Episode 80: How Does ING Create a Culture of Learning Agility? (Interview with Maarten van Beek)

This week’s podcast guest is Maarten van Beek, HR Director for Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg at ING, who I spoke to about the shift from a learn, work, retire approach to careers, to a model of lifelong learning.

To encourage lifelong learning and talent fluidity across the organisation, taking an employee centric approach is vital. In Maarten’s opinion. HR should focus more on the employee journey, the employee experience and less on the responsibilities and confines of rigid traditional L&D roles.


Throughout the episode Maarten and I discuss:

• How organisations can promote a lifelong learning approach to work by encouraging and supporting employees to reinvent their skill sets every three to five years

• The power of using skills data to fuel talent fluidity

• The business value and societal value of measuring skills proficiency without depending on traditional qualifications and educational experience

Support for this podcast is brought to you by Techwolf. To learn more, visit techwolf.ai.

You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Maarten van Beek, HR Director for Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg at ING, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show Maarten, it is great to have you on.

Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and your role at ING? 


Maarten van Beek: Sure. Thanks, David, and great to be here. 


So, I joined ING, I think five and a half years ago, I am responsible for the three countries that you just mentioned Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Before that worked in FMCG and MedTech, but always have been an HR guy, changing industries throughout my career, but always have been in HR.

I am calling today from Hague in the Netherlands, where I still work from home, as are the majority of the people in Holland and where we hope to go in hybrid mode, in a couple of weeks. 


David Green: Yeah, it has been an interesting time, hasn't it? I am still predominantly working from home, been into the office in London a few times, and it has been an interesting time for HR, hasn't it? 


As a HR director for nearly half of ING's workforce, it must have been a pretty tumultuous 20 months?  


Maarten van Beek: It was, and it still is because I think now, the next move to hybrid is the new challenge. If I look back on the last 18 months and what we have achieved, and how quickly we digitalised and changed key things in all operating models, it is impressive. 


I think we now do things that we didn't think were possible, a couple of months, or a year or two years ago and it becomes normal. So, it has been hard work by all my colleagues, all the countries, but it also has been satisfying. And I hope that we keep a little bit of the good things from this more digital space, but also sometimes I just look forward again to be face-to-face with some people, but also see a lot of benefits. It is a mixed bag.  


David Green: We have had a few guests on the show, Heather McGowan, being one who have talked about how the pandemic has fast-forwarded the future of work by five years. I don't know if you're feeling that in your role in your company? 


Maarten van Beek: Yeah. I think we see the same. Especially in the beginning of the pandemic, everybody had to work from home, so our full HR portfolio had to be digitalised, all our training, on-boarding is digital. Getting people started, digital. 

We are a digital bank, so we had been a front runner, but we were not yet where we are today, and we accelerated. I think a lot of things we now do differently; on-boarding will continue to be digital; the majority of learning will continue to be digital, our agile ceremonies, half of them will be digital and we didn't even think about doing those things digital two or three years ago. 


David Green: No, it is interesting. It leads in quite nicely to what we are going to talk about now around learning, which I know is one of your passions.

In your view, how is the relationship between work and learning evolving? I know from our previous conversation, you are not a big believer in the learn, work, retire, model. What is the alternative, in your view?  


Maarten van Beek: In the past, words like graduation or do your finals, the old words, which would suggest you stop learning at a certain point and then you are ready for the working life. 


And what I see, even in the pandemic, that become much more fluid is I believe more in long life learning as a given, combined with long life working, family life, private life, interests, which should be more fluid. And what do I mean with that is that, of course, at some point you take your education, you do your masters, or your bachelors and you start to work. But I think we have to probably re-skill and up-skill ourselves in our lives, five to six times. Because working life is 40 years or something and, in those periods, the economy continues to change, the world changes, so we have to up-skill and re-skill ourselves. Of course, you can do that during your work but you can also take a sabbatical.

My grandparents worked in the Dutch coal mines. They stopped working and took their pension when they were early 50s, I think now in the Netherlands and in most European countries, it is mid-sixties. That goes up a little bit every year. So how do you show you are still vital around that age. I think combining sabbaticals, up-skilling, re-skilling, education, working, family life, has to become more fluid. Which also adds completely different of how you look at work, stepping up the career ladder, sometimes going maybe a little bit more flatter because you want to focus on your family or learn a new profession and then go back again.

So, I think we have to look completely different at careers and how that integrates with life and working. 


David Green: Yeah. Things are changing so fast, I mean there is an argument that they have always changed so fast, but they seem to be changing even faster now. Obviously, we talked about how the pandemic has really accelerated things, but even prior to the pandemic, if we think that at Davos, every year, they have been talking about the future of work. They have been talking about the impact of automation on society and on organisations, obviously we will talk a little bit about how that is impacting the banking industry in a minute.

Then we see some of the research that the likes of The World Economic Forum are publishing saying, and I can't remember the exact numbers, but by 2025 something like 80 million jobs will effectively be automated, but they will be replaced by 90 million new jobs.

So, a bit like every other industrial revolution, potentially we will have more workers than we had previously. However, it seems to be all about skills now and I know that you are seeing a shift from jobs to skills, which I think talks nicely to what you were saying around, lifelong learning being so important. 


 Maarten van Beek: What you described for me is learning agility, how do we have a mindset of learning agility? Where I fully agree, I think for me, skills are the basics.

We moved back to skills. What can someone actually do? And from those skills, what new skill sets can you develop? Our skills are measurable, they are learnable, like I just said, probably you will have to re-skill yourself five to six times during your whole career to get a new set of skills.

For tech professions, that can be a new coding language, but it can be all professions, let me give an example.

My sister, in this pandemic, she was a hairdresser, and a lot of people lost their jobs because we couldn't go to the hairdressers etc. So she unfortunately lost her job, but what I am very proud of, in two weeks she found another job. 
What happened was she said, what do I actually like about my job? What are the skills which I am good at? And that was, not doing the hair, it was more talking with the customers, making them feel comfortable, the social aspect of the job. So now she works in home care and those skills are exactly the same, taking care of people, making their life a little bit easier, to have that chat, helping them with a couple of things. 
For me that is a very simple example where someone has a skill set and how do you explore that skill set to do a different job.

In old fashioned HR systems, you go from one function to another, but the skill set is almost the same. And you can see that everywhere, we also see that in banking. To build a little bit on that, in the beginning of the crisis, a lot of our branches were closed so those people were sitting at home. And we were seeing another part of the business, which is called KYC, “Know Your Customer”, there was a lot of work. 
We had a lot of people say, well, I want to work, I want to develop myself further.

We looked at how we could up-skill and re-skill those people who worked in the branches, which were closed, to other jobs which they could, relatively quickly move into and where there was work, which has a future. Those jobs will be there for at least a couple of years. And then of course they have to re-skill again.

It happened voluntarily. It happened because people were eager to learn something new and help their colleagues.

That made us think, inside ING, how can we make this bigger? How can we automate that and almost, make this part of our DNA and how we look at talent, at skill basis, and at jobs?  


David Green: What does that new approach look like in the banking industry? What is that new approach to learning and work look like for the workforce of the future at ING or other banks?  


Maarten van Beek: We are still experimenting, so let's be honest, because these are big moves. What we actually look at is, what are the skills people currently have and what are easy ways, within their own career aspirations, to develop there too. And again, that can be up-skilling or that can be re-skilling.

And then prepare them for the future. Make sure that we have taught them skills, for jobs, which will be there in three to five years. And I said three to five years because 10 years, I cannot predict what we will need then. So, it is step by step and then do that. So, build learning journeys from the current skill sets to the other skill sets, those learning journeys can be content, which of course digital can be delivered to them. There is also getting experience, so I really believe, and I know scientifically the 70, 20 10 has never be proven but I am still a big believer of it, because I think at some point you have to start doing the new job and then you see what you master and then you see what you still have to develop and then you learn it. You learn it by feedback from your colleagues, and by mistakes, and by improving yourself. 


So, for me, it is that re-skilling and then in a couple of years, those people we can bring to the next platform. I think why it is important is exactly what you say, jobs disappear, and a lot of times we make a big deal out of it, and it is because if you lose your job, that is of course an awful experience, but we don't talk about all those jobs which are new.

Overall, if I look at the employment rates in the Netherlands but Western Europe in general, it is quite stable. So, if 10% of the jobs disappeared, 10% of the jobs will come from somewhere else and then the trick is to connect the two and optimise your workforce for that. 


David Green: And I suppose as HR professionals, we have a responsibility to help our workforces understand that we need to be looking to the future and understanding how our industry is going to change. Let’s take banking as an example, understand the jobs or tasks that might be replaced and then help people, as you said, re-skill and up-skill in those areas. 


How do you actually do that though? Let's make it practical. Let's say someone has got five skills, two of those are likely to be solely automated, over the next three to five years. They have got three more skills. How do you know, how do you work out that they can acquire two other skills?   

Maarten van Beek: It is two things. It is self-assessment of the individual, that is one part, and it is the feedback you get on someone.

For the big populations, we use quite a lot of analytics to match the skill-sets we see on one side to the skill-sets we believe that are still there in the future. And we have analytics driving that, really looking at the skills of job profiles. Job profiles are just too generic, so you have to really narrow it down to, what are the people doing?

And then the input to those analytics, you probably know 10 times better than I do, has to be real live data. 
So people have to say, what is it actually that I can do, and what do I like to do, and what I am good at, which skills are they?

Then the skills which were a mismatch, or they are not there yet, we have to say are they learnable? Personally, I believe the majority of skills are learnable, probably not everything, but quite a lot. 


I think we then put in time, that can be three months or six months, where you can go from A to B. Then you hope someone is at a normal performance level in that job within, less than a year’s time. But it also depends on how big the skill gap and the step up in that direction. 


But it is this personal input from the individual, the surroundings, and then I think on the future jobs, we have to be crystal clear what we expect. So the discussions with the business leaders on, if we say banking becomes more digital and part of the advice conversations you have are not face to face, but are via a screen, or chat, or in other ways, what does it mean exactly for the skills level of the individual?

That is when you have to also have really good conversations with the business leaders. What do you expect in the future? And I think HR can facilitate that journey, can ask the questions, but it is still the business leaders who have to put their vision there and then we can help them to make that general and drop to the skills level.  

David Green: It is interesting, you are talking really about very close partnership between HR and the business. HR, obviously, skills like being a bit more comfortable with data than perhaps we have traditionally been in HR.

What are some of the skills that you are building into your HR professionals, in order that they can have those complex conversations effectively, take the understanding that they need and then transfer that into some of the HR programs? 


Maarten van Beek: Yeah, we put a lot of effort in the HR business partners to make them comfortable with data.

First of all, start to understand the data and then after that, giving their own interpretation because I said, well, if you put a dashboard in front of a business leader, why? You should draw conclusions from that dashboard and then have the discussions with the business leader about what you see in that data. 


What I notice, in my whole career, that a lot of HR people are a bit scared about data and it always surprises me because I sometimes made a joke with our CFO, he puts in the finance data and there are a lot of assumptions behind that finance data, and every quarter they get adopted, there is a different forecast. 
And then you put the finance data in front of the business leaders and the business leaders say, well, I don't recognise this data.

So, there is a lot of discussion about the finance data, but still finance is very comfortable to put out data and have a discussion about a data. To my HR people I say, we can do the same and we should do the same. 
It won’t be perfect but having the discussion about the data is good. And if the business leaders don't recognise it, let's talk about why they don't recognise it. What did I miss? What do you see differently?

But what is not good is not doing it, not taking that first step. Let’s really put it on the agenda, have the discussion, get the feedback, and improve. 


David Green: Yeah, as you said, it is probably a little bit a mixture of confidence, I think a lot of it is confidence, and sometimes capability. But as you said, if you don't try and practice, then you are not going to get better.

We have been doing some research recently into data-driven organisations and one of the things that really came out, it was two things, yes you can help HR professionals improve their capability by giving them training, allowing them to practice, as you say, creating an environment where they can learn and fail sometimes and get better. And that is in combination with delivering value through people analytics as well. So, the business can see the value of the data. 

But as you said, business leaders are used to receiving data on operations, on customers, and financially run their businesses like that. So, for them, it is probably less of a jump to receive information about people that they can use to make decisions that drive the business forward as well.  


Maarten van Beek: I think it is really about all functions, it is about HR. I think we are too reluctant to put it on the table and if I see now what my team is doing step-by-step, I am quite proud of them. We put much more data, we have forecasts, we combine data, sometimes traditional data like turnover, sick leave, but then you look into motivation, clarity of jobs etc, and you put different pockets of data together. 


My HRBP’s get excellent support from our central People Analytics team and that helps because those are the analysts, but then they have to make it real for their business domains and put it on the management teams.


David Green: They find that really important link between the central people analytics team and the business because usually central people analytics teams, generally are quite a small number of people. It might be five, might be ten, could even be fifty, but it is still quite small relative to the size of the organisation. So, the HR business partners are so important in the ecosystem of People Analytics.

I digress, we could probably talk about People Analytics all day. So, we talked a little bit about the experience of the pandemic, how, obviously, you moved people out of branches as they were closed during the pandemic. 
You have helped to up-skill some of those people, know your customer I think it was, the KYC, and we talked about some of the examples of that.

What are some of the lessons that you have learnt, as an organisation, from the experience? And are you planning to sustain the fluid approach that you talked about, more to the workforce moving forward?  


Maarten van Beek: I think what we learned is there is much more possible than we thought. I think what we also learned is sometimes it's our HR policies that are the limiting factor and I think we stepped over that. We said, well, we see now that we can combine skills, what can people do to what needs to be done, much more easily. 
And how can we do that in a smart way?

We talked about, is there something around a talent fluidity platform where you could link the two, because at some point you have to automate it. ING is a big organisation so you cannot do that in Excel sheets, and you cannot do that based on good luck, where people meet each other. 


So, you have to automate it then logically, almost logically you come to a platform or something which is platform based. You say, okay, what are the skills that people have? Can you put your skills profile on there? Do you also know what skills you want to learn in the coming years? And then look at jobs to be done, so work that is there.  

And for me, that is agile in the next level, because that is really managing your workforce in a demand driven and a very flexible way and also steps away from the old functions and jobs. You could even say, well, if you could do that internationally, again, there will be limitations with tech social security etc. 
But if you will do that internationally, you even don't have to have people with the skill sets who do the jobs, in the same countries, we will be working much more digitally. So, I see really for the future of work, but also for how we look at work, that there can be big shifts there.  


David Green: Obviously asking people what their skills are is certainly one way of building that but are you looking at ways to automatically collect what people's skills are as well?

So, by looking at all the data we have got in HR and the business, for example project descriptions, job roles, performance system, all those sorts of things, are you looking at bringing that data in and understanding skills from that perspective as well? 


Maarten van Beek: Yes, we do. Of course, respecting all the data privacy, which is around that. Hey, LinkedIn has data, resumes have data, and performance reviews. And then you have to come up with a couple of algorithms, which predict then what jobs and skill sets will be very useful for these people in the future.

Analytics can help there of course, but in the end, it is a person, it is a real person with real skills, doing work that needs to be done.

But I think that at a macro level, you can much more influence that, but also help people because sometimes, the example I gave of my sister going from one profession to another, sometimes that is not for everybody logically, is that what I really can do and am I going to enjoy that?

So sometimes you also have to, and data can do that, show that based on the skills profile you have, these are five jobs, did you think about it? And with this job, you have an 80% skill match, this is a 60% and this is 30%, so it is not impossible, but you have to re-skill yourself a little bit more. 


I think that really gives people more guidance than we currently do because the old career ladders and career paths, they will be outdated the moment you go to the second step. So, for me, it is connecting that and then give them real tools. If you say, well, if you choose a job and there was a 60% skill overlap with your current one, 40% you have to learn. These are the two or three learning interventions and learning journeys you will have to take and ideally then the learning system comes in and says to you, okay, do you want to start now?

So, I think the action is important. And from employees, it will take mind shifts. Because I think in ING, we want to make it possible, but you are the owner of your own development, you are the owner of your own career, but we want to make it possible, so we provide the training, provide the learning journeys, etc. But the mindset of the people has to really be, look at your own skills, go to other ones and take that seriously. Don’t ensure that in five years’ time, you are looking at yourself saying, okay, I am losing my job because I didn't invest in myself. 
So, we really have to help them to invest in themselves.  


David Green: And it is great, I think you struck on a really important point that, as an employee, if I am going to provide data or the company is going to collect data on me, we have got ethics and privacy things that we need to adhere to, but actually if we could provide a fair exchange of value, i.e. you give us your data and we will provide you with information that helps you drive your career forward in ING. Maybe give you training that you might be able to take your career elsewhere as well.

So, we help you develop as a person by giving you personalised learning recommendations, based on the skills you have, based on where you tell us you may want to take your career within your organisation. 
As you said, great example, you are a data scientist working in HR, obviously you can be a data scientist working with customer data and with financial data as well. And that is what these technologies can do.

We have had a few guests on the show talking about this sort of stuff, and it really seems to be that traditionally HR has learning, it has career mobility, it has workforce planning, and all these things should be linked together, but they are not always linked together. It is almost like the skills data can help link that back together.

So, you can help the employee develop and acquire the skills that they need to develop their careers within the organisation. But you can also close some of those skills gaps, that you talked about earlier, as the organisation goes more digital in certain areas as well.

And that then helps you understand from an organisational perspective, what is our build versus our buy philosophy when it comes to talent as well. 
So as a HR leader, that must give you a lot of comfort that you are developing people, but also helping the organisation, from an organisational sense, get closer to where they need to be around skills.  


Maarten van Beek: Yeah, indeed. And so, at ING we defined six capabilities for the future, on tech, on risk, on customer experience, where we expect there will be jobs in those areas with skill-sets behind it. Then defining the learning journeys. 


And I really liked what you said, is that in HR and indeed even after the Ulrich Model, we still stuck to learning specialists and we need that expertise, so don't get me wrong, but employees don't care. They want to be developed. They want to make a career and whichever HR stamp we put on that is completely irrelevant, that's all internal organisation.

So, I think from HR, when we talk about talent and talent fluidity, we have to start thinking, okay, what are the journeys employees go through? And of course, all the experts can add value to those journeys. 
I think there is a challenge for HR to start organising themselves in a different way, in that direction as well.

Also at ING, I think we make steps, we work agile so we can put different disciplines, communications, workday expertise, but also the experts where it is end to end in how you make something happen. 


But it is the mindset, it's the mindset. But I think if you want to have a great employee experience, you have to talk the language the employee’s talk and not your HR vocabulary.  


David Green: As you said, it is an employee journey, isn't it? It is not a learning journey, it is not a mobility, it is an employee journey and different HR programs feed in at different points. 


But actually, most of the touch points that employee has, the moments that matter are actually touch points outside the organisation and that is where your HR business partners come in, to work so closely with managers in the business to provide data around those moments that matter, but also to help guide managers around that. 


There is enough data out there that suggests that if you provide a great employee experience, it doesn't just benefit the employee it benefits the organisation and the customer, of course.  


Maarten van Beek: I think we will have benefits for the organisation. Research suggests there will be a shortage in the labour markets, might be, might not be because we are saying that already for long-term.

But I think continuous re-skilling and up-skilling, especially in the European context where if you let people go, that's expensive and then you'll hire new people. That is not a business model that is at all sustainable from a financial point of view, but also from a human point of view, it doesn't make sense.

So, continue to look at what are the skill-sets we need for the next five years and start building people to that, that means that when people join the organisation, you already have to shift the mindset. Which means the youngsters joining the organisation, you say, well, you start here and then you end in a board of directors or executive team.

I think now you have to say, every five years you will reinvent yourself with your skill-set and if you do that in the right way, you will flow through the organisation. And that can be horizontal and vertical because I also believe that what I see with the whole thing changing with work, managerial careers still will be there, but I think the expert careers become much, much more important.

That also means that the experts have to re-skill themselves even faster because the world around them is changing as well. 
  


David Green: I love what you were saying earlier actually, around measuring skill proficiency on the jobs. Yes, you can go and do a course and everything else, but you don't really become proficient until you do it. I completely agree with that. How do you go about measuring skill proficiency on the job? I would be interested to hear about that.  


Maarten van Beek: I think the best example we have is in our tech domains, where we use the Dreyfus model, which is an old model by two brothers which actually looks at proficiency. There are five levels from a Novice to a Master. And at the master level, it is actually your peers at an international level, recognise your skill set and invite you to speak about work you are doing. And of course, a Novice, then you start learning etc.

Sometimes I look at that model and I think, well, that is not that different from what Rembrandt did in the middle ages, it still stands.

And I think that is true with a lot of things in HR, the basic work didn't change at all. We can automate it. We can put data there, we have to make it measurable, but a lot of the old stuff is still good, but we have to use it in a different way.

So really getting the peer review on the quality of the work and the skills I think is important. 
I think you can extrapolate that to quite a lot of functions. In tech because the majority is about the quality of coding, it seems to be easier, I say it seems, but I think a lot of professions including HR, if you cannot make that as tangible as our tech friends can do, you also sometimes have to doubt what is the added value of that job. Because if you cannot make it measurable, it becomes quite interesting.

So, I think in tech, we do a really good job there. I think all the disciplines we experiment with, it goes well, but I think we have to learn something as well at ING, in this perspective.  


David Green: That is quite interesting. 
We had Professor Rob Cross, on the show a couple of episodes ago, I don't know how much you know about his work, but it is all about organisational network analysis. So, you can do that on a passive basis by looking at communication, things like email, you see who connects with who most often. But he was talking about understanding who are the key people within an organisation, influencers perhaps, they may not always be senior leaders, when you come to a transformation or to understand who people go to. Which I guess talks nicely to your proficiency thing where you can actually ask people, well, if you have got a problem to solve with this, who do you go to? And then you can find out who those people are. And sometimes they are not always the people that the organisation necessarily expects, particularly in a big organisation like ING. So, it is interesting how things are progressing around that as well.

And obviously now that we can look at things like who people send emails to, how quickly they open, who do people connect with both within a team, but also between teams as well. We can start to see who are the people that connect people within an organisation as well.

And again, of course, we need to look at that data carefully and use it in the right way. So that it provides benefit to the people themselves. But, yeah, fascinating how things are developing.

So, in terms of that approach around measuring skills proficiency on the job, what are some of the benefits of that approach to the organisation? 
So, we can talk about ING as an example or you might, maybe, want to talk about organisations holistically.  


Maarten van Beek: I think to take it broader because I think that the challenge all organisations have, will be quite similar to ING.

I think make it measurable, make it also much more transparent. I think the transparency about performance management and other HR processes we have, there is sometimes a lack.

So, what is good performance? I think the moment you can measure skills better, which level those skills are shown, I think it helps. And demystifying a lot of HR things. In 2021, I think that the world is becoming transparent whereas HR sometimes can be a black box and I think demystifying that and taking it out of the black box is good for the function, it’s really good for the function, but it also helps the people because then it is clear in which direction you can improve, you can develop, and you can perform.

From an organisation point of view, I think when people know that you get energy around it. So, we didn't discuss that much, but I think when people are responsible for their own career an organisation creates a context where they can develop, the time is there, and the tools are there, people get energetic. It is clear where they are going to go because people sometimes now hold on to what they currently do because they are afraid for the future. And why are they afraid? Because we don't tell them how their future looks like. We don't tell them how that can fit in the future. And then they hold on and we want them to move as HR professionals, we want them to progress.

So, I think more transparency about how the future looks, which skills are relevant, which are not relevant. 
Be honest with them. How easy is it for those people to go from A to B, how easy it is to up-skill, and is that in ING or is that in your current organisation or is it outside? Both is good, as long as you help people to go there and ensure there is a next career step in the organisation or another organisation. 
I think those discussions have to take place much more and that also means that, that is deliberately why I say you probably have to up-skill yourself five to six times in a career. That might be 10 times, I don’t know.

But I think the majority of the employees understand that the management of an organisation, doesn't have a crystal ball and you don't know how it will look in 10 years. Everybody knows that.

I think five years is realistic. So, if we don't know where we are in five years, then it is probably not good management. So, five years we know. So have that conversation and then say, look guys, in three to five years, we will look what the next step is. A step that makes sense and that you can oversee from a horizon point of view but have those transparent conversations and demystify the whole thing. 
I think, if you create that, you create energy in the organisation.  


David Green: And you create trust as well, that transparency, by using data to help people with their careers, as you said, being realistic about how long it is going to take them, I think that is really clear. And as you said, I agree, you can look three to five years, maybe in some industries you can look a bit longer, some industries probably frankly, a bit less, to be honest at the moment. 
And as you said, making that transparent is helpful for the people and the organisation. Thinking even more broadly, what about on a societal level, this approach?  


Maarten van Beek: It is interesting, and I said at the beginning of the call, I am the HR Director at ING, but besides that I do a couple of Board of Director functions. One of them is with a refugee organisation and what surprises me is that what I see there today with Afghanistan it has becomes crystal clear again, people have to leave their homes, their loved ones and hopefully their loved ones can escape the country with them, but you don't bring your diplomas with you when you come to another country. 


I think for a lot of refugees, there is work in other countries, but then you can look at the skills level. So, you can look okay, what were you doing from the country can be Africa, can be Asia can be anywhere, so what were you doing there? And how can we use those skills and how can you build a meaningful life in another country without having useless discussions about what are the diplomas etc, which you had in the past.

Sometimes people show diplomas, and you don't know the universities because, I know a couple of universities also international, but not all of them and the quality of those goes up and down as well.

So, I think by looking at skills and what people really can do and the proficiency around it, you create more honesty on the global labour market. Not only for refugees, but also people who didn't have the opportunity to go to college and to go to university and do a bachelor’s degree, because they were born in a family where it was not common, but they have good skills.  

I remember when I was an HR Director earlier in my career in a factory of Asian food. We needed engineers for the factory and in that area of the Netherlands around Amsterdam, where a lot of people who didn't have education in a diploma form, but they took their whole car apart and they put them together again. 
So, they had skills which were very useful, they just didn't have the diploma. And so, what we did at some point was that we just invited them and we asked them to perform the job.

So, we didn't have a job interview, we said, this is what you have to do technically, and then if they could do it, we would hire them because in the end, that is what you want, people that can do the job. That diploma or a resume can be evidence that someone can do it, but it's not real evidence. Real evidence is doing the job. 

So, I think for having a more honest labour market and really ensure that people who don't always have the chances to go to college, go to university, have education, or don’t want to that is possible as well, they can have similar jobs or even really great jobs as other people can. 
So, I think for society, there are a lot of benefits for a lot of people.  


David Green: If we think about Europe, unemployment is relatively steady, but we are also ageing populations. Most of the major European economies have got ageing populations. I think countries like Germany, for example, they potentially will have a labour shortage in 10 to 15 years’ time. 


It is so important that as refugees come, and let's not forget they are coming because they have to, a lot of the time they don't have a choice. If we can help them understand their skills and integrate into companies then that doesn't just benefit them, which is great for them, but great for society and actually benefits us as organisations. 
It benefits our economies as well.

Again, skills is the magic word at the moment, isn't it? I won’t say it will solve all our ills, but it will certainly go some way to helping them.

Last question Maarten, and I have really enjoyed our discussion on the podcast. Bringing this all together and this is the question we are asking everyone on this series, how can HR help the business identify the critical skills of the future?


Maarten van Beek: I think it is asking the business questions and questions. To really ask them, if you talk about digital banking, what do you mean? What does it look like? What is someone actually doing? Where is someone sitting? What are the conversations? So really asking the questions, questions, questions, because questions give answers and then you go a level deeper. 


Also be honest on, we can look three to five years ahead, so don't think we are going to solve the issues for 2040 or 2050, that is too far away. So, keep it relatively close and see that against a journey, because upgrading to one skills level will make us capable to go to the other one, but if we start thinking 2050, well we don't know and then you end up with nothing.

So, make it practical on the one hand, because I think that gives much more execution certainty, but asking the questions and be brutally honest and say, well, do you really see that? Or is that not possible? The pandemic is I think a great example as a lot of things we thought were not possible, you know, running a bank from home offices, and a lot of other corporations did the same. They are possible.

So, challenging our own paradigms on what can be done from both angles, it should be good for business. It should be good for people. It also should be good for society.  


David Green: And as you said, it starts with the business questions doesn’t it. And drilling down once you have got information, drill down making it practical, bringing data to the conversation, once you have understood the business questions at the level, understanding that data that can support and help answer those conversation. 


Enabling people, enabling employees within your organisations to then develop those skills as well, close some of those gaps that undoubtedly you will find as things progress so fast.

Maarten, thank you very much for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you and follow you on social media? If you do social media.  


Maarten van Beek: I do bits. So, I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter, just type my name and you can find me. Thanks for having a conversation, David really, really enjoyed it.   

David Green: Yeah, I really enjoyed it and I know listeners will as well, because the topics we covered, I think are topics that will resonate with a lot of HR professionals today, perhaps not surprisingly.

Thank you very much for your time and look forward to speaking again soon.