In this episode of Learning Matters, host Doug Wooldridge chats with Chris Harry, Chief Learning Officer at TEKsystems, about how the global IT services leader is transforming talent development through data, technology, and human connection.

Chris shares how TEKsystems built TalentX, a data-driven platform that brings over 100 data points per employee into one system — creating a “baseball card” view of skills, performance, and career readiness across the company. He also explains how the organization’s 20-week cohort-based learning model is reshaping how employees learn, connect, and grow.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

✅ Why organizational development, learning, and enablement must operate as one connected ecosystem

✅ How TEKsystems uses data to power mobility, career clarity, and leadership development

✅ What role clarity really means — and why it was the surprising key to transformation

✅ How cohort learning builds stronger community and accelerates performance

✅ Why AI should enhance, not replace, human connection in learning

Tune in to discover how TEKsystems is aligning talent strategy with business goals — and what every L&D leader can learn from their journey.

🔗 Connect with Chris Harry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-harry-34646b4/

At ttcInnovations, we help businesses create lasting change with immersive learning experiences. Through instructional strategy, design, and content development we empower employee confidence, performance, and results.

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We did not have this extensive library and information that ultimately allows us to match skill and talent and resource to where the business is heading what we need. And that could be in the form of potential groups that are for a particular role in the company, could be for people that can move globally. There are a lot of factors that one, when you look back, we did not have views into that. And it took people to have.

of conversations and things were in spreadsheets and you can imagine how that data would be sitting around and part of it was to organize that information. So there was a lot of unlearning of things that we had done in the past and moving forward. We started almost four years ago with something as simple as saying that we need to actually, we did an innovation session and at the end of the day, the thing that came out number one, which kind of shocked us, we thought it was gonna be enhance the coaching environment in the company.

And the number one thing that came back from about 80 leaders was the idea of role clarity. What is it exactly that our roles do in the company to support the business and where we're headed in the future?

Welcome back to Learning Matters. I'm Doug Wooldridge, your host. And today I'm very excited to be speaking with our guest. He's an executive leader, facilitator, coach, and mentor. He's known for his data-driven frameworks for assessing, measuring, and tracking the learning and development impact on business outcomes. He provides strategic design, oversight, and guidance to the global talent processes of a more than $5 billion IT services enterprise. And he's the

C. L.

Thanks, Doc. Great to be here. Looking forward to the conversation.

Awesome. And as always, we'll be discussing the ever evolving world of L and D. I'd like to start off with this, Chris, what strategy do you think matters most in learning and development today?

Yeah, when we talked before, I think I've been trying to figure out a word for this or a kind of a theme, but I would tell you OD learning and enablement are the main trifecta for us right now. And I think we've been really thinking about this for the last couple of years and the idea that those three facets of the business could function by themselves for a very long time is kind of over. And I think that we are plugging

Our systems, our people, our resources, all into a very connected environment now. And as we design and use technology and process and people and resource, we are very, very keeping that at the front of mind of how those three things connect to get people to do their jobs really well and connect with our customers and our consultants globally. I think that's that I don't have a word for it, but those three things are incredibly important and they are now a weaved framework.

Yeah, it kind of blows the mind that they weren't woven together in the first place. It seems like it just started a couple of years ago where folks finally started being like, why aren't we always talking back and forth? We have these departments. They've been siloed. Let's un-silo them. So how are you doing that at Tech Systems?

Yeah, we so so there's a couple of things one we have a strategic implementation office that carries the weight of all of our large projects. So that is a is a main connective fiber tissue for all of our departments. But we now have some other what we would say kind of Tiger Teams coalition groups that come from all different parts of the business that function now in a team that have these three focuses. And they're all typically from our VP team that then

disseminate and work down through the organization. And that is where the work from the SIO comes down into this group. And we really do look at systems across the company, where they are connected, what we're rolling out, who's affected, and how do we make these things come together? and I think I'd mentioned this before, was this idea of in the flow. When you think about that, where do you have your really focused development environments?

for leadership and employees, and then ultimately, where are you taking all of this really rich information and plugging it right at the moment of attack, the moment of truth? And that is where these teams come together and try to design these really, really cool systems through our architecture that ultimately get that to the very, very point when people are either talking to a customer or consultant or someone in term.

So when we were talking before, you mentioned that you guys have, I believe it's 65 data points that you're looking at per employee. So how did you come to those 65 criteria points or data points? And then how are you collating all of that data? That seems like a lot of data for a lot of employees.

Yeah, that's within our talent frameworks. We have a system that we've created internally. We use a system called PeopleFluent and we have DeGreed and we have Cornerstone and we have our stack. But those data points, that's now actually well over 100 because we've connected since the last talk, we've actually connected a couple of other systems. And ultimately that leads into what we call as a talent profile. And we literally have a baseball card view of every employee in the company globally.

And that covers everything from aspiration and career path and readiness and everything from performance and job histories and certifications and badges and all kinds of really cool information that ultimately get us to a set of views that allow each section of the business to do what's called a talent marketplace. We do that yearly and ultimately it comes out of the system. There are views that come out of that system that we go and meet and we look at how we move talent, what's needed, what's coming like true on workforce planning.

that this data supports. And then out of those meetings comes things like leadership development, things that go into coaching, things that go into three sixties and very, very focused environments for some individuals. And then very large scale upskilling for groups of people where we find thematics that say this entire population could use this based on the conversation, based on the data we have, and maybe even where we're heading from a business perspective, we need to put a little bit of sharpening on some teeth of the saw.

And ultimately that comes out of those conversations. And that's been work that we've been doing for the better part of four years. And it really has in the last 18 months paid off from the perspective of moving people globally. This idea of mobility and agility of your talent, that is something that incredibly proud that the team that's doing that work.

Four years is a long time to do such a big overhaul. How do you start and then get to the middle, get to the end of this? And I'm sure there were a lot of tough hours, a lot of tough meetings. But when you're investing this much time into this massive program, how do you even start with it? And what

What ultimately were you guys looking to accomplish with this massive overhaul? mean, just having this database sounds really awesome, but what was the initial reasoning behind doing this massive overhaul for the company?

One is the pure view of our talent that we did not have in the past. We did not have this extensive library and information that ultimately allows us to match skill and talent and resource to where the business is heading and what we need. And that could be in the form of potential groups that are for a particular role in the company, could be for people that can move globally. There are a lot of factors that, one, when you look back, we did not have views into that. And it took people to have

tons of conversations and things were in spreadsheets and you can imagine how that data would be sitting around and part of it was to organize that information. So there was a lot of unlearning of things that we had done in the past and moving forward. We started almost four years ago with something as simple as saying that we need to actually, did an innovation session and at the end of the day, the thing that came out number one, which kind of shocked us, we thought it was gonna be enhance the coaching environment in the company.

And the number one thing that came back from about 80 leaders was the idea of role clarity. What is it exactly that our roles do in the company to support the business and where we're headed in the future? And that if you can imagine having that for almost 90 plus percent of every role in the company, which is well over 400 different success profiles today, we started there. And we really started with our biggest populations and put these documents and things in place. So we chose a partner with a competency and behavior model.

We did that first and then we went into this work and the future view was to get to this point. So there were a lot of things, there were success profiles, then there were review cycles and skills reviews. There was additional technology that we needed. There was the connection of our leadership academies and things that into this world of knowing what exact competencies and behaviors for which types of leaders, first time managers, all the way to VPs. How do we connect all of those pieces? That was a very methodical way.

for about two and a half years. There were chunks of things that happened along two and a half years. And then finally we got to this technology that I mentioned earlier, where it brought it all together and degreed in this world of people flow, it came together and we actually had this ability to have these views. So a lot of unlearning of old ways of doing things, the new way of this system that we call TalentX, we came up with that, that's what it is. But at the end of the day, what that does is it lays out a view of all of this for an employee.

and a view of all this for a leader. And it was really funny because it's like you put one sheet of kind of music together and people were like, here it is. Like now we understand all these pieces and parts that had been going on for two years. And this now this connected view of these three things that we talked about right in the beginning really come to life. And now we have meaningful conversations twice a year.

We have all of this data. We have these TME meetings. We have learning academies for all of our rules across the organization. But again, it's been a hike. mean, you're 48 plus months. We're not done. We still are learning. We're still breaking things, which is cool. But yeah, it's been a lot of work, but very, very, very fun.

So with all of this data and all the ability to look at this data, how is that transforming the actual learning and the upskilling, the transitioning from the learner's current position into a new role or potentially into a leadership role?

Let's give an example, the sales production world for us. That is a four job career path from a very early on coming in for someone that's very new into sales all the way to a sales executive, which we call a BDA. That has four steps along the way. And what this data does for us, first and foremost, is the idea of role clarity defines what the curriculums are for the core function of the job. so you have those functional

items that the job must do to be successful in the company. Then as you go up the career family, you actually start to get involved in things like coaching and leading and having people to report to you. So that gets added into the mix. But what really where it comes down to it is are the performance metrics and the rubrics and how you are badged and credentialed throughout that journey to move from one job to the next that's then tied to compensation.

which is probably one of the hardest things to do for most people is to tie comp to this kind of work. And that again, is part of that four year time cycle. We were able to get the point to look at when you're doing X types of business and you change to X type of role in the company, that is equating to changes in whether it be salary or bonus or commissions or whatever those things are for the different roles. And we've actually gotten that to be in place. It's in place from us two years now.

and it's working really, really well. And I think what we're seeing is that from the notion of very clear development programs, we're seeing things like people get earning their first services when quicker than we have in the past, which is a major indicate for material. And we really now are looking to the future of the next two years is to say, well, how are we going to build sellers that sell like a sales executive within two years where that makes...

they can people eight to 10 years in the past to get to that. So really, really quick, really quick ramping, which will take some new development environments, new coaching environments, probably some new technologies and things in play will help enhance things. So yeah, that's what that's, that would be one example that seems to be paying off.

No kidding. mean, it just sounds super exciting. like you're just making an incredibly efficient pipeline for folks who are just coming into the organization or folks who have already been in the organization. And what top trends are you most excited about? So speaking of technology and potential new technology that you guys are going to have to use, what's on your radar?

Yeah, obviously, the very fast answer is what's what's coming with all this AI, right? You and I you and I talked before, and I think it's it's very double inch, because there's a lot. And what I think is is one of my name and my partners, we sit back and we laugh and we're like, don't AI just for the sake of AI. Don't do that. And that is very, very true. So I would say AI in general is just a really interesting forefront that I don't know that we know where we're going to end up. But

There are some really interesting things that are coming out these bots these agents these abilities to curate Information in a very different way some of the design tools that experienced designers use and the speed at which you can do things differently now The fact that we can take experts in the field and give them tools that can actually start the ball down the road And then we pick it up and get it get it rolling That is a very new

way of getting things done much quicker and having an agility that we just haven't had in the past. And I think the other piece that is really exciting is this idea of true, true cohort learning that is done through technology with some really neat enhancements that some of the vendors have in these new functions, if you will. And it's starting to look like the ability to keep people together.

One builds tremendous community. And I'll give you an example. One of the groups that we have is we hire what we call SDRs. mean, a lot of companies have SDRs. And one of the main things that we always struggled with was for the first time that they all would come together is it was kind of like meeting this new team you have for the first time. And the first time I was in class was like, it's this odd kind of dance of the middle school group. And it's like really weird. All these new friends I have.

and getting them to be comfortable and actually role play and do things that are highly meaningful to the success of their job was very difficult. And it's three really expensive days and in high value time. So we've changed this model to now be a 20 week cohort model. And the first, would say six or eight groups that are now through the model, the first indicator of them showing up, they are completely different. They are very different in their capability to jump right into class.

It's almost like, you know, coming back to a school class reunion, if you will. And we've got multiple instances of being together over a period of time. And we've shifted some really neat intentions from leaders in the field not having so much weight on skills development early to our team, to where they stay with a facilitator for 20 weeks, kind of almost a sherpa, if you will, for 20 weeks.

which is really cool and it seems to be a really neat connective tissue as I said. And now then at the 10 week mark, we shift that to the facilitator becomes in this cohort, the coach and the leader picks up the day to day. So it's a really cool dance and we just got our first 100 day survey back from it. I think, so I'm really excited about applying that functionality and some of these new tools that we have to some other groups.

the leadership and support and operations because we got some big projects coming there that that might pay off very, very differently for us in the future.

I think cohort is the way to go. Not that it solves for every issue or is a solution for every learning need, but I think a lot of what we lost when we started getting into more like micro learning and more just individualized learning is that bit of

social connection with the other learners, because you're going to be working with these folks. So it's not just, you know, who's on the other side of an email. So I love the idea of bringing folks together sooner in the process and continuing to develop that community throughout their time together, because it really makes work more efficient. It makes more fun. it gives a face to folks who

You're not maybe always seeing every day, you know, hey, we went through that training together. Wasn't that awesome? So I think that's incredible. And I, like I said, I think it's the way of the future.

The in-person environment has always been something for us for 40 plus years the company's been around. But the connection for the 20 weeks, the connection in the technology and some of the enhancements that the technology brings to that social and connection of the humans is just some cool stuff we've not had in the past. And I think it's just kind of amping up some of the really interesting things. And when you pair really talented, contest-winning salespeople as your facilitators,

with the new folks, it kind of can't help but win. So I'm like, we shall see. We will know by the end of the year, because that will give us a six month look back. But we've already started collecting data and we've done our first set of surveys. So like I said, we're breaking some things, we're fixing those and winning on the other end. So it's good stuff.

Yeah, no, I think that's incredible. I really respect what you guys are doing over there at Tech Systems. It just seems like you're utilizing a lot of what being on the vanguard of up and coming technologies allows you to do. just think, and you have to, it allows you to be much more flexible within your learning environment and allows you to really take all of these incredible tools that are

that are really data collectors and make use out of them. Because what's the use of having all this data if you're not going to utilize it? now I'd to get into some more personal side of things. So tell me about you, Chris. Take me back to younger Chris days. What led you into the world of learning and development? And how did you end up being the C.L.O. of tech systems?

Yeah, so the younger Chris went to college like many of us. I studied business and got a master's degree in OD from the same university. But I was fortunate during that time to have an incredible mentor that I worked for in intramural sports, Dr. Ned Britt, and taught me a lot about working with a lot of different people and how to work within a setting of people that I just didn't know I didn't grow up with as similarly.

So I learned a lot there, but through that process became a G. Ed. and I taught in KCology department. And then I ended up staying there for four years and became a full-time employee and taught a whole bunch of different things. And I would say that the teaching part of things was just cool because you teach people learn, but it was kind of a strange thing. was in my twenties and so were the people in the room. So you can imagine that dynamic of like, who's this guy teaching us? Like he's R.H. How does he know anything?

but it did give me a little bit of the bug, I would say, from the perspective of education. And then from there, I went and got a referral into a company, ironically, that was a competitor of one of our brands way back in the early 90s. And that's where things kind of, got into the business world and ended up writing the national training program for that company and overseeing five to six offices in the same area that I'm in today in Baltimore area and had that experience there.

kind of that was the beginning. Then I went and did a consulting job, the typical 30 weeks a year traveling, Sunday, Thursday was a PeopleSoft, consulted, did a lot of things in learning with that. And then came to Allegius Group as a referral. A friend of mine, ironically, that was teaching in the OD program that I took in the late, in the mid 80s, referred me here.

And I never looked back. I've taken this opportunity for everything it's worth. I've had some of the greatest humans to work for. And we started in a time in the early 2000s where we were what was considered a shared service. And we operated like a project group. And there were a whole bunch of us. And unfortunately in the downturn that all changed. So in the mid 2000s, I walked up the hill with two people that are currently still on staff here and we...

started this thing at Tech Systems and we've grown it to a team of 50 plus and it has been a great run and now I have the opportunity to work with global teams and work with our CEO of Allegious and then all of our operating companies. We have six specific brands so I get to do some advising and some consulting with them and get them to do things with us. So that is really, really rewarding and yeah, don't mind telling them to work. I love it. Hello.

That's awesome. And if you could go back in time and have a little discussion with yourself, let's say coming out of college, what advice would you need to hear at that time?

Yeah, coming out of college, think I would just say that first and foremost, take risks, be willing to make mistakes and learn and be curious. Like I would just say, that's the other thing too, is when I came out of college, things did not move at the pace they're moving today. And one of the things that I talk about with all of our new hires is if you're not learning something every day.

Whether it's a single article, it's a podcast, it's a something in what you do or something personally, because there needs to be some some harmony between the two. You know, you're falling behind, you know, you're not taking advantage. And I think that's what I would say back then. And I think I look back at myself and I'm like, I didn't read enough back then. You know, I didn't do some of those things. And I kind of wonder, you know, well, what I know today, but but that's hindsight. It's like the second part, it always goes in. But but but

I tell myself that I'd say, know what, read more, be more curious, take some more risks. And most certainly, I have always been a person like, I'm okay. If I break some things or do that kind of stuff, we'll get better from that. And I would say, you know, double down on that because we have we as a team, I love that our team holds that very dear, like we're going to push it and see where we go. Things don't go well, we'll work through them and our customers internally, they're starting to know that. So I'm

Yeah, that's what I would tell myself, I think.

I think that's great advice. And lastly, before I get you out of here today, where can people connect with you?

Yeah. So Instagram, LinkedIn are the two that I do things in. I'm not an overly big social media person, but those are the two places. And email or phone as well. I enjoy connecting with a lot of different people and like, this is a really cool experience to talk with you. But I super appreciate it so much.

Yeah, we'll have those links in the show description so you guys can reach out and and see what Chris is up to and thank you so much for sharing your incredible insights Chris. We really appreciate it. Thank you

Thank you. been a great conversation.

The pleasure is all mine. If you learn something new or had a laugh, share the show with someone you know. And this has been another episode of learning matters. As always, like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and don't hesitate to reach out to us here at TTC innovations to see how we can assist you with all your learning needs. See you next time.