Headlamp: Aligning Academia and Employers by Shifting Towards a Skills-First Mindset

Nice. Lingering in the back in session rooms and talking in hallways, like, the amount of creativity in this space in this week is I don't know. I think it's awesome, and I just wanna say thank you to all of you doing the cool things and and coming out. So I wanna take a moment and share with you something that's been a really deep source of personal inspiration for me. I have to get my clicker first. Boop.

Has anyone here read the book Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder? No. Get to turn everybody onto it. It is an amazing book, and I highly recommend it because it's a book about doctor Paul Farmer, who's someone who really faced giant complex problems head on. And in his case, it was healthcare in Haiti. The title of the book comes from a Haitian proverb, De estement j'en ment.

Beyond mountains, there are mountains. So when you first hear this, it's kind of dispiriting, right? Like, no matter how many challenges we overcome, no matter how many solutions we bring into this world, it's like there's just going to be another one on the horizon. Kind of a downer, right? But Paul Farmer, he didn't take it that way. When he was faced with the overwhelming challenges of providing health care in Haiti, he didn't think, what's even the point? Like, it's not like I'm gonna be able to cure everyone, and then you've got socioeconomic challenges on top of that. Like, no.

He instead he rolled up his sleeves, started traveling back and forth between Haiti and Boston to take on the problems that he knew how to do something about. Sure, it wasn't going to solve the swath of systemic challenges facing Haitians, but it was something. It was good, and it was a start. And then when you end up looking back at, like, his whole life and the work that he brought to these communities and the many Haitians that he helped, like, it's it no longer feels like some small, countless contribution. And it's that relentless dedication that, I guess, really fuels me.

And as we start thinking about solving seemingly insurmountable problems, that's so awe inspiring for me. And while our collective work in education, the thing that's bringing us all together here this week, may not seem as dramatic as solving health care in Haiti, the principles remain the same, like tackling each challenge in front of us with perseverance, dedication, and innovation. I do believe that we can fundamentally make a profound impact on the lives of our learners and the future of education. Alright. With that preamble, hope everybody's feeling inspired and motivated and jazzed and able to look at some hard challenges.

Because in this space of online nontraditional learning and skill alignment and industry collaboration, there's a few challenges. It's been about a year and a half since I started this incubation project, at Instructure. And when I first sent out the call to many of you, asking, how is your institution responding to the increasing demands and the changing landscape of online, nontraditional learning? I wanted to know, had you had you mostly figured it out? Problem solved. Did you need any friend or any help from your friends over here at at Instructure? My inbox and Zoom blew up. We spent months, I mean months, talking to hundreds of institutions across the world, not building software, just listening.

We heard about the common stories about enrollment cliffs and shrinking state budgets. I'm sure many of you are aware of. We heard about the need and desire to increase accessibility and deliver education to more people, but to do it more effectively than previous attempts at scaling online education had achieved in the past. We heard about the increasing demands of nontraditional learners who, while balancing and raising a balancing their jobs and raising a family, need to be able to dive into targeted educational content of their choosing on their timelines when their lives allow. We also heard how these learners, these non traditional learners, are no longer a niche group on campus.

They're a growing segment of the student population. And so a focus on continuous learning and career development had to become the norm. So quick aside, probably heard this from me a lot, but as we were thinking about this and learning about how common these learners are becoming, it just continues to feel wrong to continue to describe them as nontraditional. I feel like these people. I know many of you probably do too.

That's why we at Headlamp and Instructure at Large at this point, I started referring to them as new traditional learners. So when I use that term, that's what I'm referring to. And then we heard about skills. In fact, it was an undertone to almost all of our conversations that we were having, whether it was small and tactical, like, how do I tag all of my existing content with skills? Or the skills taxonomy that we're using on campus is too granular, or the skills taxonomy that we're using is too broad. Then there were the bigger strategic challenges, like we're trying to do a better job of responding to the criticisms from industry about how we're not teaching the right skills or the about how We heard about how overwhelming it can be to have to have answers to about how your institution is teaching, not just the hundred or two hundred degree programs that are commonly offered at institutions, but the thirty to fifty thousand different professional skills And then we And then we heard about how approaching instructional design from a skills based perspective actually required different techniques and different mindsets, not to mention all the other mindsets on campus that need to be changed as well when it comes to this.

Talk about mountains beyond mountains. Luckily, though, we started to see that there was a theme. And that theme is that the foundation of a lot of those problems is getting skills right, Not just applying some off the shelf skills library to existing curriculum and calling it a day, but truly digging in and reevaluating the fundamental mindsets and techniques of what we mean by skills based education and going through the very real work of changing how we design and deliver that education. And so in this space where learners are increasingly motivated to connect their education and their skills to their careers, we first have to listen to industry. How do they view skills? Why are degrees and certifications no longer sufficient to make a hiring decision? To do that, I'd like to introduce you to Tony Lee.

Tony is the head of talent acquisition at Mission Cloud, an AWS partner specializing in helping companies optimize their technology investments. With nearly twenty years of experience, Tony excels in scaling companies through hypergrowth and implementing strategic talent initiatives. He serves on advisory boards for AI driven talent acquisition technology and is the VP of technology for both of his kids' school boards. So welcome, Tony. Tell us tell us about how you're thinking about skills ecosystem.

Great. Thank you. Great. Thanks so much. Hi, all.

I'm Tony. Really appreciate the opportunity and, the invite to come to InstructureCon. So, with that, I actually probably should have played with this before I got here. Here we go. So a little bit about me.

So I'm Tony, and, some quick background. I've been doing talent acquisition, for, corporations, corporate hiring for nearly twenty years. Talent acquisition is a fancy way to say recruiting. And in that time, I've been lucky to have been, nominated and, awarded by my peers to be one of the top hundred global TA leaders. In that time, I've also, in the companies that I've managed recruiting, have directly influenced over ten thousand hires, And I've been also lucky and privileged to have served on a number of advisory boards, including Workday, smart recruiters, their ATSs are the ones that power your career sites for companies.

And through working with them on product advising, customer advising, I've helped influence over a billion hires in the last twenty years. So why is that important? It's not important. But what's important about it is that the last couple years, we've really pushed towards skills based hiring. So I remember early in my career, this is how all my hiring leaders looked at hiring. And I remember a meeting long, long time ago with the CEO of one of my companies I was working for, and he, and this is a company that bought, built, and spun out other companies.

And so, some of the companies that this group supported and grew were Match dot com, Tinder, Vimeo, HomeAdvisor, Angie's List, Home Shopping Network, TripAdvisor, Expedia. So the CEO of this company said, hey, we need to build a new leadership team. And my team and I got a bunch of different profiles, amazing people, people who led, hundred, five hundred billion dollar companies, gave him a bunch of profiles, and he said, I don't look at any of these. I'm like, why not? It's like, because none of these come from an Ivy League school. I don't think I know any of them, and they won't pass this test.

They won't pass my beer test. I'm like, what beer test? And he said, I can't I can't imagine actually going after work and having a beer with them. And I purposely said him, and, thank you to Chat GPT. They helped me make some of these slides. But Chat GPT also, the the lack of diversity in this slide is also, very intentional.

And so that was my experience to hiring many, many years ago. And it's still kind of the case today in in some institutions, but ever since that moment, every company, every space I've ever been in, I've tried to push towards this, which is why do companies do skills based hiring? How do we get away from the traditional coursework, the traditional, pedigree? And how do we start looking at the building blocks of what a company needs? So that's what I do with companies nowadays is figure out what are the building blocks of skills that a company needs to be successful? What employees have those skills? What hires do we need to make? What gaps do we have? What hires do we need to make to fill the rest of those skills? Would lead to all these potentially and I'll show you another slide later with a bunch more research, but it potentially leads to all these potential positive outcomes. And those skills can then, directly influence revenue, your technology, support your company values. And hopefully, big thing for me is, can it make us a little more unbiased? How do we make this more equitable across, across everybody? But it doesn't come without challenges, though. The challenges to move into a skills based hiring process is it takes a long time.

I mean, Trey just talked there about, the the skills. I mean, he said twenty, thirty thousand. I would argue, like, it's infinite. If you ever if anyone's ever gone on LinkedIn and try to add a skill, that list just seems to go on forever and ever when you're trying to make a profile. So the question is, what skills does a company need? What what what skills does your company want and care about? You gotta implement it.

You gotta train. You gotta and then likely you have systems you have to integrate to, HR systems, learning platforms. So, for me, on average, it takes about one to two years potentially to build an actual skills based learning platform or hiring process if you build it on your own. And so that's where partners, institutions, education spaces can help us make that time go faster. So I'll touch on that a little bit later.

But here are some examples of if you can get this right, these are actual studies, over the last five to ten years of people saying, here's how skills based hiring, skills based interviewing has helped our company. Just to name a few, for example, IBM reduced their time to hire. They hired forty percent faster and increased performance by fifty percent. Capgemini saw a forty four percent increase in employer performance. McKinsey reported twenty five increase in innovation, and that's just because you focus on the skills that you need for the work that you need to get done.

But beyond that, there's my role, in talent acquisition is not just interview and hiring. It's also about workforce planning, and workforce planning directly influences finance, revenue. The most expensive thing a company ever does is have people. And so salaries are the most expensive commodity in any company. And so, skills based helps identify what are the gaps.

What do we have? What do we don't have? And can we upscale those roles so that we can potentially fill those gaps with people we have, or do we need to go higher? And so think of it this way. Think of all your we call it FAANG. I don't know if you understand that term, but Facebook, Google, Amazon, and most major companies. The way they do headcount planning, that's also called workforce planning, is, hey, you got a budget of x million. That equates to y heads.

We're gonna distribute it across the company. And so engineering and sales, you get twenty, you get thirty, you get ten. Go figure out what you wanna fill. And that's led directly to the layoffs that are happening, reduction in workforce, where now you're over capacity, you're overhead count. You actually didn't fill the gaps you needed.

You just filled bodies and spaces you think could do the job. So what's happening now when I do work for every year, I get invited to senior leadership and finance and say, hey. Here are the gaps we have. What heads do we need? Who do we need to hire? And can they do can they fill those skills? But where do employers and education come in? So, traditionally, when I grew up in corporate tech world, the bigger you are, the more money you have, the more l and d you have, learning and development. A lot of these companies had in house universities, in house training.

And so because the because the average cost to hire someone externally is about five thousand dollars per hire. The average cost to hire someone internally is about five hundred dollars. So it's about ten x spread and try I mean, that's my job. So hopefully, I still have both. But at the same time, like but the reason why my job exists is because it costs so much money to go hire someone.

Now in the day of home office and hybrid and remote, the challenge now is companies aren't offering those learning programs anymore. But instead, what they're offering now is, hey. Take some time off to go do some more classes, Tuition reimbursement, paid certifications, paid subscriptions to learning platforms like Udemy, LinkedIn Learning. And so now they're telling employees, you go upskill yourself. I'm gonna go hire this role, and if you can add a skill, I'll consider you.

If you can't add a skill, I'll go find someone else. And that's kind of how the corporate world's working today in trying to define skills and then go find it. So, I if you look back earlier, I remember earlier the slide of it takes about one to two years to develop a skills based program. It takes as much time to maintain it, and it costs money and people. But if if institutions, technology, AI, anything can help develop that curriculum, have a home base that's owned and managed and developed and updated somewhere else, well, then it can reduce potentially forty percent of the time it takes for companies to roll out skills based learning and hiring.

So with that, that's me. That's my last chapter teach side. But, my parting words is if I, like, today, if I could give all of my skills data to someone else for them to figure out how to up level or improve my current workforce or future workforce, I do it in a heartbeat. And so that's how I I partner with Instructure, and I'm excited to continue partnering with them. Great.

Thank you all. Hey. Thanks, Jimmy. Great stuff. Now at this point, we've talked to hundreds of companies.

I mean, everything from startups to Fortune one hundreds. And what Tony described, it's not unique. Companies are spending millions of dollars every year trying to map those skills to jobs, those skills to humans, those humans to jobs, and somehow divine their future workforce needs. So it's no wonder that any conversation in this space about educating today's how do we need to respond? As how do we need to respond? As a technologist, I want to throw new tech at it. But we all know what happens when we do that, right? When the technology becomes the driving force without truly understanding the problem or the discipline, we get things like this.

We've all had probably worked with things like that. And that's where I feel really lucky to be a part of this community here because you all help us not do that. When I reached out and asked how you were thinking about these challenges, it was inundated with responses. Nobody had a simple answer for me. Kinda wish they did sometimes, but, but you are all eager to share your efforts and and and share with me where you could thought you could use some help from, from us at Instructure.

One of those people was Anne Innes from the University of Utah. Anne is a lifelong educator, has more than twenty years of experience as a curriculum theorist, a lecturer, a classroom teacher, and an administrator. Anne's commitment to disruptive curriculum is evident in her work, in university industry curriculum mapping as well as skills based curriculum development. She holds a PhD in education, culture, and society and is the author of Recognizing, Reframing, Negotiating, History Teachers' Entry Point to the Decolonial Process. Welcome, Anne.

Tell us about how you're facing these challenges at The U. Thank you. It is great to be here to talk to you all today and great to work with our friends at Instructure and also MissionCloud because as Tony says, he's got this set of data, workforce planning skills, and what he wants to do is figure out how to get it to a university. We at the University of Utah, we're real happy to take that. And we're real happy to take that and to turn it into curriculum.

Now, in order to do that, we have to think a little bit about what curriculum is, what we do with it, and how we're gonna get it from that stage to what Tony's looking for in skills based hiring. Now, I love to talk about curriculum all day, every day. And if my slide would advance, there we go. I love to talk about curriculum all day, every day, so that's not hard for me. Broadly speaking, curriculum is what you know and why you know it.

It's that big vast body of knowledge and we in the university setting, education setting, we have to parse through that. So there are two types of curriculum we wanna think about, knowledge based curriculum and skills based curriculum. Knowledge based curriculum is the creation, the enactment, the underlying rationale of why you know the stuff that you know. Whereas skills based curriculum is more of the intersection of theory, practice, and story. What can you do? Why can you do it? And what else could you do with it? So in order to tell you or illustrate for you what those two look like, I'm gonna tell you how I got to be here on this stage speaking to you today, and I'm gonna tell it to you in two versions.

First, the knowledge based and the skills first. The knowledge based version of how I got here today, well, I am a graduate of Big Spring High School, Newville, Pennsylvania. Nobody. Wow. Tiny little school.

I finished school there. I got an undergraduate degree. I got a master's degree. I finished all the coursework for a PhD, and I had amassed this body of knowledge, and they say to you at the end of that, well now you need to contribute to it. So I authored a study, I defended the study, I published the study, contributed to that body of knowledge, and I get this job at the University of Utah.

But if we look at that through a skills based lens, I have a very different story. My first job was as a state park lifeguard at the age of fifteen. And in order to get that job, I had to get a Red Cross certification and demonstrate all kinds of skills, swimming skills, rescue skills, CPR, boating skills, all of it. I passed those certifications, I demonstrated the skills, I got the job. My second job was as an English as a second language and Spanish teacher.

Now in order to get that job, I had to go through a number of other certifications and demonstrate a whole bunch of other skills. Classroom management, basic statistics, averages, computation for a teaching license, also to demonstrate my proficiency in the Spanish language. I put that second image there in the middle because I distinctly remember that well over twenty years ago, that proficiency exam contained an oral response prompt that told me there was a problem in the Strait of Gibraltar. Whereas orcas and boats were trying to use the strait at the same time and they were running into problems keeping both the whales and the people safe. Now, I responded to that in excellent Spanish and passed my certification, though if you are watching the news right now, you'll see they still haven't figured that problem out.

But I got the certification, I took my teaching job. I taught for a number of years. I moved up, I became an administrator. I was a high school principal for a number of years. I gained more skills.

I added on more skills. I had enough skills that I became a university lecturer. Then I had enough skills that somebody said, hey, you could add on to our group of skills. I authored a study, I published a study, I defended a study, and the University of Utah hired me for the position that I'm in right now. So you see either way you look at that, whether you look at knowledge based curriculum, whether you look at skills accumulation through curriculum, I get to the same place.

We in higher ed often feel like those two types of curriculum are at odds, but in reality, we need to think about what they are and how we get to them, how we can parse them apart. What causes that struggle? Well, oftentimes we think of knowledge based curriculum as this solid rock wall. Yes. I also used CoPilot, not GPT, for my images here. And this solid rock wall, if you think about it geologically, the layers go up, but that's also how knowledge based curriculum works.

First grade, we learn a horizontal layer. Second grade, we learn another. And the higher you go in your education, the more of those layers you encounter, you master, you obtain that knowledge. But if you look closely at the image, you can see there are verticals running throughout that rock wall. Those are your skills.

And if you think through your education, you build those every year. But the struggle is getting those skills out of the solid rock wall. It's hard to isolate those verticals when they're encased in all the horizontal lines. Now, why are we so concerned about this? Tony's concerned for a set of reasons. I'm concerned for a somewhat different set of reasons.

Thirty nine percent of people ages eighteen to twenty four enroll in higher education each year. As Trey mentioned, the enrollment cliff, we are at the edge of the enrollment cliff. We are starting to fall off, and we're about to go careening down if we don't make some changes. Of all the people enrolled in degree programs, thirty three percent of them drop out every year. They leave the institution without completion, which means that we get to this number that I am focused on bringing down, which is thirty six point eight million people in North America have what we call some college, no degree.

They've started, they haven't finished, and they don't have something to show for what they've done. This is a number where we in higher ed and when we think about skills based education and skills based curriculum, where we can make a major difference. It lends itself to skills based hiring, and it lends itself to what our population, our student population, is looking for. So how do we get there? Well, if knowledge based curriculum is that solid rock wall with all of those geological layers, skills based curriculum looks more like this. And if you're following my geology metaphor here, these things are called hoodoos.

It's not about, as you can see, chiseling those verticals out of the solid rock wall, but rather building skill stacks through a process of accretion. We don't have to know what the top looks like or the end to get started. We can say that in my basic AI skills today, I need this first, this second, this third. In six months, the skills will go further, higher, longer. We accept that.

We start with what we know. In order to do this, we have to change how we approach content creation. We need to ask ourselves, what skills does a student need in order to do and extend the work in the career path they choose? We need to find entry points into that skill stack that are logical for students to enter depending on where they come to the institution and what they need when they get there. We need to create programs that students can complete in a relatively short period of time and that logically lead from one program to the next. And we need, we have a critical need for both application and alignment, application of skills aligned to industry need.

At the University of Utah, we have engaged our Professional Continuing and Online Education or PCO unit to meet these challenges. In order to develop skills based curriculum that is focused, progressive, workforce aligned, flexible, accessible, and affordable, we need new tools. We need an LMS based on skills. We need that LMS to be flexible so that learning to talk to hiring managers and industry experts about the skills and the trends that they see in their hiring. And we need a way to aggregate all of that information to compare it to our curricular library so we can see what we already have, what we need to update, and what we need to build afresh.

We need all of those things, and we need them now. Now, these are difficult challenges, and they sound really hard and really frustrating, But what we have to remember is that curriculum wall that we looked at on the one of the earlier slides, that is daunting. If you've ever stood at the beginning of a degree program and looked up or seen your child or someone else's child at the beginning of high school or middle school. When you look at that wall of knowledge based curriculum, you have a lot. It's scary, right? It's hard to get up there.

Do I have the right tools? Have I picked the right lanes? Will I find the right hand hold? Skills based curriculum? That's a different journey for the student. Students are able to venture off into a skilled space field, finding the path that works for them, circling back when one is really successful, moving on to another. They have multiple on ramps and off ramps. Because climbing a solid rock wall, that's daunting. Skills based curriculum, that's an adventure.

Thank you. That was great. Thank you, Anne. I hear that. I'm going to say, I love Canvas.

For the last decade of my professional career, I've spent the majority of it working on Canvas. I've used it as a student. My kids use it every day. So when I hear Ann talk about, like, we need something else, it gave me a little bit of a pause. But as you've now heard now from Tony and Ann, the challenge that we face today in this space do really require something more than Canvas can accomplish alone.

We need a different approach. We need something that's going to be better able to support our new traditional learners and the institutions that serve them. And that's why we started building Headlamp last year. So I'm gonna take the rest of our time together before the keynote kicks off, and we're gonna flip through at a pretty high clip through a pretty big platform, that connects industry with educators all in the service of developing skills for new traditional learners. Sound good? We're gonna start with employers.

Again, employers and see how employers can use Headlamp to address some of the skills based hiring and talent development initiatives that Tony described. Skills are the foundation of what we're gonna solve for though. So therefore, employers begin their usage of Headlamp by defining skill profiles. Now unlike other initiatives that you might be familiar with, when I describe that, you're probably thinking of being hunkered in a conference room for weeks on end, arguing with your colleagues about what skills are and aren't important. Sounds luckily, Headlamp, with Headlamp, we've aimed to streamline this process by allowing managers to communicate directly to Headlamp their unique needs for their teams through a skill profile interview.

Then from these interviews, Headlamp can use artificial intelligence and data science to extract extract not just the keywords that are mentioned, but the underlying skills and concepts that are being described across the management team. Employers can then make much more informed decisions about the current skill landscape at their companies, and they'll have a much better way to evaluate their strategic long term skill needs. For their current workforce, Headlamp provides powerful tools for team development and performance management. This helps pinpoint skill gaps for individual employees and across teams. This enables focused one on one performance conversations centered around specific gaps, making the development process more targeted, and therefore, hopefully, a lot more effective.

Additionally, Headlamp then offers insights into career progression possibilities. We know there are so many paths out there and just trying to figure out where I can go with the skills that I have, it's a challenge. With Headlamp, employees can see the skills they need in order to advance within the organization, which helps foster a conti a culture of continuous growth and development. And to support that, they can then review a curated skill development catalog of aligned educational content. And they can enroll directly on Headlamp.

And those employee tuition benefits, you know, that Tony described, we can even help streamline that process that can be kind of cumbersome in a lot of companies. And then when a manager needs to hire somebody doing that talent acquisition that Tony talked about, Headlamp, again, leverages those rich skill profiles that are created by the managers describing their unique needs for the for what they need on their team. And then Headlamp can surface and identify candidates with validated proficiency of those key skills. This process that we've developed aims to reduce bias and let the managers focus on true proficiency. Hiring managers can explore detailed, portfolios in a skills based portfolio environment where they can look at the artifacts that are evidence of of somebody's capabilities.

That helps them gain insights into a candidate's development over time. They can also leave feedback and ratings and make it a more data driven process as they evaluate who should move on to the next stage. All in all, we hope we we hope that this helps managers find the best fit for their teams based on actual skills rather than your traditional resume. So that is a very quick tour through some of the capabilities that we've built for employers on Headlamp. We're hoping that employers can use this to become a true skills first first organization like Tony describes and foster a more capable and adaptable and skilled workforce.

Then we move over to, while we're all here this week, education. Now in our early days when we were setting out, one of the things that we heard so frequently from instructional designers was, alright. How do I get that type of information from our industry partners? We know it's out there. We just don't have access to it. We have these cumbersome processes.

We might set up some interviews. It takes a long time, but we don't usually get it. How do we get it? And in fact, that was one of the initial blockers that we encountered in our early days of Headlamp when we were thinking of Headlamp as just an Edu focused only solution. Educators wanted to align their content to industry needs. Industry wanted Edu to be teaching the right skills.

There just weren't good ways to collaborate, and it's too complex and an ever changing of a problem that you can really effectively address in a single meeting or two. So as you've seen, we tried to overcome this challenge by bringing employers onto the same platform with their own set of features to, you know, address some of the needs that Tony described as they want to become a more skills based, skills driven organization. That gets them on the platform. From there, sharing those insights and that intelligence about their strategic workforce needs really just became and sharing that with your educational partners became, an easy lift and an added benefit of the platform. Now I hope many of you saw and visited us in the educational moments of the future room.

But what you can now do is then ask your industry partners to share their skill profiles and their strategic workforce plans. You can solicit subject matter expert interviews and ask them to give you some information and intelligence about very specific topics, really anything that you're needing in order to develop your curriculum. This gives valuable context for instructional designers that has just been really, really difficult to come by with other other tools and processes. Then with the help of AI, Headlamp, again, extracts those skills and key concepts. And we can go take it a step further and automatically generate a matching course outline to what you're hearing in those processes.

We think this really helps accelerate the content development process to answer Anne's needs of get it moving faster. But as many of you have let me know many a time, that knowing what to teach is only half the battle. Right? Through conversations with instructional designers and learning scientists, we heard that we needed better capabilities for authoring and delivering content, especially to new traditional learners. So with that in mind, Headlamp has built learning activities that are based on the latest best practices from learning sciences that can easily be assembled to create effective educational experiences. We have the standard content based activities like text and images and videos, for sure.

But we've also built learning activities like chat, chat activities that you can provide almost a near world simulation that learners can interact with an AI agent to apply some of the concepts that they've learned about. We We also have project based learning activities so learners can focus on demonstrating their proficiency in as near as or as near as real world as we can get. And then we also developed, something called that we're calling dynamic reflection prompts. And some of the history behind that is as we were talking to a lot of our early adopters about what should we build into this learning management system, we kinda came across that knowledge check, a thing that we use a lot in online education to do that knowledge checkpoint. Do do people know what they need to know to continue on? And we got some pretty big yellow red lights from our our audience going like, be careful with that one.

The way that we currently do that is multiple choice questions. They're kind of a poor proxy for actually evaluating somebody's understanding of the material. So So we dug deeper, and we said, well, what what would you do? What should we do? We want this to be awesome. And what we heard a lot of was, well, gosh, the best way would be be to, you know, engage that learner in a dialogue and push the boundaries and figure out what what information do they really know? How have they synthesized it into their mental model? Are there edges that they're still weak on? There's no way we're gonna be able to do that. Like like, we just we like, that we we can't hire a bunch of people that do oral exams for all of our students.

We're trying to keep costs low. That would be super expensive. Luckily, we live in twenty twenty four. We have some pretty awesome technology that maybe you've seen some of. We took some of that technology that we demonstrated in the educational moments of the future room and said, can we apply it in this situation, incorporating the content from the skill development experience into an interview with a learner to do exactly that? So I'm gonna pop over to a live demo really quickly and show you how that works.

Here we are. So at this point, I'm now logged in as a learner onto Headlamp. We are in the middle of a skill development experience focused on scope definition. This might be for somebody who wants to become a project manager. You can see there are multiple activities in the skill development experience where we're gonna read and communicate the the wisdom and what it really takes to develop this skill around scope definition.

There are multiple activities here. I won't go through all of them. But frequently, somewhere along the way, maybe before they, launch into a a project or something and apply it, the learning experience designer says, hey. This is probably one of those points we need to make sure that they really understand their concepts before we have them go do a project. So Headlamp has the ability to then say, at this point, we'd like for you to do, one of these reflection prompts.

And so we're going to see how that goes. I'm not an expert in project management, as many people can probably attest. But we'll we'll see how Headlamp does for me. Reflecting on what you've learned about the components of a scope statement, how do you think each element contributes to the overall success of a project? I might say, gosh, I I I think a scope statement is is is pretty important to keep the various stakeholders in my project aligned about the underlying goals for the project, but I don't I don't know many of the components. That's a good starting point.

Let's focus on two key components, objectives and milestones. How do you think clearly defined objectives and milestones could help keep your project on track? I guess that's a that's a good point. I think I think making sure that everybody involved in the project is aligned on the objectives maybe helps us stay focused and make sure that we don't insert some scope creep along the way because people aren't aligned on what those objectives are. Absolutely. Clear objectives can definitely help prevent scope creep.

Now considering milestones, how might setting and meeting these milestones be past the This could go on for a little bit longer, but, it's pretty cool that we can take the content that's been put into that skill development experience, and it can reinforce that in that dialogue. Like, you could see where there was this part where I maybe was a little weak and forgot how maybe objectives could help or where milestones should fit. And this helps not only reinforce the content, helps expose to me, the learner, where my edge of understanding is. It's it's a really great tool, and we're seeing it applied in really, really creative ways. So I'm really excited about this.

Now at this point, a learning experience designer could decide, hey. This could just be something for, a a student to just reflect on their own with, and move on and make their choices about whether they need to do some more study before moving on. But we could also then move it over to feedback and say, hey. This is a good example, and a facilitator might want to use this conversation in order to evaluate somebody's Headlamp is Headlamp is unabashedly competency based. We heard so much from our industry and employer adopters that they really don't care if somebody get a ninety six or an eighty two on a final exam in order to hire somebody.

They wanna know, do they have the skills in order to do the job? And so we wanted to make sure everybody on the platform is, again, aligned to developing and demonstrating true validated proficiency. And to that end, we've made sure that everything in Headlamp is that's assessable is assessable from a competency based perspective. And once all of this is built, you can then invite your industry partners, who, again, are already on the platform, back in to review the curriculum that you've built, leave some feedback, give some, you know, anecdotes that you can incorporate as well. This helps ensure that your educational content stays relevant and aligned to workforce needs. Now a common question that we get at this point is, all right, Trey, that sounds pretty cool, But we've got a lot of content, and it's in other systems.

Do we really have to start over and build all this content, on Headlamp? And initially, as Anne will attest, the answer is yes. We wanted to make sure that we weren't just propagating, paradigms that didn't align to this new skills based curriculum approach. But now that we have a better handle on what that looks like and what the learning activities are that we need to support that, we've built an AI powered importer that can take any catalog, Canvas, or really any common cartridge and import it into Headlamp. It's not a one to one type thing, but it susses out what really is skill based curriculum and makes some suggestions about different projects that you could put in. And you'll, you know, come through with your instructional team to to dial it in, but it's really accelerated the content development process, for content that you might already have.

So in summary, for education, Headlamp empowers empowers educational institutions to better align their curricula with industry needs, develop a best in class learning experience, ensures that new traditional learners are equipped with the skills required for today's dynamic job market. So now that we've gotten that, we can now get our attention back to those new traditional learners. Now that we've got that skill aligned content in place, now we can see how these new traditional learners can navigate their career paths effectively. They start their journey by exploring different careers. We've got all that information from employers about what the what skills are needed in different careers so they can delve into various career paths, understanding the key skills required for each role.

This helps them determine their next steps and whether a particular career aligns with their interests and aspirations. Headline then can then offers them a self evaluation tool, enabling them to self assess their current skills and see how they even match up. Is this even a re a career that I'm gonna be able to do, you know, in the near future? Or do I have a huge gap that is gonna take a while to get there? With this information, Headlamp then can present learners with educational content in an educational marketplace that maps directly to their career goals and skill gaps, serving as an educational marketplace. Now as they progress, Headlamp automatically builds a skills based portfolio, incorporating completed projects, artifacts from their educational journey. This portfolio, as it's enhanced with additional experiences from work and volunteering, it ends up showcasing their comprehensive skill set and achievements.

I'm looking at my time because I've got I wanna show you the portfolio really quickly. You wanna pop over to the the demo real quick? I know there's a keynote starting in fifteen minutes, so I promise to be quick. But what this does, we kinda see skills being an accumulation over time of lots of skills from lots of different experiences. They then kind of collect into a collection over time. Now not all of these skills are gonna align to a career.

Right? I guess I told everybody there's a keynote starting. Note for future. Anyway, you can layer a specific career on top of your skills collection, and Headlamp provides what we're calling a skill constellation over here on the left, which is kind of an at a glance view of where you are already skilled and proficient, in things that are required for a for the for the career. In this case, Taylor Foster, who wants to be a project manager. It's great experience in budget management.

You can see that they have lots of artifacts. Some of them are even verified. Some of them might have come from educational experiences as well. But as, they're looking through, you can also see that there are skills that they don't have. For example, data visualization is one that they don't have.

Now again, because that educational content is already on the platform of Headlamp, aligned content from that context of their portfolio that aligns with their career goals, and they can just pop right on in. There are lots of other things I could show here about how endorsements work, and they can, you know, take that portfolio and and share it with employers who aren't on headlamp. And, of course, if that employer is actually recruiting, like Tony on Headlamp, they'll automatically be surfaced, and those evidence of proficiency will show up for those employers. So we can pop back to the slides now. So as you can see, Headlamp is a comprehensive platform.

It's big, but it has to be in order to achieve a holistic approach to truly bridging the gap between industry and education. By aligning educational content with real world demands, Headlamp ensures that educators and employers have a collaborative space to create a highly skilled workforce for the future, all while advancing the career goals of the new traditional learners across the globe. So where does that leave us? We've been working, like I said, for the last year, year and a half with a small group of early collaborators. We facilitated industry collaboration. We've launched educational programs.

Some of our early learners are graduating and completing those programs, and they're using their skill based portfolio in their job searches today. We're super excited about the progress that we've seen and the excitement that's growing. We climbed many mountains together. But as that proverb that I started with reminds us, beyond mountains, there are mountains. Our journey is far from over.

There are always going to be new challenges and peaks on the horizon. We're still working on designing that accretive system of skill development that Anne talked about. We're trying to figure out where does AI play in feedback. There are lots of peaks that we're looking at. But as we do, we're excited today to invite more institutions to join us as early adopters. So if you're like us and you're looking at this presentation and you believe that together, we truly can push the boundaries of what's possible So So click the click the click, join the join the URL, and let's get on a Zoom and talk about how we could collaborate to make more of this possible. So thank you.