Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
ASU+GSV: Ashley Chiampo, CLO of Emeritus
Ashley Chiampo is the Chief Learning Officer at the Emeritus Institute of Management, an online learning company. Shehas over 20 years of experience supporting people and organizations to reach learning goals and achieve greater effectiveness. Her background includes working with CXOs and senior leaders in small private companies, international development organizations, and multi-billion dollar publicly traded organizations. She focuses on creating and delivering meaningful learning experiences that can impact learner’s lives. Ashley also holds an Adjunct Faculty position at Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur, an affiliate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to Emeritus, Ashley Chiampo ran an executive coaching company, New Global Mind and worked at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Ashley is a trained group facilitator and a certified executive coach with over 2000 hours of coaching practice. She is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) granted by the ICF. Previously she was a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group and a mechanical engineer for PTC. Ashley holds an MBA degree from the Wharton School, an MS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and a BA from Brown University.
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Ashley Chiampo:Hi, Alex. Good afternoon. So you were asking about emeritus. We are a global education company focused on the online learning for professionals and executives. We have offices all around the world. So our founders actually are based in India. And one of them Ashwin went to Harvard Business School. And he had that opportunity to learn about sort of very elite, high quality education and our other founder had the opportunity to go to INSEAD. And so their vision was we would like to take this really amazing experience that we had, and how do we bring it to people all across the world in an affordable and accessible way. And that's how we originally started. We have offices in China, and Singapore, which is our legal entity is based there. We have a big headquarters in India, we have a Middle East office, a small European office, a US multiple sort of people in us and also Latin. And so what we do is we partner with best in class educational institutions around the world. So we started out in the US and we partnered with like solve, MIT, Wharton, Kellogg, Berkeley, etc. And then what we've done is we've also found the best in class regional players. So for instance, in Singapore, we have partnered with an US National University of Singapore, we've partnered with SMU as an example. And so we purposefully try to find the institution that each region and what is that institution that we want to partner with? So we have over 80 partners around the world.
Alexander Sarlin:I've taken emeritus classes, I think it's an incredibly interesting and really exciting model, especially because it's about education, that it's very, it's a high level education. I mean, it's coming from very serious business schools. And it really gets into some very deep and very important topics as Oxford I think as as a bunch of programs. One of the things that is hot topic at the conference this year is artificial intelligence, as well as skills. We've heard so many sessions where people are saying, we have to think about skills and how AI could help us with skills. How are you thinking about AI and skills in this particularly interesting world of business? And executive Ed?
Ashley Chiampo:Yeah, so it's interesting for us in executive ed to be thinking about skills, but it is I think every learner wants to understand what is the outcome that they're gonna get, right. So that's just sort of basic that you as a learner want to be able to understand, what is it that I'm going to be building here? And what is the outcome that I will receive at the end of this program? And so we definitely hold that philosophy. And we're building that into our courses. Our learners are extremely busy people, right? They want to see tangible results. And they're most of our learners are 15 plus years of experience, right? So their time is very limited. And so they want to know, what am I going to get out? And how is that going to make a difference? Right, so we really try to create actionable outcomes that are implementable in the workplace in the next seven days. Right? That's the whole point. I particularly very strong pattern of behavioral change. At the end of the day, why are we doing learning? Because we're aiming to change behavior. So if we can give our learners skills that will help them to either progress in their organization change their organizations, nothing like okay, here's my favorite metric. Okay, I'll be honest. 90% of our learners have reported that they have improved their organizations as a result of our course. is because what that is saying is, not only have I learned something new, but I've implemented it, or I've shared it with someone else. And that is for me, that's a victory. Absolutely.
Alexander Sarlin:What's interesting about this moment is even people with 15 years of experience, who understand their businesses incredibly well have been promoted. Our managerial or executives are still novices, when it comes to these new technologies that are creating a paradigm shift in so many different industries. They sometimes we call them digital transformation. And right now, I think we're calling them jet ai ai, what is AI going to do for business? How do you think about that?
Ashley Chiampo:Absolutely. Right. So to your point, people with 15 plus years of experience is the lifelong learning journey. We don't know I'm in that category, we don't know what we need to train up on and learn. And so the upskilling is huge. And so that's something that we can provide. And we really try to provide relevant, critical topics in order for executives to be staying relevant and to be current. So upskilling is huge. I think also with the AI, we need to think about how we're going to help our learners thrive and utilize you AI. And so our approach, when we first kind of started to get familiar with this now, what, two months ago, right, or whatever was a long time, but we're embracing it because it helps the executive, right? It helps the executive be more efficient, how can we really get our learners up and running and experts at the tools and the technology that's out there? For me personally, I'm very excited about the personalized learning, right, and we've done personalized learning. But this is different. This is a whole new level. And I think those moments of frustration and education that we all experienced as children remember, I least I remember the moments of tears, or I just gave up or threw something on the floor. Right? Those moments, I think potentially could be gone. Because we're going to be able to target the learning so precisely to what that learner is where that learner is at that moment. And I think that's really exciting. Learning could be fun, learning is going to be more enjoyable, right? Hopefully. So I think that's one thing about that we're coming out of this conference, I was very interested about the skills and the level of granularity that people are going to understand these skills. I don't know enough about it yet to you know, I think I'm still kind of just processing about to what level we want to go to. But there's a lot out there. And I think that is going to be very disruptive to how we think about learning, it's going to be disruptive to a lot of businesses out there. We're finding out right, we'll find out.
Alexander Sarlin:It's so interesting, because when it comes to, as you say, how much to slice up these skills, right? Is it one skill is a 10 skills? Is it 100 skills? Is it 1000 skills? And there are a lot of people here who are at this conference here, who are who have opinions about that they're actually building products, saying it's 1000 are saying it's one or saying it's 10? Or saying oh, you there's different levels, and we can tell what level you're at. And what strikes me is so interesting about it in relationship to executive education, or professional education is that professional education, historically, not to be rude about it, but it's been a little hand wavy a little bit, right. Even top schools, sometimes they're like, Oh, you need to know more about leadership. And leadership can mean absolutely anything. And I'm not saying that education isn't powerful. But there's been no forcing function to actually dive down and define what these things actually mean. And now it feels like that might be coming. So I'd like to hear you talking about.
Ashley Chiampo:So I think what the challenge was, in sort of the higher education is that these skills are absolutely critical, but very hard to measure. You see, so I need to help my leaders be more agile, how are we going to measure that I need them to have better difficult conversations. So it's not that the skills aren't needed? It's just that they've never been measured before. So the aspiration is, can we provide those skills and really give an amazing learning experience, and really help the learner to say, Oh, by the way, you've really aced the difficult conversations piece, right? Nothing like so the content and the topics of higher ed are absolutely critical and even more critical, as we're moving into a moment of uncertainty or a time of uncertainty. So it's just measuring and being more precise about what is being learned. And that's super exciting.
Alexander Sarlin:The measure what matters, you know, is really important. And it feels like a paradigm shift specifically in this type of education. Because as you say, you can't measure in the past, how agile you are, how critically you're thinking or how strategic you're being, then we have to just take our word for it and put it in practice in organizations and see it work that way. And that's, that's powerful. But you have to do it in real life to even know if you're doing there's no chance to practice there's no chance to get formative feedback and evaluate how well you're doing. It could be a really, really exciting change. Last question for you. I wish we could talk more. You've been at this conference that you were at the last day of the conference, what has jumped out to you as some of the most exciting things that you've heard, there's been hundreds of panels, there's 7000 people here, what sort of jumps out to you when you go home and a week from now and say, oh, yeah, at ASU, GSB. This is what I took away from it. I'm curious what you're gonna say.
Ashley Chiampo:I think there's so many ideas, so much activity, it's really hard for me to pinpoint what I will come out where those moments that I had really inspiring conversations with people. And so I learned something new and a conversation connected and felt affinity for what they're doing these technical ideas, I will reflect on those. And in the next three or four days, I'll have better clarity on these of my three technical sort of, but now it's just a series of just really, really interesting, inspiring discussions, moments. Hearing Freeman this morning. Fabulous, right? Jane Fonda hearing her story. And so Freeman, her basket, never even I'll be honest, I hadn't heard of him before. So he was new to me, but just coming in, and by chance, sat down, and I heard him speak. And I just admire his transparency and his, he has a lot of courage. He has a lot of emotional courage. He's honest. And it was really interesting. His messaging. So yeah, a lot of things.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, it's a lot to digest. And I think, Well, I only put the pieces together when you look back at in retrospect, but I think this is a turning point conference. I just think this is the fact that all of these technologies came out, as you say, you know, a few months ago, and everybody's trying to figure out what that means, and what it means for them what it means for their personal job, what it means for their company, what it means for the future of their organization, what it means for the whole sector. Wait, I just came out of AI in higher ed session. It's pretty exciting. Oh, Ashley camp out chief learning officer of emeritus. Thank you so much for being here with me.
Ashley Chiampo:Thank you so much, Alex. It was great.
Alexander Sarlin:Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider, subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.
