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Why AI Rarely Improves How Work Actually Gets Done
Jim Hemgen didn’t just buy Workera’s product, he helped shape it. Today he joins the company as VP of Partnerships.
Hemgen comes to the company from Booz Allen Hamilton, where he led talent development for more than 33,000 employees.
Path From Customer to Employee
The path from customer to employee is a well-trodden path in the B2B technology space. The company gains a person with deep knowledge of their products, someone who understands and can speak credibly to learning and development leaders about their pain points and goals.
Booz Allen was already a leader in delivering AI services to government clients, but building AI literacy across its entire internal workforce was a separate and newer challenge that Hemgen was tasked with solving.
The challenge was two-fold: build AI literacy across all roles, not just engineering, and build new AI capabilities against specific roles, such as AI engineers and AI practitioners.
“For that to work, we were thinking about how we go about assessing and understanding where one’s skills and proficiency were at any given point in time. It's one thing for a person to self-report they are AI literate, but I have no way of knowing how AI literate they really are,” said Hemgen.
After a review of providers, the company brought in Workera. A successful role-based pilot with 2,000 employees led to what Hemgen called a “light bulb” moment in terms of skills intelligence. Soon after Workera was rolled out for the entire workforce.
Shaping Workera’s Product Map, From Inside and Out
At the time, Hemgen and his team were working with a number of custom-built solutions and ones from other providers. The total cost of maintaining all of these solutions and the need to close existing gaps in skills assessments led him to ask “Could I shift my investment into a single provider that could cover the greater depth?”
Workera’s initial offering focused on mentoring and assessing AI-related skills, reflecting founder and CEO Kian Katanforoosh’s background as an adjunct AI lecturer at Stanford. Hemgen raised the possibility of expansion into skills beyond the initial offering, including what the company calls “power skills”: problem solving, effective communication, teamwork, etc.
Eventually the company gave Hemgen’s team the ability to create their own assessments, a capability now available to all customers.
Hemgen’s new role will see him continue this influence on the company’s roadmap, offering input and bringing in perspective from the clients he works with. “Additionally, since I'm working closely with all the partners, I have a view into their roadmaps. Being able to see this larger ecosystem, where everybody's heading directionally, I can orient our product roadmap compass in the same vein,” he said.
Where the Conversation in Learning and Development Is Headed
Hemgen’s experience at Booz Allen Hamilton shaped his views of the current opportunity for learning and development, but it requires them adjusting their focus.
Learning professionals’ desire to establish ROI has led them to focus on a few, measurable areas: enrollment, course attendance, hours of learning in a period. What’s missing from that conversation — and where the conversation is heading — is building capabilities to achieve specific outcomes, said Hemgen.
“How do I show that we've helped employees acquire the right skills and to the right proficiency that matches the complexity of their work?” Hemgen asked.
Previous approaches relied on self-reported skills, supplemented by peer-reported and manager-reported skills. All three are subject to bias and therefore variable. The lack of trust created by this approach leads to employees losing out on opportunities when their skills go unrecognized and leaders making personnel decisions on incomplete information.
The limited time available to learn new skills adds to the challenge, making it all the more important for what Hemgen calls “precision upskilling.” It’s the difference between a five day boot-camp on a broader topic vs. a one day focused course suited to the person’s current skills and abilities.
Hemgen is excited to see the skills conversation move beyond the talent development space. He calls it a paradigm shift, where the need to continuously upskill is part of every C-level conversation.
“All of a sudden, CTOs and CEOs are thinking about skills differently. Everybody is really concerned about how AI is showing up in work, how it is potentially changing the roles and shifting the skills required. The question becomes ‘What are we doing to upskill our workforce on a continual basis?’ The operative word there is continual,” he said.
Workera Builds Capacity for Its Next Phase
It's a moment Workera has been building toward. The company's nearly 100% revenue growth in the past year has created demand for the kind of go-to-market leadership that can translate that vision into sales.
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Workera recently added three other leaders to support this vision: Brad Bernstein as VP of Global Sales, Jessica Harvey as VP of Customer and Amanda Ellsworth as Head of Product Marketing. Bernstein joins the company from HackerRank, where he served as GM North America, VP of sales and revenue. Harvey joins from Mursion, where she served as chief revenue officer, and BetterUp, where she led account management for Fortune 500 workforce transformation programs. Ellsworth comes to the company from Workiva, where she was director of product marketing.
For Hemgen, the move opens up his ability to affect talent development at an unprecedented scale.
“Rather than affect 35,000 employees, I can potentially reach 35 million … through all the clients and partner ecosystems, which I'm responsible for,” said Hemgen. “I know the partners really well. I understand their value proposition. I understand how Workera can best combine these capabilities to achieve those outcomes. So for me, I'm in a unique position at the right time, at the right place.”
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