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How do hiring managers measure talent? Traditionally, the resume has been seen as a proxy for success, along with a college degree.

But those measurements don’t always predict who will succeed in a job or a career.

Gayatri Agnew, Senior Director, Walmart Giving (Photo: USCCF)

“Someone who went to college will have more formalized education and more traditionally recognized skill, but is not inherently more capable or more talented or more skilled than someone who has learned those skills essentially on the front lines of work,” says Gayatri Agnew, senior director of Walmart Giving.

Agnew believes that not only do we have a crisis of underemployment, “we also have a crisis around recognizing where skills are learned or where learning occurs.”

I got a chance to explore these ideas with Agnew on our Work in Progress podcast recorded at the Talent Forward 2019 workforce conference organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation a few weeks ago.

She says that in the five years she’s been at Walmart, she’s been continuously surprised by the amazing, high quality of talent and skill of the associates working in their stores. Agnew says the goal is to upend the notion that “talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not.”

“We set out to recognize that learning occurs everywhere, especially at work. And if we can give working learners, particularly front line service sector working learners, pathways to formalize the skills they have and to earn more skills through work, they will be able to access stronger pathways to economic opportunity and economic prosperity.”

Walmart has several programs for its own associates, including Live Better U and Walmart Academies, to leverage their existing skills and learn even more skills that can help them build strong careers.

You can hear all about them in this episode of Work in Progress, available here and wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, please subscribe!

We hope you enjoy the conversation. And next week, we speak with Andrew Dunckelman, head of education and economic opportunity for Google.org.

Gayatri Agnew (second from left) on Talent Forward 2019 panel (Photo: USCCF)

Episode 115: Gayatri Agnew, Senior Director, Walmart Giving
Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim
Engineer: Daniel Tureck
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.