It’s the last episode before the Christmas break. So we have brought to you an episode to fill your Christmas stockings with everything skills-led approaches to talent.

 In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David is joined by Matthew Yerbury, Workforce Analytics and Digital Practice Lead at KPMG, and Nick Biller, Head of Data Science at HSBC.

With over 30 years’ experience combined working in the people analytics industry, this conversation is going to cover everything you need to know about adopting a skills-led approach to talent, that not only drives value for the business and the workforce, but supports your ESG initiatives, too.

The conversation will also cover:

• How a focus on skills can help build the meritocracy within an organisation

• Keeping on top on the ever-evolving workforce skills requirements

• Creating strategic skills insights through operational data

• How to tackle the challenges that come with skills at different maturity levels of the journey,
  and much more!

Enjoy and Merry Christmas!

Support from this podcast comes from TechWolf. You can learn more by visiting: techwolf.ai

David Green: As this week is the last episode before the festive break, I wanted to bring you something extra special to fill your Christmas stocking.  So, l invited Matt Yerbury, Workforce Analytics and Digital Practice Lead at KPMG and Nick Biller, Head of Data Science at HSBC, to share their insights, experience and advice on building a skills-based organisation.

Matt Yerbury: Traditionally, an organisation might set a target for a promotion.  They might set different top-down targets to move the needle against those very important metrics.  And there's an argument some camps might say that that will work against the meritocracy, because it's a top-down imposition.  So, by taking that skills view, you can learn what skills correlate with success; then you can use that information to drive learning interventions to enable those diverse groups to thrive, by giving people better information about what they can learn in order to propel their careers.

David Green: Combined, Matt and Nick have over 30 years of experience working in the field, and today we have brought them together to discuss how organisations can adopt a skills-led approach to talent that drives value for the business and the workforce, while also supporting ESG initiatives.  Our conversation also covers topics such as how a focus on skills can help build meritocracy and reduce bias; how to infer skills from the myriad of organisational data, while navigating ever-involving workforce skills requirements; and how to tackle the challenges that come with skills at different maturity levels of the journey, and much more too.

But before we get started, make sure you save this episode, as I reckon it's one that you'll want to listen back to time and time again.

Matt, Nick, welcome to the podcast, it's great to have you on the show.  I'm going to ask each of you to introduce yourselves, but I'll come to Matt first.  So, Matt, if you could just say a bit about your background and your current role?

Matt Yerbury: Fantastic.  Thanks, David, and thanks for having us on, nice to be here.  Yeah, so my name's Matt Yerbury.  I have been working in people analytics for 15-plus years now, although it wasn't called people analytics back then, and kind of fell into it.  I had a job at university, when I was sent spreadsheets from a small reward consulting company; great gig at the time.  And then, on leaving university with a big slug of debt and a baby, I thought I would stick with what I knew. 

Always loved tech, always found people fascinating, and those things have coalesced over the years.  Had a couple of gigs in consulting for Aon and Mercer, had four wonderful years with Nick here, and then I've just moved over to KPMG to set up my new practice, so really exciting and great to be here, thanks.

David Green: Well, it's great to have you on the show, Matt.  And, Nick, same thing, bit about yourself and your current role.

Nick Biller: Yeah, thanks, David, and great to be here.  Nick Biller, little bit longer than Matt in people analytics.  I think I've been doing it now for nearly 20 years.  Came from, strangely enough, chemical engineering, where I did a PhD, which you could probably describe as data science now, but they didn't call it that either back then; and then various roles in financial services and consulting, until coming to HSBC about six years ago, working with Matt, where we set up the data science practice at HSBC, so really trying to put the best practices around modelling and data science around people data and forging that path, which is obviously hugely exciting now.

David Green: Well, it's great to have you both on the show and I think it's going to be really interesting, because I think, Matt, you're going to talk about some of the wider aspects around this kind of shift towards skills-based approach that a lot of organisations are doing, and of course a lot of it being driven by people analytics teams within those organisations.  And, Nick, you're going to share some of the work that you've been doing at HSBC in this area as well; so, really looking forward to this.

Matt, I'm going to start with you.  Obviously, as you said in your introduction, you combine experience in people analytics, 15 years, 35 years between you, which is really impressive, in this space, as a practitioner with experience as a consultant, helping organisations transition into skills-led companies.  Given the current economic climate and labour shortages, what are your thoughts on how taking a skills-based approach to talent can help the future livelihood of organisations?

Matt Yerbury: Yeah, I think adding that to a more holistic set of answers to that youth problem is key.  There's a seismic shift that we're seeing, in how organisations start to conceive jobs and work, and I think we've seen that start to play out in some ways, very tangibly, in things like the gig economy.  But traditionally, organisations have managed jobs and people have had careers and they have stayed largely static for the majority of a career, 30-plus years.

But I think today, we need to support more flexibility, organisations need to support more flexibility, and I think with the big onus on continuous improvement and that more flexible career path journey for people as well, those two pieces can really enable us to respond to a demand profile for work which is changing very quickly.  Jobs are being automated, our roles are fundamentally changing through augmentation as well; and if we zoom out a little bit, we've got a big challenge on our hands, as societies and communities, to make sure that we can weather and respond to some really big challenges with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is fundamentally changing how work is done.

So, by leveraging tech, we can meet that social need, and it's largely a political need as well, they're pushing for it at the World Economic Forum, it's on the government agenda.  So, companies at the moment are focusing on building talent marketplaces, they're focusing on expanding their learning platforms and other analogous offerings for their people.  And at the same time, from an analytics perspective, that's really exciting as well, because those big systems create a lot of really fantastic information that we can use to understand the scale of the problem and to work out how we're moving to combat it.

David Green: It's really interesting because a lot of people talk about how the pandemic's accelerated this transition, but it was already playing out beforehand, as you quite rightly refer to, Matt.  The World Economic Forum's been talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution for at least seven or eight years now.  It's a big focus of the discussions at Davos, and that ends up translating, as you said, through to organisations, through to governments, through to societies as well.  But, Nick, would love to hear how what Matt's just described, how that's playing out currently at HSBC.

Nick Biller: Yeah, absolutely.  So, the skills agenda is absolutely one of the key people priorities at HSBC.  We see it very much as a win both for the organisation and for the employee themselves to get a fundamental understanding of the skills footprint that we have as an organisation, what we need.  So, whether it's playing out as creative approaches to talent, we're perhaps needing to understand we can't necessarily go and buy that talent; if we're dominant in a market, we potentially try and hire our own people practically in those markets that we've got to build that capability, short skills; it may make sense to build that capability, maybe more traditional technology skills that are leaner in the market, we've got an opportunity there.  And then, that traditional thing of getting a thorough understanding of where we've got those resources. 

In large organisations, it's often very difficult to really understand where we have those skills.  And historically, you can imagine, although we didn't know, you'd have situations where we'd be perhaps downsizing a part of the business and growing another part of the business, and no one stopped to think, "Hey, can we actually leverage some of those things?"  Getting that comprehensive view of the organisation is obviously super-fundamental. 

But from an employee, obviously that unlocks a much better employee value proposition.  You've got potential for career pathways, transparency around how we're hiring.  If we focus on skills-based hiring, there's greater transparency, greater capacity to eliminate bias in those recruitment processes if we are focusing on the skills required to do those roles and the skills that people have to do those roles.

I think the ability to take people who are perhaps at risk of redundancy and then saying, "Hey, we've got these opportunities here.  Had you thought about this maybe non-traditional transition across the organisation?  So, you've got these skills, but for this training course, or you could be redeployed over here" or, "Actually, you've got exactly what we need, maybe you just need a bit of domain knowledge to get there".

David Green: Matt, how would you say a skills-based approach could help eliminate future biases, I know Nick touched on it a little bit there, and tailor the meritocracy within the organisation?

Matt Yerbury: Yeah, great question, and this is a particularly fascinating additional benefit from this type of oversight.  Companies may have multiple platforms in play now that do generate skills data that you can associate with employees and you can associate with jobs as well.  So, we could look at what the acquired skills are for different segments of our workforce.  You start to segment that by success factors, by different indicators of success.  What are the skills that the people who are thriving the most, what does their skillset look like and how does that differ?

Now, if we think about a lot of the current approaches to ESG challenges, to representation, the drive to improve representation of diverse groups, and some of the monitoring and publishing that we're doing along those lines now, gender pay gap, ethnicity pay gap, the proportion of females in senior roles, tend to be standard metrics.  Traditionally, an organisation might set a target for a promotion.  They might set different top-down targets to move the needle against those very important metrics.  And there's an argument some camps might say that that will work against the meritocracy, because it's a top-down imposition.  So, by taking that skills view, you can learn what skills correlate with success; then you can use that information to drive learning interventions, to host more learning content, to enable those diverse groups to thrive, by giving people better information about what they can learn in order to propel their careers.

There's another important piece here as well around a lot of people analytics practitioners now will be looking for systemic bias.  So, they'll be looking at the profile of performance ratings across an organisation, they'll be looking at the profile of salary increases, they'll be looking at the profile of bonus payments, and they'll be looking for unexplained bias in that profile.  So, is there information here; is there variation in who's getting promoted that isn't explained by people's performance?

Taking the skills view as well and adding people's skillsets into that view and those types of analysis can enable us to strengthen our understanding of the meritocracy and then have a much stronger argument where we do find bias, and actually do some myth-busting as well.  Perhaps there's evidence of bias by using those relatively blunter metrics of a performance rating, but you could actually look at those heuristics that indicate the actually skills profile, and how the skills economy for the organisation is working, that can explain where the meritocracy is working and where bias factors may be at play.

David Green: What can organisations do to help keep on top of the ever-involving skills that their workforce needs, and close that in and make sure you're closing that gap all along around what a data analyst actually needs, now and in three years' time?

Matt Yerbury: Definitely, it is a fast-changing area and there is a lot of opportunity and a lot of work still to do.  But I think the opportunities are starting to become clear, and the changes that we can make using the skills-centric view is slowly becoming clear as well.  So, yes, it's one thing to estimate workforce demand on a jobs level, "We need this many financial accountants, we need this many dev ops engineers, we need this many analysts".  By taking that skills view, we can shift from a jobs-faced view to say, "Well actually, we need to make sure that we have enough people with these skills in the organisation, rather than enough people who can do this job".  So, you're immediately less held back by grouping people by jobs, it helps encourage that mobility.

To get that right, there is a big behaviour shift, there's a big upskilling that needs to happen around understanding the current skills profile and how those jobs are likely to change.  And really, from the analytics perspective as well, by generating this data, we can begin to support with that journey as people analytics practitioners by giving oversight of the market data, how is the external market changing in terms of the skills profile for different role types.  And also, what are those new emergent skills; what are we seeing in our systems that are just starting to generate interest; what are those fast-growing skills in terms of people's learning activity; what are the fast-growing skills in terms of the onboarding process that we're gathering through those areas as well?

So, there's a big opportunity to create a bit of an early warning system for those nascent skills and then start to mobilise a future pipeline to make sure that the workforce demand planning is met in the future.

David Green: Nick, turning to you now, obviously doing some of the work at HSBC, over 200,000 employees I think in the organisation, so a big, big, global organisation and we can just imagine the amount of data there is related to skills that you've got and skills that you potentially need in the future.  So, can you give listeners an understanding of when they're building a skills-based organisation, obviously it's imperative that you look at that people data and build the architecture around that; how can organisations leverage their operational data to create strategic insights to skills?

Nick Biller: Well, I think there's the obvious ones.  So, use everything that you're using already, like maybe your learning management system, if you've got a learning experience platform, maybe you've got talent solutions that have got skills in there.  A lot of organisations hold talent profiles.  The reality I think that everyone needs to appreciate is, it's going to be patchy, it's going to be maybe a little bit rough in places, because the degree of adoption is going to differ by different parts of the organisation.

For example, we've had a lot of skills surveying that we've been doing, where certain roles within the organisation, we've gone out in a very structured way and said, "We think these are the core skills that you need to do this role", then other parts not necessarily engaging with those things yet.  But they'll have information about skill in other systems, so obvious things like, would you want your technology function to go and sit and write all their technology skills in a learning platform?  Maybe not, if you've got other existing resources that have that in there. 

So, you might be using source control, which generally tells you what language is being used; you might have an asset register for applications that might also refer to both the what is being done, and who is doing it.  And, don't underestimate the power of working with partners around skills inference, so those systems might have it in a very structured way, but you might have access to other pieces of documentation; it might be CVs, it might be business documentation around processes.  But this is where the real challenge starts is, it's very nice and clean if you can say, "This part of the organisation is doing it this way, that part of the organisation is doing it that way".  I mean, the best thing would be if everyone does it the same way.  It's never going to happen, so it's then what are those rules, and that's the bit when it starts getting tricky.

The other critical thing then as well is having a view on that data quality, so how reliable are those sources; and therefore, how should you prioritise them?  And then, it would be remiss of us saying that you also need to have a common ontology, a skills taxonomy, and a way of rationalising those things across those systems; that's before you then have to wrestle with the fact that if you're in an organisation like ours, where our employees are working in multiple languages, then you've got to actually say, "Well, how do we then bring that all together?" and all that is extra layers and extra layers, but is leading into that pathway of that comprehensive view of skill across the organisation.

David Green: You talked about skills inference; just for listeners, can you explain what that actually means?  I mean, you've talked about a variety of different systems; it actually means using the data in the systems to infer the skills that people have, isn't it?

Nick Biller: Yeah.  So, once you've got an understanding of what skills are associated with certain roles, so there's, if you like, a basic inference that says, "You've undertaken these roles in your career history.  Generally speaking, we'd expect these skills to be associated with that", then there's other things which is actually literally mining the text and then saying actually, it's talking about this, it's talking about that.  So, a role profile or a job description might be handy in terms of actually spelling out the skills that are required; but actually, it won't be contained within the text, and that's where the models and things like that come to bear, to actually say, generally people who are described as doing this role, so not doing this role but actually describe as doing that role, other people like them have these skills.

So, it's a great deal of sophistication and emergence in terms of getting stakeholders to be on board with that.

Matt Yerbury: I think that's a really good starter for ten as well.  Many organisations would have a lot of job descriptions, maybe multiple years' worth, that a hiring manager would write when they wanted to bring someone into the organisation.  Now, that's probably a couple of folders full of word documents. 

Using some inference tooling to extract the actual skills that are being required and creating a structured data set, to then have that playback conversation to say, "Actually, at a strategic level, hold up that mirror and say these are the skills that you're trying to get through the door, these are what you're asking for, this is how it's changed over the last three years.  Does that resonate with your idea of the future skills for the organisation; does it resonate with what correlates with success?" because it's often a fairly chaotic system.  You have a lot of people recruiting for their own needs across a business.  And so, that's probably a really good entry point and a good starter for ten, using assets that most organisations would have.

Nick Biller: And a subtle reflection we've had as well is, actually do those job descriptions reflect the intent of the hiring manager of the skills that they needed?  So, it's almost, "How well was that job description written?" because actually, how good is the AI in inferring those skills?  But actually, those potential candidates, have they read between the lines of what you've written in your job description to say, "Actually, what you need is someone who's got these skills".  So, it's an interesting mirror from that subtly different perspective as well, is how good are we communicating with potential candidates around what we need effectively.

David Green: Obviously we've talked about it, technology is a huge enabler of the skills-based approach; there's no doubt about that, particularly if you want to infer skills and personalise learning journeys, etc.  But it's only one piece of the puzzle.  Matt, what else do organisations need to be considering to ensure that they set themselves up for success?

Matt Yerbury: Sure.  And as techies and analytics professionals, we'll always go towards the smart solution, the tech, the platforms.  I think trumping all of those is culture and behaviour, and ironically skills as well.  People need the understanding of a new world, a new range of insights for skill, a new type of stewardship for an organisation.  That all requires a new type of conversation, it's a skill-centric strategic conversation, strategic workforce planning, that skills-based is a new skillset.

You need people to engage in new processes, but I think probably the one that trumps all of it, that does speak to the ability for a talent marketplace to succeed and does enable learning journeys to succeed, is just you need a supportive set of managers.  People are working hard, workers may not feel that they have enough time to invest in themselves and their own learning journeys and invest in their future selves, and that comes down to the expectations of the manager, the encouragement of the manager, for time to be protected towards this end, the inclusion, the cultural norm for the inclusion of those self-improvement goals in people's annual objectives and the real measurement and tracking of those goals in an authentic way.

You can spend a lot of money on a platform, you can get all of the shiny tools, you can put all of the analytics in place but if no one has time to learn and no one has time to try new things, then nothing will ever get started.

David Green: Because, we shouldn't underestimate the scale of the shift, from very much a job-focused approach, to actually very much a granular skills level; and as you said, Matt, technology definitely helps enable this, but without managers believing it, being ready to try something different and actually not just recognising it up here, but actually in the way they behave, the way they, rather than just going out, so in the example we just talked about, just going out and getting some contingent workforce in to support a project, actually be more open to going out to the company itself and getting a few people to support for a few hours a week; it's a very different approach, isn't it?

Matt Yerbury: Definitely, and there's two things here.  As a manager, I may be very reluctant to let my star performer, who's ambitious, go and leave my team for 20% of the week, and I need to make a decision not to block them, I need to encourage it.  But the flipside of that coin is, I can access great people from other teams.  And if I don't engage with the marketplace, then I'm only going to lose, so the mind-shift is towards a more fluid conception of the team itself.  So, yes I will lose people to other projects; but I will gain people as long as I engage with these tools and this new culture.

David Green: And, Nick, you've obviously gone through the early- and mid-stages of the skills-based journey at HSBC, but what would you say would be the right entry points for those starting out; and tell us a little bit about the successes that you've had at HSBC around this that have been really good?

Nick Biller: I think it is, as touched on earlier, it is use that data you've already got, bring it together.  You don't need really sophisticated technology just to do that, the teasers, the basic pieces of analysis.  Just actually saying, looking at a business area that's maybe engaged with your learning experience platform, or whatever learning system you've got, bringing it together; but even actually saying, "Do you know what, we've got all these gaps, this is where we've got skills information, this is where we don't have skills information", because it starts that conversation about what should we do about this.

We're getting to that piece where we've got some examples, we've got some playbooks, if you like, around different ways of getting at the skills problem, so now we're sort of moving more into marketing, you know, "This is what these people have done, this is what their experience has been from going through the process, these are the kinds of outcomes that they can get from that".  So, I think it really is, yes, start simple, get those senior executives in a room if you can and say, "Everyone's talking about this, we all know we need to get at this, but how do we start to shift this into tangible things that we can do?"

David Green: From both of your experiences and, Matt, we'll start with you, what are the challenges that some organisations are facing at different maturity levels of this journey?  For instance, what are the common challenges that those in the early stages face; and what are the challenges that those at a more mature level of the journey are facing?  Again, Matt, we'll come to you first and then, Nick, you can probably provide a bit of context from HSBC.

Matt Yerbury: Sure, yeah.  I think we've touched on a few of these already.  The culture and the knowledge are key and secondary to that, the buy-in and the tech.  You need to have the right people behind that journey, and you need to have some of the people controlling the purse strings as well to make the right investment.  Now, depending on the size of the organisation, where you are on the journey, the size of the investment, the level of tech you're going to implement, the size of the machine you put behind it is going to differ, and there really isn't a one-size-fits-all approach.

The key challenge that transcends all of that again, that we haven't touched upon quite so much, is just that engagement piece, the change and implementation.  In any business, there will be people leading that business who have maybe a qualitative sense, or a quantitative sense, of the skills profile of that business, what skills are required today, where those skills reside, and what skills are required tomorrow.  And there may be certain processes, systems, customs that have been set up in different areas of the business that have been started in a more organic way over the years to address this challenge, which is the right thing. 

It is important, it's commercial.  Yes, there are lots of reasons to do this.  Outperformance, performing well as a commercial enterprise, will always be one of the key reasons to be pursuing the skills journey.  So, it's really that change and implementation piece, "We're going on a journey, this is the challenge, this is the vision that we're going towards", and being crystal clear about that to your stakeholders, to your workforce, to the people in the businesses and to your leadership in general, rather than doing this build activity in a darkened backroom on your own and bringing it out to the business as a surprise later.  People need to be brought along the journey and it requires a lot of thought and effort.

David Green: Nick, is there anything you'd add from the experience that you've had at HSBC?

Nick Biller: Yeah, I think something around talking to that change and implementation and scaling piece, there are two aspects to that.  I think the design of what you build needs to really think carefully about that user experience.  You're going to want to deploy these things as user-friendly, and with people who haven't necessarily been on that journey with you.  So, I think that's something to think about.

I think inevitably, when you're dealing with proofs of concept and just starting out on this journey, you're inevitably going to be very tailored to specific sets of requirements like, "We're doing this particular journey, we'd like to see it like this".  I think eventually you've got to take a bit of a step back and say, "Okay, great, what's the generic, very simple story that works through this piece of analytics".  Telling stories with dashboards is very hard, but I think making sure there's a logical flow through them, making sure it's capturing things in a simple and coherent way, that people can just pick up, and then build on that, like all things in people analytics, is we're very reliant on users outside of our space delivering this content and delivering value using this content.

Matt Yerbury: And it's a huge opportunity for HR as well, to move into that new strategic space, to have a very commercial conversation, to be leading activity from the centre, but in a way that includes the businesses, includes the other functions and really leverages the mandate as the custodians and guardians of actually a lot of very sensitive data.  And by the way, we could do, I'm sure, a whole other podcast about all of the GDPR privacy and meeting all of the other important obligations in that space with this type of work.

So, yeah, it's that higher level of conversation that HR can be driving and really taking its rightful, strategic place at the table for a very contemporary challenge.

David Green: Nick, you refer to there's other people, other stakeholders involved in this.  Clearly there's finance, there's IT, there's the C-suite, there's actually business unit leaders as well.  For our listeners out there who are currently working on getting that buy-in from the organisation, what advice could you give them on getting senior leadership onboard with the skills-based approach?

Nick Biller: Well, I think it's keeping that simplicity; keep it simple and impactful.  I think there's that tension that I talked to earlier around, the one benefit here is they all get it.  Skills is really important; the story really resonates with everyone.  It's just then translating that into practicality and then actually saying, "We've got such a huge landscape to go after, what can we do that's valuable that can demonstrate that value quickly so that as an organisation, you can test and iterate and learn?" because they don't necessarily know.  So, keep it practical, do those proofs of concept, make sure that they understand what the other options are, I think, are really critical.

But as I said, they do get it, it's not a hard sell on the concept level; it's more on the practical of, "What are we going to do; and what is the sequencing going to be?"

David Green: So, that prioritisation, that focusing on value really.  Matt, is there anything you'd add to that?

Matt Yerbury: It's such a big challenge and exciting opportunity that it can be tempting to boil the ocean.  Focus on a couple of key stakeholders, do the work with them, get your business case, get your proof of concept landed, and then just one step at a time.  Scale from the proofs of concept, be prepared to throw things out; that's why you're doing this test activity.  And just be prepared to iterate, refine what it is, because we need to end up with something that is custom-built for the particular business, for the particular skills profile, for the particular tech landscape, process landscape.  There really isn't a one-size-fits-all and therefore to get there, we need to iterate and we need to take it one step at a time.

David Green: Moving to the question for the series, this is the last question of our discussion today, and for those listening who like this question and think, "I'd like to hear some other episodes", either listen to the episode or go to the myHRfuture YouTube channel.  Matt, I'll start with you.  How can HR help the business identify and prioritise the critical skills it needs for the future?

Matt Yerbury: I'd probably draw on two things overall.  HR has a mandate over this information, it's sensitive information.  HR has a job to align the commercial strategic imperatives of an organisation with the needs of the people, its workforce, and work in that space between the two.  So, I think HR needs to prioritise leveraging that mandate and being practitioners that treat the information responsibly, that make sure it isn't a free-for-all to access that sensitive information.  It needs to be curated, it needs to be protected, and then they really need to lean into the business, lean into the businesses to make sure that the understanding is there, that the engagement is there and on top of all of that, they need to bring in a view from the marketplace as well. 

So, that internal view held alongside the correct acquisitions of market insight to know what skills are where, what the prevalence of skillsets and proficiency levels are in different locations and marketplaces and bringing that holistic picture to the business to enable their workforce planning.

David Green: Pretty good, Matt.  Anything you'd like to add to that, Nick?

Nick Biller: No, just to reemphasise, make sure you're profiling those systems that you've got and those sources that you've got, and I think leverage all the market intelligence you've got, including your employees, because they're going to be active and learning things that are cutting edge.  So, if you want to know what's the next big thing in technology, look at your technology population and what they're learning about or using their time on, if they're leveraging your platform.  And if you've got a compelling learning management platform, they'll go there first.

David Green: Well, lovely way to answer that question, I think, between the two of you there.  Matt, Nick, thank you both for being guests on the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  It's actually going to be the last episode before Christmas as well, so if I forget to do it in the outro, we'll say Happy Christmas to those that celebrate it who are listening! 

Please can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you or follow you on social media, if you do that, and find out more about your work; Matt, I'll come to you first, and then Nick?

Matt Yerbury: Thanks, David, and yes, echoing that, thanks so much for having us.  Yes, so I'm on LinkedIn.  I've made a commitment, a public commitment to be much more active on there now we're building a business and I really want to take people on that journey a little bit from KPMG as well, because it's a real ground-up build and we're really keen to bring out some of this thinking into a consulting offering.  So, find me on LinkedIn and I'll be making more noise from that channel in the near future.

David Green: We look forward to that.  And, Nick, how can people stay in touch with you?

Nick Biller: Yeah, thanks again for having me on.  Yeah, absolutely, I'm also on LinkedIn and would love to discuss with like-minded people also going on this journey.  I think the more we talk about this stuff, we can share ideas, successes, failures, etc, and we'll get there.

David Green: That's a great way to end it, we'll definitely get there!  Thank you, Nick, thank you, Matt, and I wish you both -- actually, I shouldn't -- yeah, I can say that because it's coming out before Christmas; I wish you both a Merry Christmas and a successful 2023.

Matt Yerbury: Thanks, David, and to you.