Bonus Episode: How to reconnect learning to business outcomes with skills (with Vincent-Pierre Giroux)
How do you reconnect learning with business outcomes in a world where skills are evolving faster than ever?
That’s what Vincent-Pierre Giroux, Global Learning & Talent Development Director at Alstom, explores in this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast.
In this episode, host David Green speaks with Vincent-Pierre about the lessons he’s learned from leading resets across industries, his perspective on why skills volatility is reshaping mobility and retention, and the leadership qualities that matter most in today’s environment of constant change.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why reconnecting learning with business outcomes is key to driving real impact
How skills volatility is transforming mobility, engagement, and retention
What leadership qualities are most critical in a world shaped by disruption
How to think about ROI in learning and skills, and measure it meaningfully
Practical advice for HR and people analytics leaders to keep their organisation’s future-ready
This episode is sponsored by 365Talent.
365Talents takes a flexible, tailored approach to skills and talent management—because no two businesses are the same. Their adaptive talent intelligence solutions empower HR teams to move faster, build skills-based strategies, and deliver real impact at scale.
Want to learn more? Visit www.365talents.com
And don't forget to explore the latest thinking on skills and job architecture in this in-depth playbook: The Skills and Job Architecture Playbook
This episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast is brought to you by 365Talents.
[0:00:00] David Green: Right now, the workplace is shifting at a pace we've never seen before. Skills that once lasted a career are now becoming outdated in a matter of years, sometimes even months. As an example, in its recently published Future of Jobs report, the World Economic Forum found that 39% of workers' core skills will change by 2030. For HR leaders, that raises some tough but exciting questions, how do you stay ahead of this volatility; how do you make sure learning and development is tied back to the business; and how do you prepare your people for jobs that don't even exist yet?
My guest today, Vincent-Pierre Giroux, Global Learning and Talent Development Director at Alstom, has been helping to answer these questions throughout his career. Coming from an engineering background and working across different industries, Vincent-Pierre brings a fresh perspective on workforce transformation. He's led resets in struggling teams, reconnected learning with business impact, and seen how leadership itself needs to evolve when change is constant. So, in our conversation today, we talk about the realities of this skills revolution, what it means for mobility, employee engagement and retention, the leadership qualities that matter most right now, and how to measure ROI in ways that genuinely drive decisions. With that, let's get the conversation started.
Vincent, welcome to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Let's start with you. You've had a non-traditional journey into the world of HR. What was the journey that led you to where you are today, just as an introduction to our listeners?
[0:02:02] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: Well, first, before I start talking about myself, David, I want to say a big thank you to you and to your team for the podcast. I've been an avid listener since your early years, and it helped to shape my practice and to transform the way that I work. So, a big thank you.
[0:02:18] David Green: Well, that's very kind. Thank you. It's always good to have a listener as a guest.
[0:02:22] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: You at least had one, yeah. So, feeling privileged to be here. In terms of my journey, what I can say is that I'm a skill dude. I spend most of my career really focusing on skills development. And when you say non-traditional, I guess It's non-traditional because I'm an engineer by trade, but yet I've been in HR for most of my career. But let me explain that. My journey goes like this. So, my first serious job, I would say, after my graduation as an engineer, computer and industrial engineer, so that first serious job was to implement LMS, a learning management system, onto an aerospace manufacturing. But as I got into this, I realised that, wow, the technology is really just the tip of the iceberg. If we really want to make a change that the technology does promise around skills, we've got to make a bigger transformation with learning. So, I found myself from technology implementer to project managing the transformation of learning for this large aerospace manufacturing.
Then after that, I moved to project manage the start of the very first aerospace manufacturing school in Mexico to feed the very first aerospace manufacturing site in Mexico. It was super-fun. And then, I found myself moving from aerospace to rail. At one point, I was in charge of 15,000 employees' skills development across US, Canada, and Mexico. Then I moved to white collars in charge again of skills development for procurement and engineering. And this is where I found that skills development was a very interesting anchor point for transformation in general, and namely for cultural transformation. So, it's not the only thing to consider, but as an anchor point, it was super-powerful to play with. And then, over the last years, I incorporated in my portfolio talent management, leadership development and executive development.
Now, I found myself to be very privileged to be at Alstom, I lead a wonderful team in charge of learning and talent development, so that covers talent management, the corporate university, and all that we do for a skill-based organisation. The magnitude of the challenge, we are the biggest rail mobility solution manufacturer outside of China. So, we are more than 85,000 employees over 60 countries, which includes 20,000 engineers. And on top of that, it's fun because we have a super-cool purpose. Each time we deliver a train, we actually contribute to decarbonising, because each train is electrical, and we also contribute to people mobility. We have this mix of super-high challenge with a strong purpose.
[0:05:26] David Green: It's interesting actually, I speak to quite a lot of qualified engineers who are now working in HR, right up to and including the CHRO level. There's an argument we need more engineers in HR, the way things are going.
[0:05:38] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: I would argue for that.
[0:05:40] David Green: So, coming from an engineering background, Vincent, how has that engineering mindset shaped the way you approach skills, learning, and workforce transformation?
[0:05:50] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: It took me a long time to figure out what was the difference between more of an engineering approach versus more of an HR approach, a pure HR approach, on to learning and skills development. And to answer that question, I will do a generalisation, which I don't like to do, but I think it's going to help. So, at one point, I understood that when you have a pure HR approach to skills development and to learning, you really consider you have this individual-centric approach. You look at what are the aspirations, the ambitions, the traits, psychometric testing around the person. So, it's really about what the individual wants and needs. When you have this engineering look at learning, there are very different triggers. You look at teams' or organisation performance, you look at vulnerabilities of expertise, you look at where you want to bring the organisation in the future, maybe about technology or behaviours or money, so you look more at the at the system. And I would say after 20 years, I find that both are true. And it's when you mix both that you really get super-strong value out of learning and skills development.
I would also add that, interestingly enough, for what you said about we need more engineers in HR, most of my jobs were for transforming learning teams. And each time I had that mandate for transforming a learning team, it started with a need, a profound need to, "Can we move the focus of the learning process tools and mindset from that very individual approach to our aspiration to more a business need approach?" So, this has been kind of a theme of my career.
[0:07:38] David Green: So, as a leader, when you enter a new business, you're almost always there to solve a problem, as you explain. What are the kinds of questions or challenges that you typically face when you first step in?
[0:07:52] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: Yeah, well, I like this question, of course. As an engineer, we always try to fix a problem, and I always like a good question. This is why I like to say that most of my career has been about transforming learning teams or corporate universities or talent management teams, and the question is often the same. It's about value for money. The question that I had, it sounds like, "Well, you know, Vincent-Pierre, I've got this learning team. I really trust their expertise. At the same time, I see my employees going in for hours in training, and I'm not so sure what's the outcome I get of that. How is it helping me? How is it contributing to the business? Can you fix that?" So, that was the kind of questions or challenge that I always got.
In parallel, when I meet with the learning teams, I often find them feeling isolated. They are experts, they are really good experts, and at the same time, they get kind of blindsided by their own expertise because they know what to do, they are good at it and they are just going to do it. So, it's cool. But at the same time, they self-unplug from the organisation. They miss asking what the priorities are, they miss having this transparent business conversation to understand the needs and making the leaders understand how skill and business success are linked together.
[0:09:18] David Green: Yeah, that's really good. And again, Vincent-Pierre, if you look back on all the transformations and resets that you've successfully achieved over the years, what did you notice about why those teams were struggling?
[0:09:36] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: So, these teams were struggling because on the one hand, they were experts, they were super-good. And when you're an expert, what you think, you often think that, "If everybody knew what I know, the organisation would be going so much better". So, they have their expertise and they want to tell their expertise to a maximum of people. And so, the struggle is to bring in another perspective and say, "Well, your expertise is one of the solutions, right? It's one of the perspectives. Let's make sure we look at the bigger picture before we jump in with this expertise". Like, if you are a hammer, all of the problems that you find are nails, right? So, we want to expand that a bit more.
[0:10:26] David Green: Yeah, I think, as you said, it's taking that time to reflect a little bit, get back, look at the bigger picture, and then agree, I guess, as a leader coming in, but obviously agree with the parts of the business that you're supporting, the outcomes, and then kind of working your way back from there, from what you're saying?
[0:10:44] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: Absolutely. And this is where I found that the most effective way to reconnect learning with the business was to create a new role actually that did not exist. We created, I think it was 19 years ago, we created for the first time in the organisation that I was in, the role of learning business partner. It was really to mix these two ideas within the same role. And this is a super fun role to deal with. The job is typically about connecting with a business when there's either a current issue or a forthcoming challenge, connecting with the business as part of the conversation, and then systematically address the portion of the problem that has to do with people skills. And what is different there is that typically people will jump onto a problem, they will find a solution, and there will often be a line, "And we need to do some training". And then, the training team gets that line. So, now we want the learning business partner to not get that line, but to be part of the conversation from the early beginning, and then with the people around the table that do the problem-solving, to find the right skills development solution that will contribute to fixing the problem. So, at the end, we don't have that that training line, but we are really from the early beginning, and we really contribute or the learning business partner really contributes to raise the maturity of the entire team about what learning is and how we can address people's challenges in general.
The job profile is kind of unique though. It's not that common to find. We need somebody who knows how to talk the business language; we need somebody who's good in change management or in organisational development; somebody who's got this also sequential mind of a project manager; and the most important is, we need somebody with a strong appetite for learning and for advocating learning. I love the expression, "Credible activist", because typically, learning is not well-positioned in organisations. So, we cannot have people who say, "Well, this is my job, and I'm just going to fit this in the system". We need somebody who's going to constantly be there to position what learning can do and to remind people how to deal with learning and how to actually bring up the maturity of everyone. So, it's a unique skillset between having this holistic or systemic approach with a sequential mind, and somebody who can advocate for learning. But when we've got this person, we get a much better understanding of how learning can impact the business.
When I put this kind of profile, when I pair this kind of profile with a subject matter expert, with an instructional designer, this is where the magic does happen. This is where we find solutions that really impact the business. At first, we were thinking, "Well, are we going to have conflict, because these are very different types of personalities? Is this thing going to work?" But in every case that I've seen, it works, because people are so complementary with one another, and they super-quickly understand that they need one another to finally have the impact that they wanted to have on the business.
[0:14:23] David Green: This episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast is proudly sponsored by 365Talents. Your business is unique, so why settle for a one-size-fits-all skills and talent solution? That's why 365Talents creates a smarter way to manage skills, flexible, tailored, and built for your needs. 365Talents help large global companies to unlock the full potential of their teams. Want to transform your workforce and drive better results? Visit us at 365talents.com to learn more.
When I go to an HR technology conference, or any HR conference, skills and AI are the two topics that I hear about the most. Skills used to be a little bit more stable across industries. We look at data from the Lights for the World Economic Forum, we see how they're changing so rapidly now. How are you navigating this volatility in Alstom? You talked about the fact that all the trains that you're putting out are electric, and technology is changing very fast, I'm guessing, in how you manufacture and produce trains. How are you managing this kind of speed of skills' transformation and everything?
[0:15:54] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: Yeah, it's true. I remember when I started my career, so I'm going back again to aerospace, when we design an aircraft, we know, we hope, that we're going to build it for the next 20 to 25 years. So, we have this shop floor, and it's almost the same with the trains. So, we have this shop floor, the layout can change, but the key tasks with the core skills to support them won't change that much or used to not change that much. So, it was pretty stable, we had a scale framework, and it was fixed. So, we could build all these solutions to fit with that framework.
Now, I see it in Alstom, say with, again, going back to engineering skills, we used to have a skill framework where we have the knowledge domain owners meeting once a year to review the skill framework, and then we were able to do this manually, it was okay. But now, as you said, skills are changing faster and faster. And many knowledge domains have a harder and harder time to cope with that change. And meeting once a year manually doesn't fit with that speed of change. And this is where a tool like 365Talents comes in handy. We started with 365talents to implement it as an internal talent marketplace. And as we are doing so, it's starting to feed us with the flow of new skills that are in the organisation. As we see how people position themselves, promote themselves with their profile with skills, we also see the different job description that we that we post out there, we see the different skills that managers are starting to put on this job description. So, we see the skills that are on the rise or the skills that are declining. So, it's kind of a first step in that artificial intelligence journey with skills to understand what are the changes; what's going on actually?
Then, to me, the next frontier is when we're going to move all our skills assessment into the tool of 365Talents. Right now, we have this fixed skill framework that are defined by our knowledge domain owners and they are defined with skills that are pretty high level. Most people will assess their skills something like once a year on these very high-level skills. Now, the next frontier is we want to have middle managers with their view of the business, adding extra skills that are really specific to their environment. You know, we always have a manager who says, "Well, I just hired this guy, he's got this skillset that I didn't know existed. And this is making my team twice more performant than it used to be. So, now I really want this new skill to be inside the job profile when I will recruit again". So, if we allow middle managers to add these extra skills, to assess their employees, and to have their employees self-assess, now we're going to start really using the collective intelligence of the entire organisation to feed us about what is the skills transformation that is happening within the organisation. And then, we're going to be able to adapt our skills framework faster and faster with that. Well, this is 365Talents, this is the journey that we are in with 365Talents right now.
[0:19:31] David Green: And that's so important, isn't it? Because previously, before platforms like 365Talents were around, and obviously as they continually embed better and better technology into those platforms, skills were a bit rigid. You asked people to tell you what skills they've got, managers would validate it, and then the information's out of date. But what you've explained there is a very dynamic process that, as in the flow of work, managers and employees are working, you're identifying new skills that employees have got or managers need, and you're continually adding and updating the skills that you require for different roles or the skills that employees have got, which I guess really helps you with things like internal mobility, with recruitment, with other areas of people management as well?
[0:20:22] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: Well, actually, the key trigger to implement a tool such as 365Talents was really originally about internal mobility, engagement, and retention. As we were doing engagement surveys or exit interviews, we found that one of the key aspects that as HR we could improve was to increase the view that people had about opportunities within the organisation, and make it way more easy to find these opportunities and to apply these opportunities. It was easier for people to go on LinkedIn and to self-promote, to promote their skills on LinkedIn and to find jobs that fit with their skills, again on LinkedIn, than to do that internally. So, the idea here is to create this internal talent marketplace where first people can put their profile, show to everybody internally what skills they have. And then, as we are starting to build that, we are seeing that our job descriptions will are moving more and more and more towards skills.
So, we start to see this capacity that 365Talents has to suggest a match between people's skills and jobs that are created, and we start to see managers exploring, what is the internal talent market; how does it fit with what I have? So, we are starting to see this happening. Actually, the implementation of 365Talents started a little more than a year ago. Now, we are at 50% of all our white collars that have created their profile. Over the last couple of months, we have 5,000 people that looked at the perspective page, and to understand what would fit for them, so they are curious about their mobility. And again, over the last month, we had, what, 2,000 people that identified jobs of their interests and that led them to our career page. So, that internal mobility and movement that we want to see is starting to take place with that marketplace.
[0:22:41] David Green: And as you said, Vincent, you're a year into this journey. So, obviously, it's early. Implementing a talent marketplace and the associated benefits of a platform like 365Talents takes time to embed clearly within the organisation. You talked about some of the impact there. What other impacts are you seeing on things like mobility, engagement, or even retention? I'm guessing a lot of the people that you've previously lost have got really important skills that the business needs. So, I guess you're trying to help them grow their careers within Alstom?
[0:23:18] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: The idea here, David, is that we want people to really see that it is as easy, or if not easier to promote their own skills internally as it would be externally through LinkedIn. So, now people are used to using LinkedIn and to see what's going on, we want a piece of their attention to migrate to our internal talent marketplace, so they really use this to promote their skills and see what skills are required by managers. And what we are foreseeing, but we're not seeing it in action right now, is managers to think more and more in terms of gigs as opposed to jobs. So that, to us, is a very big change, because all the organisation is really structured around jobs. And so now, what we are thinking may happen is because skills and specific skills are becoming more rare, but we are going to be able to find them internally, or by allowing managers and employees to get connected onto that specific skills, we're going to create much more of that internal type of collaboration that we want to see. It may complexify a bit the organisation or some of the behaviours, but I think it's going to simplify the delivery of the solutions that we need to deliver.
[0:24:38] David Green: I want to take a short break from this episode to introduce the Insight222 People Analytics Programme, designed for senior leaders to connect, grow, and lead in the evolving world of people analytics. The programme brings together top HR professionals with extensive experience from global companies, offering a unique platform to expand your influence, gain invaluable industry insight and tackle real-world business challenges. As a member, you'll gain access to over 40 in-person and virtual events a year, advisory sessions with seasoned practitioners, as well as insights, ideas and learning to stay up-to-date with best practices and new thinking. Every connection made brings new possibilities to elevate your impact and drive meaningful change. To learn more, head over to insight222.com/program and join our group of global leaders.
What qualities do you believe leaders need now that may have not been as critical in the past, particularly working with a talent marketplace, but maybe generally as well as we enter, well, we're in the age of AI, I guess, in the early stages?
[0:26:02] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: Yeah, well, I've spent my career in manufacturing and it's a bit more of a conservative world. And it's also a world where it's all about execution and delivering results. That is an important fundamental that needs to stay. It's execution and delivering results. But what I've seen is all the jazz that we hear in literature is actually starting to sink in and make its way through the leadership mindset in manufacturing, so that whole notion of curiosity, having leaders really involved in developing their teams, having leaders starting to speak the language of skills, and of course, pushing for diverse perspectives around the table. So, this is really starting to be the, let's say, not the new language, but the addition to the language of leadership in manufacturing. It's like, we used to be super-happy to find leaders that were heads down and getting things done. Now we are telling them, "Look, the world around you is changing super-fast. So, you need to bring your eye, your sight a little further away on the horizon, and bring that view that you have into your team and create that space within your team, so your team feels that they can be curious as well, they can bring new ideas as well, and we can all contribute to bringing more leeway to people for innovation and for, yeah, for the change that they see that is needed".
So, we are asking our leaders to bring in just a little bit of tension into that very execution world to generate that new space. To me, it's fascinating to see that this whole literature language that we've been hearing for the past decade is sinking in, and we really see that very concretely. Expectations about leaders are changing within our manufacturing organisations.
[0:28:08] David Green: A couple of things around the kind of leadership topic, maybe. Firstly, one of the challenges I hear from organisations when it comes to implementing talent marketplaces and trying to drive more internal mobility and more flexibility around gigs, and stuff like that, is talent-hoarding. It would be interesting how you've approached that. And maybe the second part of that question is probably more widely how you communicate the benefits of implementing a system like 365Talents to employees and leaders, and connecting that to the outcomes that you're trying to get as well.
[0:28:42] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: Best question here. In terms of talent-hoarding, so there's of course everything about talent acquisition that has changed significantly, and that is still changing. I see my colleagues in talent acquisition totally reviewing how they look at their practice, and being lots of innovation about how to attract talent internally, and how we are much more transparent about how who our organisation is, to really bring in the people that will fit with our culture. So, it's not about being this perfect organisation, super-slick, it's really showing who we really are with our challenges and differences to really bring the talent that has the mindset that we are looking for.
In terms of talent-hoarding internally, this is an ongoing challenge that we have. Being a project business where we have ups and downs in projects around the world, we are having meeting sessions amongst HR every second week or every week to really see how to position talents at the right place for the right type of projects that we have. This conversation is really, I would call it manual or people-to-people. For top talents, we haven't found the technology yet to make this happen. It's really, we talk about people and we see where it fits the best. Now, in terms of talents in general, this is where with 365Talents that we have, we are starting to have this massive load of information about the skills of the different folks inside the organisation. And one of the key questions that we have is, how will we be able to use all that data set about skills with workforce planning? And workforce planning in a project organisation like ours, where our contracts are often politically driven because it's communities buying trains, so it's not super-foreseeable, we have that challenge to figure out, okay, we just had a big contract that we thought that we wouldn't get, so now we are getting it. And now, how are we going to match this with the skillset that we have? This is a next frontier of challenges for us.
[0:31:21] David Green: That's really interesting, actually, because again, talking to your peers in other organisations, a lot of companies start with skills to kind of drive internal mobility, to try and prevent attrition of key personnel. And then they find, just how it sounds like you're explaining it here, it supports workforce planning. It helps you understand, as you said earlier, the skills that are going up and the skills that are declining within the organisation. And that helps understand workforce planning, it helps understand learning, for example, as well, back to our earlier conversation. And then, ultimately, it's all connected to what you're trying to achieve as a business. So, as you said, contracts coming in, in an organisation like yours, these contracts, I presume, take quite a long time to deliver because you've got to build and deliver those trains. So, it's so important that you've got the right people in place to actually fulfil those contracts. And it sounds like that skills bit is giving you more visibility and the ability to fulfil those customer requirements?
[0:32:30] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: Yes, actually, the kind of contracts and the kind of projects that we have are multi-billion contracts, and they are over five to seven years. And when we are looking at, okay, we need to mobilise a team to address this contract, the conversation goes down to skills, always. And we have different kinds of contracts, like it could be a joint venture type of contract, it could be more of a rolling stock type of contract, or more of a technology, digital solution type of contract. So, it's all about what skills will we need to make this happen. So, actually, that conversation about matching the right skillset with the right contract has been part of the DNA of the organisation for a long, long time, because this is the kind of workforce planning that we do.
Now, what we are super-eager is that we are starting to have data sets about this. And Alstom grew significantly over the last years, because we absorbed Bombardier Transportation, so we double-sized, so moving from 35,000 employees to now 85,000 employees. So, what used to be really relationship-based positioning of talents around the organisation, now we need to become much more data-driven as we are doing that. And it's not an easy shift. And we are really hoping that we're gonna get that intelligence and that data set with tools like 365Talents.
[0:34:11] David Green: Really good. A couple more questions, Vincent. Firstly, how do you measure tangible business outcomes with this, maybe now, maybe how are you thinking about how that might evolve in the future? ROI, those three letters that we all hear about.
[0:34:25] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: Well, I love this question, David. And this is one of my pet peeves, I would say, the whole question of ROI. And so, I'm going to be on purpose a bit provocative.
[0:34:39] David Green: Good, we like a bit of provocation!
[0:34:42] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: So, as I hope I shared throughout this interview, that I'm really all about creating business value through learning and skills. But at the same time, each time I go to a conference on these matters, to a seminar on this matter, there's always a conference about the return on investment of learning, how to calculate the return on investment on learning. And I disagree with that. I think we need to flip the question totally upside down. I really think that if, from the early beginning, you have a strong learning business partner that connects with the business and with the business owners, that speaks the language of the business with a simple language of skill, and that can explain that these are the skills, and if you miss the skill, actually it's with these skills that you're going to achieve the business success that you want to achieve, then naturally the return on investment will be there.
I have to say, I've been in that business for more than 20 years. It never happened to me that I lack money for learning, never happened, because I always got connected with the business need at first and finding a solution to that business. The famous sentence is, "If training is a solution, what was the problem?" Or I could quote David Ulrich here with the with his outside-in approach, like we are doing that 'so that'. But in order to do a good 'so that', you need to be there from the early beginning. But it won't happen to you to be there from the early beginning just by sitting at your desk. You need to go out there and to be that credible activist of learning and to position learning as part of the team that will problem-solve from the beginning.
[0:36:34] David Green: Really good, I love that. A bit of provocation, actually. Interesting what listeners feel about that. I suspect many will agree. And maybe one connected a little bit to that. A lot of your peers I speak to in other organisations, one of the challenges for getting investment in platforms like 365Talents is they need to put a business case together and get sign-off from whether it's a CEO, a CFO or another senior executive. What advice would you give to your peers that are maybe looking at that at the moment, maybe two or three things that they could do to try and be successful in that objective?
[0:37:17] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: I would say, find a problem that you want to solve with this and be very clear and crisp about the problem that you want to solve with it. If you try to push it just because it makes HR sense, it won't happen. But if you really speak the business language, you understand what KPIs they are tracking -- or you need to invent a KPI, well, you go ahead, you invent this KPI, and you show what's the value of this KPI. But if there's no problem, don't try to bring a solution. There's nothing worse than a solution without a problem.
[0:37:50] David Green: And last question, again for our listeners, for the HR and people analytics, and maybe heads of workforce planning or heads of learning that are listening, what advice would you give to them about keeping their organisations ready or helping their organisations get ready for the future of skills?
[0:38:08] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: That's a tough one, David. I'm not strong on advice, but I could tell you what worked for me. And what worked for me is we need to talk skills. I think it is really a good language to use to bring people, people development and business needs. It is a good language to really make business sense out of the people matter, but the skill conversation needs to be simple. I know that in literature, "We say competency is key, as like knowledge, skills, and attributes", and I understand that. I know it's scientifically proven, and I really see how important it is. But as soon as I bring this to an organisation, they don't follow me. It's too complex. So, maybe I'm not good at explaining it, but it takes more than 30 seconds to explain. And after that, people start to think, "Well, is this skills, is it knowledge, is it attributes?" So, I kept it to skills, and I make sure that we really bring it down a notch to keep it super-simple so that everybody can understand it.
[0:39:27] David Green: I think great advice. I mean, keep it simple, connect it to the business. It sounds like it's two of the things that has helped you be successful. And last question, I'm just intrigued, really, Vincent. What next with the talent marketplace? How do you see the partnership with 365Talents growing in a year, two years?
[0:39:49] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: It's in a couple of folds. The first one is we want to increase our data set about skills and increase the quality of that data set. And that goes with, of course, advice from 365Talents, and it also goes with talking to our knowledge domain owner to make sure that we don't try to put every single skill in that. We want to summarise it like 12 skills. And if we cover 80% of the variance of the jobs with a bundle of 12 skills, that's super. And then, we may put in a couple of transfer skills, like leadership skills, but we keep it simple. But we make sure that the data we have about this is crisp and that we can trust that data. So, getting more data, ensuring that the data quality is good, and putting the business process in place to collect that more data. So, to me, one of the big challenges here is going to be, how do we bring our middle managers to input data into the skills framework? So, we're going to need to bring, to make our people managers involved into skills, into skills management, having them use the platform to say, "Hey, I have this extra few skills that I want to add to this assessment". But this is a big change that we're going to need to do. And after that is, how do we use all that new data we're going to have?
[0:41:19] David Green: Yeah, if you're going to collect it, you need to use it. You need to explain to people why should they bother putting that information in; how's it going to help them; how's it going to help the organisation? And it's back to what you said, connecting it to the business.
[0:41:32] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: I think once we have the data that we can trust to use it is the very fun part. The tough part is to change our leaders' behaviours about using these kind of tools, but having the mindset to say, okay, actually our best people manager right now, when it comes to managing their people skills, they have an Excel file hidden on their computer with the name of their employees and the list of their skills, and they do X's and bars into that matrix. We want them to move from their Excel file that they love to move into our platform, and we want the others to do the same. It is a huge change, and it's going to take us a couple of years to get there.
[0:42:11] David Green: Vincent-Pierre, thank you so much for sharing the Alstom story with us, and your background as well, and your provocation around ROI as well, which was excellent. Can you share with listeners how they can follow you and all the great work that you're doing at Alstom?
[0:42:27] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: I guess that the usual way to answer is they can find me on LinkedIn. There's only one Vincent-Pierre Giroux. My parents were original enough. And I could say if some of your listeners ever come to Montreal, Canada, where I'm based, they will find that right in the middle of downtown, there's this superb mountain park where I love to go with my amazing wife on the weekends. We go for a long jog, both Saturday and Sunday morning. So, that's the place to find me. If ever you want to continue that conversation as we are jogging, I'd be thrilled. And I have to, and I'm sending a challenge, I can do it at plus-30 or at minus-20 in the Canadian winter, I'll be there.
[0:43:12] David Green: Wow! Well, next time I'm in Montreal, Vincent, I'll look you up and I'll try and keep up with you. But I suspect I won't be able to keep up with you and your wife, so I might need a bike. But thanks very much for being on the show.
[0:43:26] Vincent-Pierre Giroux: Thank you very much, David.
[0:43:29] David Green: That brings us to the end of this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. A huge thank you to Vincent-Pierre for joining me today. And thank you to all our listeners who tuned in today and each week. If you found this conversation valuable, please do subscribe to the podcast, share it with your network, and leave us a rating or review. And don't forget to head over to insight222.com, follow us on LinkedIn, and sign up for our weekly newsletter at myHRfuture.com. That's all for now. Thank you for tuning in, and we'll be back next week with another episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Until then, take care and stay well.