Meet Michael Howells: A Visionary In A Place To Make A Difference

Michael Howells set out twenty years ago with anthropology and law degrees in hand to make his mark on the world. He soon landed a job as a policy analyst at UK Aid, a counterpart to US Aid, sponsored by the UK Government to address global starvation and other humanitarian needs. He went on to spend most of the next fifteen years in what is now the UK’s “Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office” specializing in policy analysis and the Middle East. His final government assignment was as a British Consul-General based in Los Angeles, ending in December 2020.

Howells’s next move was into education, specifically into Pearson Education, where he holds the title of President of Workforce Skills. Pearson’s vision for skill development is that "With the consumer at the heart of all we do, we’re helping more people than ever before realize the life they imagine." It appears that Pearson, traditionally a juggernaut in the field of formal education, is claiming an intriguing shift in focus.

Michael B Arthur: I keep coming up against people promoting talent management systems and asking, “What's in it for the career owner?” However, you seem to be wanting to start with the career owner. Is that right?

Michael Howells: That’s right, because the success of employers depends on the success of their employees. However, there’s a persistent skills gap, and most employers recognize that. So, the way to help organizations is to help their people grow, and to build more dynamic talent markets to sustain that growth. Those markets aren’t working effectively for any of their participants, whether they be employers, employees, consumers, or ultimately, government policymakers.

Arthur: Can you say more about the persistent skills gaps, and what can be done about them?

Howells: Two factors underlie the skills gaps and the persistent challenge to date in solving them. We can all see very clearly—through productivity challenges, motivation challenges and engagement challenges—that there’s an ongoing and widespread skills gap within the world of work. In spite of huge investments made, that problem has not been solved at the individual level. And, as a result, it has not been solved at the organizational level. So, our focus is very much on helping organizations to grow as their people grow. The second factor that's driving this situation involves overall technology and consumer trends. People are very familiar with having extremely powerful data, and complementary AI and machine-learning tools, to help them in their lives as consumers. They expect the same kind of tools in their work, so their experience as consumers adds to their potential as employees, if we give them the tools to harness it.

Arthur: Pearson has published a series of reports highlighting where there’s a shortage of individual skills. Would you like to say more about those?

Howells: The data is both rich and powerful. It tells us that skills in using technology are essentially table stakes. They're vital to everybody's work because everything we do involves using technology in some way. But the really powerful story is about the value of people, for two reasons. First, there's a realization that as people are utilizing technology more in their work, and in particular as we're moving into hybrid ways of working, we need the human skills to make our work more effective. Almost everything we do is through a technological medium of some form, like having a conversation over Zoom, for example. The human skills to make that kind of working effective in a digital environment are even more important than communication skills in a physical environment. Collaboration skills for a team that's geographically diverse are even more important than collaboration skills for a team that's in the same office building.

However, even though human skills are more important in technology-enabled work, there’s an absence of proper investment in those skills. Many company leaders are saying, “I've got to get my people back into the office because I can see the downsides of people working in a hybrid way. Crucially, my people aren't collaborating as effectively as I want them to. They may feel personally productive, but there’s a problem with the sum of the parts.” Those leaders are defaulting to bringing people back into work, because they have seen how that worked in the past. However, many leaders also recognize that they’re sailing against the winds of change, and they really need a set of solutions to help invest in people's “personal power skills” as we would call them.

Arthur: Are you saying that the present push to get more people back in the office is old school thinking? Is it really OK for a CEO to walk out of their office and not see someone they want to talk to?

Howells: CEOs want their staff to be productive, and the staff want an employee experience that is more flexible, more tailored to their personal needs, more nuanced. These are tensions that every company in the world is trying to work through. But the underlying issue concerns the very powerful human skills—particularly around communication, collaboration, and problem solving—that we’ve been neglecting. In turn, that neglect makes applying the hybrid working model more challenging. I can't predict the future, but we have to assume there's going to be a lot of technology and hybrid working in our lives over the long term. What our data shows is that we can help people attain those personal power skills in order for them to be successful in the future. Companies will also need their employees to have those personal power skills, in order to maintain a highly productive workforce.

But there's a second trend, which is also important. A few years ago, most of the commentary in the media was about the looming challenge to employment from automation. There was going to be an employment crisis and, as members of the public or as policymakers, we needed to think about how to manage that. Our data shows a more optimistic trend in automation. It shows that the more that you automate more repetitive, more mundane tasks—the tasks which obviously machines are more easily able to take on—the clearer it becomes which tasks only people can do, and therefore are increasingly valuable. Skills to directly interface with technology are critical as a baseline everywhere. But in order for technology to help in the areas of creativity, innovation, teamwork and collaboration, we need the personal power skills that only people can offer. The strength of our data is to help companies to understand where they need to make the necessary investments in training and learning, in order to prosper in a technology-enabled world.

Arthur: You are taking established ideas about making teamwork successful in physical space and turning to ask if and how they can work in virtual space - right?

Howells: Yes, and the question is one about human capital. How can you take the overall stock of knowledge a company holds and make it work effectively? That’s going to be harder when a team is not co-located in the same physical space. However, we see huge potential in taking some of these incredibly powerful tools that have allowed companies to become much more productive, because consumers have simultaneously become skillful in other areas of their lives—whether that be through commercial or social activities, social media or media consumption. Those people are largely ready to re-factor those skills and apply them in a meaningful way in the workplace for the first time.

Think about the power of big data and real analytics to help companies understand what skills they have in their organizations today, what skills they're going to need tomorrow in order to achieve their business objectives, and how to genuinely architect a path between those two points that is motivating for their individual employees. Imagine giving access to all of the data about future trends and the shifting demand for skills to employees, to help them make their own choices about what's the right next step in their lives. That's what we're here to do. And we think we're on the cusp of a huge revolution in the world of work driven by truly powerful, personalized data, with complementary sets of services for companies and leaders as well.

Arthur: Can you provide some examples of how skills might be recognized and applied in a different role?

Howells: One example is that we know your average accountant has 75% of a skills match to a data scientist. We also know that through automation there’s a great demand for data scientists to help companies better understand what their customer or financial or product data might be telling them. In contrast, a lot of companies are reducing their numbers of accountants because a lot of their work can be automated. That means companies don’t need to fire accountants and hire data scientists. The high skills match means it’s quicker and cheaper to help accountants to become data scientists. It's also great for maintaining culture, and employee motivation and loyalty. And, it helps re-balance the talent markets for both accountants and data scientists and reduces a previously identified skills gap.

By understanding what people can do at the skills level, you open up a huge opportunity for individuals to re-think their ideas about what they can do and for company leaders to support them. Our website tells a story of one of our own employees, Christian Zaremba who, as a college graduate, had dabbled in the martial arts and responded to a Metropolitan Opera House advert for “actors who could perform stage combat.” With the House’s support, he went on to direct that combat, get inspired to take singing lessons, and eventually land leading roles in the House’s productions. During COVID, he – like many employees – realized that he needed to respond to changes in his industry and decided to bring his skills into a business development role within Credly (now part of Pearson). The skills he honed early in his career made it possible for him and for us to envision a different career path.

Arthur: I guess another example is you bringing your ambassador skills to Pearson, and pitching new products there, right?

Howells: I saw a strong correlation between my skills and what Pearson was looking for. I’ve also been very lucky to have the opportunity to show the skills that I have in a new environment. What we are trying to do here is to make that opportunity available and accessible to everyone. We believe that there is an enormous amount of equity and benefit to be had from delivering our services in this way.