Episode 220: Up-skilling and Why it is Important to You
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.
I'm so honored that you would take a few minutes of your day to join me, Randall, on this edition of Around with Randall. In my spare time, I try to read as much as I can, and as I learned, I sleep a lot less. So I find myself reading all kinds of interesting things. And recently I ran across a interesting article on LinkedIn that dealt with Amazon and their commentary, or their effort regarding what they called upskilling, which I thought was fascinating.
What it turned out to be was some type of enhanced professional development, but it was a term I was maybe unfamiliar with and I'm not the most modern, up to date, suave guy, but I found what they were doing as fascinating. They are investing billions of dollars into their workforce for upskilling, meaning to give them an opportunity to grow not only professionally, which helps Amazon and Self retain employees find people that can move up the ladder, but also personally in terms of their growth.
It's about the idea of employment satisfaction that the realization that finding and training new employees is really expensive. It's just better to do more for the employees. You have this upskilling effort. They're looking at trying to incorporate the. In 2025, nearly 300,000 employees across the Amazon spectrum to have development or growth or education or different things that they can offer to provide more opportunity.
This led me to think a little bit about upskilling. Upskilling. Excuse me. In our profession, as the nonprofit sector sees more and more pressure, particularly on the expense side with inflation, there appears to be a continuation which ran through 23 and into 24 and now into 25, about how do we create more value for our non-profits, create efficiency.
And it tends to be, unfortunately, that much of the time that's about reducing expenses. This includes health care. I just read a number of articles about hospitals that are just finally giving up on certain areas of providing service, and are just laying people off and stop doing them. Education is seeing this in a reduction of baby areas within the organization, the institution that don't have enough students.
Nonprofits are seeing this in terms of their frontline individuals who are really dedicated and loyal, but they just can't afford it. What this means is the more you upskill yourself, the more valuable you are to the organization. And if something should ever happen, maybe also more valuable to another organization, you become more attractive. What I want to do today is to take this apart in two ways.
Number one is what are the benefits for upskilling and kind of the ten basic ways that we can upskill. Where can you go do this. And then the second thing is within the nonprofit sector I want to break it in out into the tactical the three areas infrastructure, gift officers and leadership. What are some specific examples of places you can go upskill either for a small cost or for free, to make yourself more valuable not only for your organization, but for yourself.
Self-actualization. Maslow I talk about the pyramid of of the idea of of of institutional or organizational and individual understanding of who you are. Self-actualization being at the top. I know who I am, I know I have ways to improve, but I'm okay with the guy in the mirror. That's real simple terminology. All of this is to get to the point of how do you make yourself feel better about who you are, and creating more va
Reasons. Benefits for upskilling. Upskilling is really all about acquiring new and advanced skills that are relevant. If we take this to the extreme, maybe the best example is it's the old example they used in business school of if you made buggy whips, meaning whips that they used for horses, when you would have a horse and buggy at the time when automotives were coming out.
Upskilling would be important because eventually you were going to have a job. Today we're seeing things like AI and other types of technology, as well as pressures and cost push into our world that are causing jobs to diminish in certain areas, but increase in others. Upskilling is about finding skill sets, learning skill sets, developing skill sets in those evolving areas.
So one areas career growth or benefit is career growth. When you have more skill, the greater your opportunity is to be more for yourself. Family. Develop a career. Number two is job security. Somebody who has multifaceted understanding of not only not only understanding of the organization, but probably more important, different skills that can be applied in different ways has more value.
And if decisions have to be made about who stays and who goes. The more things you can do, the more job security you have. Three is an increased productivity for you and the organization if you're able to do things more effectively. And this is where I is in the center point of our world being discussed an awful lot.
If the more effective you are, the better off you are at showing value. Higher earning potential. I think we should not lose sight of the fact, particularly as inflation, and we talk about the cost of eggs. As one example, having the ability to make more money is a good thing. Whether it's for the now or maybe for the ability to save more for the future in terms of retirement or paying off the house early or putting a child through college.
Professional networking. You can do these things in concert with. And we'll get into some examples here in a few minutes with other people. You don't have to do it by yourself. There is a real strength in having a group of people that you're doing something kind of a cohort doing it together, because if done correctly, it's not a zero sum game.
You can all obtain the skills and do so as a cohort or as a group that could be mutually beneficial in terms of the experience. The idea of industry relevance, that it keeps you aligned with the current trends and the things going on. There's nothing more frustrating for a leader when you sit down with a with a team of people, and there are some people who just don't understand the basics of what's going on.
It feels like we're retrenching to a least common denominator in terms of being able to talk about strategy or direction, or what we're going to do for improvement. When a small group of people don't have that information at a base level, you don't want that. Personal satisfaction is one. This idea of the hierarchy of needs Maslow high self-actualization.
It helps build confidence, self-esteem, self-actualize who doesn't like to finish and accomplish something? Career flexibility. This was the buggy whip example a few minutes ago. If you're in a certain area and you're not improving your skills with the technology changes that we're seeing, is it possible that technology can take part of your role and you don't have other skills that you can apply to make the organization better, to make the service better?
To present your skills as a professional option for the organization to leverage more success. You want that flexibility. The last one is competitive advantage. The more and more we introduce technology into the world we operate. And I just don't mean the nonprofit world. I'm talking for profit. If you think about auto making as an example, they have a tremendous amount of technology using robots to build the cars.
But if you don't have other skills, then what ends up happening is you've been you may be dependent on something that is no longer needed, and you aren't as competitive as a employee, as a producer of whatever it is. You want to distinguish yourself from other candidates in the job market by having skills that are unique, that are defined.
All of these things are the benefits. I do want to spend just a second talking about the general areas that you can look at for upskilling online courses and certifications, workshops, joining professional associations, simple things like reading industry publications. This is what I was talking about when I found this article on LinkedIn about Amazon's upskilling program. I'm always trying to figure out where can I get more information.
Some of it's relevant, some of it's not. But I'm always trying to figure out how do I get more of it so that I can find those places. It's free reading, industry publications and information. Earning an advanced degree more formalized. One that I think is under discussed and did a podcast on this very specifically about mentorship. That is an important way to upskill because you can learn from someone else offering volunteering to take on more responsibility at work, forcing yourself to learn it because you've accepted that responsibility.
Learning new software tools. The essence of artificial intelligence. What skill sets? And we'll get into some tactical things, particularly in the database infrastructure teams that might be of interest to you in this area. Participation in an online community or an association where you're active, you're learning from others, you're doing group projects. And the last is just the idea of practicing things.
I just wrote a blog post about my daughter wanting to shoot better, and for her eight year old for a second grade basketball team. And I said, we got to practice. And she said, well, I want to do it now. I said, we all would. You gotta practice to get better. This is the usage of skills. So the truly tactical thing today is, is to take apart three areas and talk a little bit about places you can get and things you should consider in terms of upskilling.
And the first area that I want to start with is the infrastructure area. I want to start with data database, prospect management, prospect research, finance, all the things that I call infrastructure because without those, the rest of it's not worth anything. It is the hub of the wheel for what we do. So when we think about in particular upskilling tactics around what I would think of as information technology database, the technical aspects of a nonprofit, you can learn things like cloud computing and management.
So AWS has a certification program or Microsoft Azure Fundamentals has a certification program. Google has a cloud nonprofit training course. It's cost effective because what it is is almost it's almost free in terms of those areas, whether it's AWS, Amazon, Microsoft or Google. Figuring out how to make the things around you cloud based activity more effective. Cybersecurity. If we're not talking about this more often, then we're fools.
This is happening more and more often in cyber. Criminals are out there trying to get access. While you may have an IT department, wouldn't you like to know more about what they're talking about? Could you make yourself more valuable? Is that something you could go do in the future? So a certified ethical hacker, which I find interesting, but I have one of my son's friends.
His father is a professional hacker. On the good side. He's he's he's one of the good guys helping people fight this issue. Well, I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about getting to be a little bit more knowledgeable. There's actually courses, relating to being a certified ethical hacker. So you can better understand how to protect yourself.
TIAA security has a formal certification in this. So there's lots of different options for you to think about in terms of getting more knowledge. The one in the database infrastructure that I would recommend the most is the next one. And that's how to use business analytics and data intelligence. The ones I recommend the most here are power BI and Tableau.
If you don't use either or both of them, you are not utilizing data and the presentation of that data properly. Power BI I've got two clients that have just invested heavily into this. It is unbelievably great how they produce data coming out of the CRM. It doesn't replace the CRM. What it's doing is scraping the information from the CRM and putting it in usable fashion.
Sorting, showing data, showing dashboards, showing results. Talking about predictive modeling. You can do this easily, but you got to know how to use it. One of the things that I'm going to do this year is I'm going to take some classes on power BI. I understand the outcome of it and how to use it, but I don't know how it's built.
And I'm so fascinated by it. That's going to be my upskilling this year. How do I better understand what goes into power BI. Because it's a phenomenal tool. All of these are ways in which you can, from an IT data perspective, increase your upskilling your skill sets. From a management perspective, do you have advanced training in either Razor's Edge or could be doing a perfect.
There's a lot of CRM is out there. All of whom have immense classes. Now you can argue that the best classes, the worst classes. I'm not going to get into that. But what I'm going to tell you is, is if you're not taking advantage of those, most of them are free. Particularly if you have that software, if you're not constantly figuring out how to do this better, then you're leaving opportunity on the table.
Integrity of data is important. So things like, nt excuse me, m-t-n's data management courses are available. That's NTN data management courses are available to improve data accuracy. This would parallel the power BI information. How do you know you're doing things correctly? Whether or not you have access to. Europe or other non United States fundraising opportunities? You should be knowledgeable about data privacy and compliance rules.
So in the United States, we actually have the least amount of data privacy. When you go to Europe and other places, they have the GDPR which you need to know about. If you're sending emails to people overseas for any purpose, you need to know about this. There are courses on the General Data Protection Regulations, which are really more about what's going on in Europe and other places like that, but you should be aware of that.
There's another option. Email marketing. We're seeing a lot more move for annual giving into the areas related to online giving. How do you take things from, you know, Hubspot's got a nonprofit email management certification program. How do you figure out how to do this more effectively? The last area is anything related to AI. My good friend Nathan Chapelle and as good a friend, Scott Rosenkranz, have a new book coming out.
I've read it. I'm not going to get into the details. Not my place, but you should be ready to buy it because it's going to break down AI for non profits in a new way. So what are you doing to learn about how I might help you and affect you? For the finance people I'll just throw this out that you want to talk about whether or not it's a certification.
Whether you can take an online for free most of the time in a community college, accounting classes, so we can better understand what are the the rules when it comes to phase B, which are the, you know, the policies and processes, procedures and regulations that accountants use for bookkeeping purposes? These are all infrastructure. What can you do out of those to better yourself?
For gift officers. There's formalized programs like CFP accreditation or certification, which I have had it since 2000. Maybe 3 to 4. I'd have to go back and look. It's a formalized way. I would also throw in something like AHP Madison or the. If you're in Health Care Association for Health Care Philanthropy, Madison or the FHA. F h AP, I didn't say that correctly.
There fellows program another great way. The cost of that if you want to increase your conversations. The Dale Carnegie Effective Communication and Human Relations programs available. Another great way of building communication and and relational skills. You can do something about utilizing. And I'm talking more about this from a stewardship perspective more often. Individual gift officers owning stewardship with their individual donors.
Things like Canva and Adobe Spark Training are ways you can create visual storytelling for individual donors. Things like plan giving. The thing that I think most of the time we see a lot of gift officers running from crescendo has a plan giving program and a certification that you can go learn from. Or if you wanted to do something around figuring out how to formalize this, there are other places you can go get a certification for plan giving from a local university, and most of the time the costs are dropping tremendously.
Like a community college. Maybe you want to affect yourself. Make a positive impact on your communication skills like public speaking. This is where Toastmasters, which is almost free. I did it for a number of years where you go maybe once a month, you do it, but you watch others do it as well. Give speeches, remarks. You learn how to be more affirmative.
Engage with your audience, how to remove some of the colloquialisms, the you know those ums from your vernacular. What a great way to improve yourself from a presentation standpoint. All this to say is there's a number of opportunities out there for gift officers to improve their skill sets. The last major group is leadership. This becomes a little more formalized.
I don't have as much familiarity with some of these, but I hear great things about them. If you wanted to earn a leadership certificate, the Harvard Kennedy School of Strategic Leadership in Nonprofits is available to you. There's a cost to that. It's not as much as you'd think, but what a great way to utilize your personal and personal professional experiences to better yourself.
Stanford has one is called the Executive Program for Nonprofit Leaders. Another example. Most of it's online. Now, I think there's maybe a gathering point at the beginning of the end, but something to think about. Board source has a certification for board governance. So maybe you're a volunteer or maybe you need your board to grow. What a great way to engage them in a high level.
Maybe there's something you want to do around financial management. Maybe you've come up through as being a gift officer. But don't have the financial backing you need a little bit of understanding of to enhance your ability to look and project great financials. Kellogg School of Management has one for the Nonprofits Finance Strategy certification. If you want to improve your own, development strategies, IU health, our IUPUI, or now just Indiana University, a little school of philanthropy has a leadership program.
Maybe it's you want to talk about talent development. Maybe you're trying to figure out how to get more people or figure out how to elevate your people. Well, there's a certification with, you earn a formal certification either at Yale or other non Yale related organizations or institutions, universities, community colleges. All this is to say that the limitations of what you can do to upskill those limitations are only set by you.
It doesn't have to be an I'm an overly educated person formerly too many degrees. It doesn't have to be that. And in fact, I think there's probably an argument. Although I loved my education and probably would go back and do it all again, that a formalized education isn't the most valuable. It's this upskilling. The only downside to any of this conversation is if you don't do anything.
And as the world gets more complicated, tech driven, as we see more and more pressure financially, if you're not utilizing these kind of things, whether it's in any one of these three categories infrastructure, so finance data, all that gift officers or leadership if you're not doing something. I just listed a whole ton, maybe more amongst the more boring subjects or the way in which I present this subject, but it was done for a reason.
It's there in front of you. It's not very costly. A lot of it's free. Questions. What are you going to do about it? Can you prioritize it? Give yourself a goal to upskill in 1 or 2 things this year to make you feel better about who you are professionally. Provide more for your organization in terms of the work you do, and create a lot of other options that potentially could be useful down the road, depending on a lot of things we don't know.
Upskilling. Taken from Amazon. Interesting subject. Worth your time and how you can make yourself more valuable. Don't forget to check out the blogs at How to be.com two per week 92nd reads. Hello philanthropy.com backslash blogs. You can get an RSS feed right to you and if you'd like, please email me at podcast at Healthline tv.com. I really appreciate your time when I do this.
I don't know how many people listen. I purposely have created kind of a Chinese wall, so I don't know, but I don't do it for the listenership. I do it because I love to teach my hope. And my dream is, is that these have an evergreen effect over time of helping people. Because what you're doing, whether you're listening in the beginning part of 2025 or you're listening in 2028, so you're trying to make your community a better place through your nonprofit work.
You are important. The world needs philanthropy. The world needs nonprofits to be that point where it is not quite good enough for capitalism, for free enterprise, for profit. And it's also misses the point when it comes to government philanthropy is that gap filler in the middle? What I believe and what I know is what you do every day is a part of that feeling.
Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. Then there are those who wondered what happened. You are someone who's making something happen for the people in the parts of community that are wondering what happened. I can't imagine another career because that kind of work. Boy, is that fulfilling. And I hope you understand that. Feel that even for just a moment today and every day, even with all the other trial and tribulations that we run into as nonprofits, I hope you feel the important value you deliver by what you do each and every day.
I'll look forward to seeing you the next time, right back here on the next edition of Around With Randall. And don't forget, make it a great day.