HR Pacesetter Story: Cisco's "Edge Up" Learning Transformation

0:04These are the skills that we see, that we predict, that you might want to focus your time and energy on building. And so really detecting that intelligence layer so that it can be serving all of our different persona groups, from employees to people leaders to executives, all the way up to our board of directors, as we think about how we show them that we are preparing our workforce for tomorrow and moving beyond them. It's not just preparing, it's us, Cisco, shaping the future. because the future is not yet defined with AI.

0:33Marci Paino: Hi, this is Josh Burson. Welcome to the What Works podcast, where Josh Burson Company analysts talk with innovative HR and business leaders about what's really working in talent, technology, and the future of work. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the What Works podcast. I'm Julia Burson, Director of Research at the Josh Burson Company. Today's episode features a story from one of our 2026 HR Pacesetter award winners, Cisco. Cisco is an enterprise technology company that fuses networking, security, observability, and collaboration to power how people and technology work together. Joining me today is Marci Pano, Cisco's Chief Learning Officer.

1:14Marci drives AI-era workforce readiness for more than 80 ,000 employees, leads the cross-industry AI workforce consortium, and brings over 20 years of experience shaping talent development and digital transformation at companies like American Express, Accenture, and Western Digital. In our conversation, we talk about Cisco's recent learning transformation and how the company shifted from a fragmented traditional learning approach to a unified, modern, AI-enabled learning ecosystem. And while technology is a part of the story, Marci shares how transforming a learning culture was really the foundation for Cisco's success.

1:50We hope you enjoy today's episode. Marci, welcome to the What Works podcast. Thanks so much for joining today. Thanks for having me. So before we kick off and talk about your learning transformation story, we'd love to hear just a little bit more about the learning organization at Cisco. You're a large company. What are you focused on? What have been your primary priorities since you've joined the team? I joined Cisco two years ago, almost to the day, actually. I'm going to be celebrating my two-year anniversary on Wednesday. And I was hired to transform learning for the company. The ELT and the executives recognized that our company really needed to prioritize learning in the AI era and recognized that we really needed to think about a new way of working, leading, and learning in this AI era.

2:36I came in to lead that transformation from a culture perspective, but also from an offering and really thinking about how do we build strategic capabilities across the workforce that really help us to prepare for and shape the future of work. I have the pleasure of leading AI Workforce Consortium, which is a coalition of 11 tech leading companies who have come together to study the impact of AI on the workforce. And then we publish our research reports alongside different resources like learning recommendations and playbooks and frameworks that help the communities that we serve really think about ethically and securely and responsibly adopting and adapting to AI.

3:15So I have had this really interesting experience of being able to lead externally and bring a lot of that thought leadership internal as well. And so really trying to think about how do we position learning as a strategic lever for our business growth. How cool that you get to not only share what you're learning externally with your clients and with the market, but also really set that example internally at Cisco and that you came in to really drive that transformation. What was the state of things when you joined? What were some of those challenges that the team was facing around learning that really made Cisco want to advance learning, kind of embrace AI and shift the way that the learning function operated?

3:53So when I came into Cisco, employee development was really fragmented and it lacked the organizational cultural values in making sure that the company employees and leaders all understood that learning is a core component of performance and job performance, right? So that was thing one, really looking at our culture and our organizational values that really show what our culture is day to day. Our operating model was also very decentralized. And so a lot of fragmented small learning teams across the company that really didn't talk to each other. So a lot of siloed organizations. And so what we've been spending time doing is really setting up a little bit more governance around how do we come together?

4:35One of the first things that we did was set up a learning practitioner community of practice, which brought all thousand learning practitioners across Cisco together in one common forum so that we could share and learn with and from each other along the way. On the technology side, we were working with a 20-year-old fragmented on-prem solution for LMS as well as LXP, et cetera. And so we did not have really the core infrastructure needed for us to be able to scale skill building across a company our size, which is about 80 to 86 ,000 employees across the globe. And then also the learning experience itself hadn't evolved.

5:14So we had an overabundance of option for our employees. I think we calculated over 220 ,000 learning courses that they could take advantage of, but it was very traditional. It was take a course, get your completion certificate and move on. And so we really recognize this as a moment for us to learn differently in an AI era. And it's not about compliance. It's about really learning the new skills of the future of the work. For such a large organization, I think that's a really relatable challenge. You mentioned fragmentation in various instances, whether that was through a technology stack that was built over a long period of time or just the number of different courses available and teams involved.

5:56And so cool how you were able to bring that together. So we'd love to hear a little bit more about how you tackled each of those challenges. What was the solution you built and how would you give an overview of your transformation? The way that I like to talk about it is in four strategic pillars. In these four strategic pillars, we essentially, in one year and a half, were able to lead a bold transformation and were able to modernize decades of legacy technology and fragmented learning and deliver a unified strategy that has aligned our learning strategy with our business strategies and scale that across our workforce of over 80 ,000 employees.

6:34We did this by bringing together a new unifying brand that we call Edge Up. We see learning at the edge of innovation and we see skill building as the opportunity for us to be at the edge of innovation. And so with this new unified brand, then we were able to start to deliver on experiences that really helped us to drive the culture transformation. As I mentioned, four strategic priorities that we really focused in on. The first is all around AI-powered lifelong learning mindset. That's that organizational culture value. And how do we embed that into the way that we work and the expectations we have of our employees and leaders?

7:11And then the second is around Cisco strategic capabilities. And so really understanding what our business priorities are and our growth and innovation priorities are and making sure that we understand the skills that we need to build in order to drive those priorities forward. And so really building out kind of the engine that allows us to get more predictive about what those capabilities are and then more strategic and intentional about how we build those capabilities, which leads us to our third pillar, which is always on modern learning. So really thinking about how do we go about building the skills across our workforce in a modern experiential way.

7:50And then the fourth is around our unified skilling environment. And so really looking at our tech stack and the data layers that we need to make sure that we can power up those experiential learning experiences. I love the way that you've broken that out into four clear pillars. And while you've summarized it so succinctly, I know there's a lot that goes into each of those. So maybe we can dive into each one a little bit further. So starting with the culture transformation piece, how did you go about defining some of those key guiding principles that you mentioned? And how did those kind of shape the overarching learning culture, learning approach at Cisco today?

8:29Our transformation journey really started with our new guiding principles as a company. And so what we did was we did a lot of employee listening. So really understood kind of the state of the state with our workforce. And then we did extensive external benchmarking and what high-performing companies are doing, not only from a learning perspective, but just in general, right? How do we need to think about our people experiences? And then we interviewed the ELT, so including our CEO. And so we got to hear firsthand from them around how they saw the evolution of the ways of working, leading, and learning, and how things needed to shift.

9:07And so we used those three data sets to basically triangulate and come up with what our new guiding principles are, which are think really big, play to win, and drive durable growth. And so we defined what those behaviors were, and then we defined skills to underpin them. And we went through a ruthless prioritization to make sure that it wasn't an overwhelming amount of skills that we needed to develop. So we were very intentional. We wanted there to be three to four guiding principles and then three to four skills underneath each one of those. And so we ended up with three guiding principles and then four skills under each one of those.

9:43So 12 in total. And so that was our first big kind of transformation effort that was led from the top from our ELT members. And so they were the ones to launch it. They owned it. Their fingerprints were all over it. And then the next step for us was to take a look at our leader expectations, so those that lead teams, and what layers onto the foundational guiding principles that are for everybody that are more specific to leaders. And we define those that same way. And so we have our behavior statements and then the skills that underpin them. And we recognize that the skills are going to continuously evolve.

10:17So as we gain proficiency within certain skill areas, we're going to continuously assess what we need to focus on across our workforce. And then most recently, we've defined kind of what we call an activated workforce and really looked at what are the core elements of what drive engagement, motivation, and performance across our workforce? And how do we make sure that we're very intentional about making sure that we create the conditions and the environment where people can really embrace lifelong learning in their day-to-day workflows? I love that approach. And I think, one, the fact that you as the learning team or the lead on helping define those guiding principles, of course, in partnership with the ELT and a really deliberate listening effort.

11:01I think that's very cool because then what you've done from there is those can often be high level, but you've created concrete skills that go along with each one, which gives you things to actually build and teach people, which is fantastic. And so those are high level. And then you mentioned the leadership principles. So applying to leaders across the organization and then kind of skills for everyone. When you think about those function specific skills and behaviors, how did you go about building a skills framework? Part of our modernizing of the technology included us building out a skills intelligence, what I like to call engine.

11:38And so essentially, it is a quantum model that brings in external data like patents and other skills frameworks like from O-Net, WEST, et cetera, and combines it with Cisco-specific data and then allows us to look at what skills we need to build across our workforce. And so the engine essentially brings together three component parts. It looks at our skill supply. So what skills does our workforce have by way of our employees telling us on their skills profile? Skills demand. So what skills do we actually need to build across our workforce to make us successful? What we did in order to define that was we took all of our jobs and mapped them to skills.

12:20And we worked with our business partners, our people business partners, to really vet that and validate that with the business. And so we did 100 % of that job role mapping to skills and then had the business subject matter experts validate it. So that helped us to define that second component of the formula. And then the third is skills forecast. And that's us looking at that labor market data so that we can see what skill trends are happening. We can see where skills are increasing in demand and decreasing in demand. And those three component parts come together to give us some really deep insights and intelligence that helps us to then help inform not only the learning strategies, but also workforce planning strategies, internal movement strategies.

13:06And so this engine feeds more than just the learning ecosystem. It really feeds the entire workforce intelligence ecosystem. And so we really spent a lot of time to build that out. With that, then, we are able to then partner with each ELT member to define how do we group and categorize the skills that are most important to you in your function into strategic capabilities so that we can then have a learning strategy that really goes after building those capability sets. The magic formula that we've been using or process that we've been using to really build out that engine and build out that intelligence layer.

13:44So we're just at the point now where we have that kind of built out soup to nuts and we're trying to get much more of the skill supply. So the employees talking to us and telling us what skills they have to really make sure that we have a full data set. But then we're able to take all of it and we're able to assess kind of the business growth priorities alongside that data. And then we're able to consult with the ELT members around how might you think about a combined strategy for workforce and workforce design. So thinking about what do we build by way of skills, but what might we want to borrow, buy, blend, right?

14:22Thinking about things much more comprehensively. So we really took a very broad approach as far as we wanted this to be the one source of truth for us around skills. And so we talk about skills as currency, and it's important for us to have a single source of truth for all of that. Creating a single source of truth for skills, I think that can be a very complex effort for organizations because they touch every part of the org, every part of HR. So really owning that, I think within your function has probably shown to be very beneficial and create that consistency. let's talk a little bit about technology because you have shared a little bit about how the skills piece works here but I know you were able to really transform a rather fragmented tech stack pretty quickly in a matter of months into a more modern stack that really serves the way that you see learning going now and in the future so tell us a little bit about what your new technology stock looks like and how you were able to move so quickly to replace and move forward.

15:24So in just six months, which is three times faster than the 18-month industry average, we replaced our fragmented 20-year-old stack. And it was a combination of on-prem, but also there was an LXP that kind of sat in the ecosystem. And then there were some homegrown tools that were bolted onto it. So we were able to accelerate the process by taking what we call a minimal lovable product approach. So really embracing that kind of agile methodology and really defining what was at the core of rebuilding the foundation that would allow us to then continuously improve kind of month over month and quarter over quarter after we were up and running.

16:06So we were very intentional about what was in versus out of scope. And so we were very clear around what integrations we needed upon Go Live, what configurations needed to be set up, and what the UI UX needed to be for our learners. And so we built that out knowing that we were going to be launching something that wasn't perfect, but it was much more modern than what we were currently offering. So we knew it was one of the batting principles is progress over perfection. And so we really embraced that approach in how we implemented. And we really leaned into the collective expertise and experience across the industry.

16:47So we had implementation partners who came in and helped us. So we partnered very closely with those who understood best practices of implementation and change management, but also who understood the technology inside and out so that we can make decisions as quickly as possible. So our new tech stack is a SaaS LMS, and LXP on top of that. We're unifying that architecture right now. And then at the core of all of that is our skills intelligence engine, that quantum model that I mentioned that we built to define our strategic capabilities. So that is the tech stack. It is out under our EdgeUp learning brand.

17:24We call it EdgeUp Skills Studio, and it's powered by Cornerstone. You mentioned at the beginning, one of the challenges, you had a lot of content, a lot of courses, but a lot of them were originally delivered in a more traditional way, right? Like course-based learning content. And what we know from our research on dynamic enablement, which is the future of corporate learning as we see it, is that people are looking for different modalities and AI has actually really enabled that to come to life, whether it's learning in the flow of work, a more agentic experience, or more experiential learning.

17:57And I'd love to hear about how your new tech stack is really enabling this more modern learning approach and different ways and modalities for people to learn. So our tech stack plugs into Cisco's other IT platforms, including our version of ChatGPT. And so we really wanted to look at what behaviors the company was trying to push our workforce. And one of them was to use that as the entry point and how they interact with the other technologies on the back end. So that was a big step for us in really thinking about, okay, in the flow of work, you can chat with the agent and get back recommendations directly from our learning tech stack.

18:35So that's kind of minimal proof point for us. But there's also an element of kind of how we've been looking at designing the learning experiences themselves. And so we've been experimenting a lot with how do we take an AI first approach? So in everything we do, we make sure there's an opportunity to practice whatever concept that you're learning by using AI, right? And so you're practicing using AI in everything we do, even if it's a leadership development type of experience. And so we start to see it wasn't just technology, but the culture and the technology come together and help us to really think about how do we deliver always on modern learning?

19:16And so that is that third strategic pillar that I mentioned that really brought things together for us in a way that allowed us to show how learning serves a full spectrum of needs. So we believe that there are, there's still a place for formal learning and for us to all come together and learn with and from each other. And we believe you need to have the ability to pull what you need, when you need it, where you need it. And so our tech stack basically enables that full spectrum of learning offerings. And then from a cultural perspective, we were very intentional around what do we want to deliver to our workforce at scale.

19:54So we introduced a new concept of Edge Up Labs. And this is a quarterly experience where we go live broadcast for our leaders, our employees, and then we give them a team kit that they can then take, basically a team labs kit that they take. And they can, with their intact teams, take everything they learned during the live broadcast and put it into practice within their own team. And so we offered that kind of quarter over quarter as a key motion for us to show that learning is important and it is something that is sponsored by and advocated for by our ELT members. We also have embedded key messaging in our, we have monthly employee meetings, we have different leader check-ins that we do.

20:35And so our ELT is basically giving the sound bites around how important learning is in every one of those motions. And so you get that steady kind of hum type of experience because you're always hearing about how important it is. And then you can go over to Skills Studio. You can fill out your skills profile and understand where you are today, what your career aspirations are, and then how you might want to plan your development to fill the gap so you can move into your next role. And that's always there and available for you. So you always get personalized recommendations based off of your skills profile.

21:09So you can enable that full end-to-end experience where we're pushing what we think is most important based off the company on a quarterly basis. And then employees can pull what they need based off of kind of the continuous plugs that we're getting from our ELT numbers. One of the other things that we hear continuously is that people feel like they don't have time to learn. And so something that we have been pilot testing over the last fiscal year and are going to launch across the entire enterprise in September is the concept of time to grow. And this is a protected four-hour block the second Wednesday of every month that goes across our entire workforce.

21:44And so we preserve that time. And then we offer recommendations for how to use that time based off of what the enterprise priorities are and what the functional priorities are. And then, of course, you're allowed to pull what you need. And that is something that I think is a really important component of the culture transformation, because we are showing that it's such an important part of our work that we need to have dedicated time for it. That's a fantastic thing to offer to employees. And as you mentioned, a way to reinforce this culture around continuous learning at Cisco. And I love that you have those consistent touch points, the quarterly edge up labs, as well as, you know, always on learning for employees to access within the flow of work.

22:27I think the theme here is that it's not one versus the other, but you kind of need a combination of both. And you're allowing for employees to get what they need when they need it, but also really immerse themselves in the learning culture and also collaborate with one another around the themes that are most important at Cisco. You've done a lot in this transformation since you joined two years ago. So Marcy, I'd love to hear how you're measuring success of EdgeUp and what results have you seen so far from this transformation? We have a comprehensive measurement strategy where we look at kind of both quantitative and qualitative.

22:59And we look at the baseline type of metrics that you would expect, right? Participation, satisfaction, perceived value. Because we're newer on our journey, some of the more sophisticated types of studies that we want to do, we need a little bit more time to see how things are going. That being said, from a skills intelligence perspective, we have 5 ,200 skills that have been compiled into a single language. So one single skills currency. And we now have 100 % of our employees mapped to critical skills, which was a huge undertaking. If you think about the scale of our company, we also launched skill profile in our skill studio, which is our ability to see what skill supply is across the workforce.

23:45And our employees are up and running in that. From a strategic capability perspective, we've done two pilots to define strategic capabilities specifically within our customer experience organization. And then we are also building out our own within what we call our people, policy, and purpose group. So we have this mentality of always being kind of customer zero, right? I like to say we always drink our own champagne or taste our own champagne first, right? And so we're building out ours as well. And so those strategic capabilities are what will anchor what we recommend time to grow each month across the company.

24:20From an EdgeUp Labs perspective, we in the last year hosted 18 live sessions we do a variety of sessions so that we can get that global scale so we offer it a variety of times over 37 000 people attended so about 40 percent of our workforce participated and again these are all elective learning experiences and more than 90 called it a valuable use of their time from a time to grow perspective we We piloted it with the sales organization and then, of course, within our own organization. The results we saw were fascinating. So we saw that more than half of the people chose to participate in at least one of the Time to Grow days.

25:00And on those days, we saw a 4.3 times lift in daily skill studio engagement. And people didn't just come, just one and done, check the box. We actually saw them come back an average of over seven times in that time frame. So we saw that lift. There's a lift when leaders are role modeling. So when the leaders are in and learning and talking about it, we also see that lift. In AI utilization, we saw that lift at two times. And in the early data we have around time to grow, the lift is like 1.7 times. So we're seeing similar right around that kind of two times marker, which is really fascinating because it really shows the importance of the leaders playing an active role in role modeling the behaviors that we want to see across the organization.

25:46So what we're seeing is not just a spike, we're actually starting to see habit form and we're starting to see adoption across the organization. And we're excited to continuously measure our impact. What we're going to start to do is become more sophisticated and look at how do we measure workforce activation? I talked a little bit about that kind of being core to our culture and thinking about employee performance, engagement and motivation. And what is the formula that we measure that by? And then partnering that with what we call workforce agility. So really getting a sense of how are we making sure that we're ready for the future?

26:20And how do we measure that agility and our ability to adapt and adjust and be resilient as an organization and using those metrics together to really showcase how we're leading the way and pace setting from an industry perspective? Wow, really impressive results in a relatively short period of time, Marcy. And I think the results speak for themselves in terms of the culture transformation that you've been able to have with EdgeUp. I think the fact that employees are voluntarily participating in these things really shows that they want to learn and that the value that you've demonstrated of learning to the employees is really sticking.

26:56And in terms of the workforce agility, we would love to follow along on your journey because I think that's something a lot of companies would be interested in learning about how to measure because that's something that every organization needs to really build today. So really cool and fantastic progress. What's next on your journey, Marcy? Anything that you've got coming up in the next six to 12 months, that's the next phase of edge up. We're looking at what does edge up look like in an agentic AI era or a post agentic AI era. We've joked a lot about, we think this year is going to be the year of agents.

27:28We've built a lot over the last three to six months, but now we really need to be much more strategic and intentional about what is the architecture? What's the orchestration? How are our agents going to talk to each other? Where is the human going to continue to be in the lead? as those agents run in really thinking about how we not only run our learning organization, but think about the offerings that we produce and deliver to our employees. And so really our latest thinking is all about how do we build an ecosystem where we continuously improve the data within our skills intelligence and the trust around that data?

28:02And so what other data sources can we use to validate skill proficiency level, skill gaps, finding across our workforce where people have transferable skills, adjacent skills, bridge skills, and using all of that data to help inform then what we are calling a skills flywheel. So really thinking about how do we find those that are pacesetters across the organization and collect and harness their institutional knowledge in a way that we can input it into a content engine that allows us to produce more modern learning experiences at scale. And so that's sort of that middle kind of layer. And then, of course, continuous improvement from a skills studio perspective.

28:44And really, how do we make sure that we're driving dynamic personalization? How do we take all that skills intelligence and put it in the fingertips of our employees and show them, hey, Mars, your job is going to be changing. And these are the skills that we see, that we predict, that you might want to focus your time and energy on building. And so really detecting that intelligence layer so that it can be serving all of our different persona groups from employees to people years to executives, all the way up to our board of directors as we think about how we show them that we are preparing our workforce for tomorrow.

29:15And moving beyond that, it's not just preparing, it's us, Cisco, shaping the future because the future is not yet defined with AI. Absolutely. Fantastic, Marcy. I think no lack of things to focus on over the next year plus, but it really seems like, for lack of a better term, Cisco is at the cutting edge of kind of the future of learning. And I think really exemplifying what we see as kind of that dynamic enablement, which is really the AI first learning experience and just embedding agents and all the things you're thinking about. Really cool and excited to continue to follow along. If you had to give maybe one piece of advice or one learning that you've had throughout this journey that another learning leader could take away, what would that be?

29:59I think that the cross-functional nature of how transformation comes to life cannot be underplayed. The partnerships are imperative. You mentioned the guiding principles and partnering with the ELT. I partnered very closely with my counterpart who runs talent management because learning and performance are symbiotic, right? They work together. And so it was really important for us to think about things holistically. I also have been partnering very closely with the individual who leads workforce planning. and talent acquisition. And so it's important for us to really understand kind of what the cross-functional priorities are and then build those relationships so that we can tackle things together because that's how you drive transformation.

30:43It's not learning, sitting in a silo, doing this on our own. It's us really looking across the ecosystem and saying, how do we link arms and get this done together? And it's really that kind of one Cisco mentality that has been very important for our transformational success. And so that would be a big recommendation I would make to other learning leaders. And then I also think just embracing progress over perfection is really important. Really get clear on how do we get something as a minimal lovable product out there so that we can start to collect feedback and then continuously improve upon it.

31:16Embrace that way of working because that's the new way of working. Two really important learnings, I think. that cross-functional partnership that you've really exemplified throughout your journey and the fact that learning cannot operate in a silo and also embracing the minimal lovable product, which I love that statement. I think that's something we can all work on because things are changing so quickly. It's never going to be perfect, but getting something out there is more important. Fantastic story. Congratulations on your Pacesetter Award as well, Marcy, and really enjoyed our conversation today.

31:46Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.