is really is how how are we, the people who helped our, you know, our workforce and our population, use it responsibly, practically, and confidently? Uh, so, you know, super important for us, for our working adult student base that we help them remain competitive while still managing everything else in life.
Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, yeah, love it. And last question for you, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Ruth Veloria: Yeah, I mean consistency’s definitely the key. You have to be close, right, to the data. Um, I, you know, I’m lucky, we run a customer listening program, so I can spend time, you know, listening to feedback all the time. The data team, so again, I can look at retention, I can see the gaps, I can dig in and find those places, you know, where you can separate from what you want to do from, you know, really what’s needed. So, you know, it’s agility, it’s not just speed. Being agile is not just speed, it’s also about really being responsive and doing it with purpose. So, you know, I want, you know, I’m looking for the ability to learn, to adapt, and do all of that without losing the sight, you know, of our very important mission that we have. So, agility is learning fast, it’s prioritizing, and it’s staying really anchored to the learner. That’s what I always focus on.
