By Business & Finance 
Aaron McKenna is the CEO of UCD Professional Academy having founded the institution in 2019. 12,000 people have enrolled with the academy since its inception where they build relationships with over 400 corporate clients.
We aim to make Ireland a more secure and prosperous place for employees.
What are your main priorities and goals in your role?
At UCD Professional Academy, our goal is to become the leading provider of short form workforce upskilling solutions for the Irish market. We are elevating the upskilling game for the Irish workforce and by extension we aim to make Ireland a more secure and prosperous place for employees to thrive and succeed. To achieve this goal, I have short, medium and long-term priorities.
Long term, we want to ensure we have the right strategic vision to realise our ambition. We need to be thinking about what the market might need in five years’ time, not just today, and we want to own that position.
Medium term, it’s essential that we are laying the right bets to achieve that vision, be it in building products, developing our distribution channels or building the right team and the right culture. Are we altering our approach in response to what’s working and where the market is going rather than slavishly moving forward against a plan we agreed years ago?
And short term, it’s about conducting the orchestra day-to-day, without becoming so absorbed in it you forget about the longer term projects until a once-a-year budgeting process rolls around.
It’s a great privilege to get to lead an organisation, but picking your moments is an interesting challenge.
What are your biggest challenges as CEO?
Nobody ever really asks you to account for your day as CEO. You have to try and thoughtfully move between the strategic and the tactical, know when to get into the middle of something and when to step away and leave your team to it. You need to be able to judiciously park that great idea you just had and also be able to disrupt everyone’s plans when it becomes clear we should go after something.
You have to be mindful not to get stuck in either the short, medium or long term items. It’s a great privilege to get to lead an organisation, but picking your moments is an interesting challenge.
How do you keep your team/staff motivated?
I think people have intrinsic self-motivation that you can tap into if you give them meaningful work, a shared vision they believe in, and a sense of personal agency to achieve that vision through their work. In practical terms, that means being pretty transparent and being pretty trusting. The best self-motivators will take that offer of ownership and an openness to innovation and do great things with it.
What are the challenges facing the industry going forward?
We’re in the business of upskilling people, which is a pretty good place to be when you consider the pace of change in our working lives. If you want your career to be as successful as it can be or you want your organisation to be as good as it can be, you need to be topping up skills frequently.
Our biggest challenge is staying out one step ahead of that: Seeing what needs are emerging down the tracks and ensuring we have a course, or incorporate an element into a course, that will meet your needs.
In a product launch coincidence for the ages, we launched our cybersecurity course a week before the HSE hack. We’ve also had a standalone AI course for a little while now, but it will likely become increasingly present in our other courseware as AI becomes a more integral part of day to day work.
We’ve been successful by adapting with agility to these trends in learner preferences and ensuring our delivery keeps up.
What new trends are emerging in your industry?
Apart from keeping ahead of change in course content, the way people consume upskilling is changing. We launched as a classroom provider in February 2020, in an amazing feat of poor timing. We became, by default, an online provider in March of that year.
Now we see preference for classroom delivery approaching only 10% of the market for courses we provide. It’s a niche. Live online and online on-demand are the big winners, so we adapt to that.
ut what’s next? Immersive learning – think, the metaverse – is on a lot of minds. Will it emerge from an expensive fad into the best way to learn? We’ve been successful by adapting with agility to these trends in learner preferences and ensuring our delivery keeps up.
Are there any major changes you would like to see in your sector?
When we ask people why they enquire with us but ultimately don’t enrol, they often cite a lack of money to fund a course. We need to pour more money into upskilling. There’s a thing called the National Training Fund, which is filled by part of the PRSI we pay. It’s nearing €1 billion in credit.
At a time when we all agree that upskilling is key to remaining competitive, when some of our traditional advantages for foreign direct investment might be ebbing away, it’s crazy that we’re sitting on that dry powder. High quality upskilling can’t just be for the well-off who can afford to take a course or the employers with the deepest pockets.
In France, they introduced learning accounts where people can get their training grant and spend it as they wish. Pay for a short course or put it towards a masters. But do something with it to keep pushing yourself on.
Within UCD Professional Academy we’ve recognised the importance of ensuring upskilling is available to a wide sector of the economy particularly during these uncertain economic times and we’ve introduced a bursary and redundancy support programme to help support those affected to promptly return to employment.
There’s so much value to be unlocked if you can get a handle on your data, whether you’re a marketing team or a hospital administrator.
As an employer are you finding any skill gaps in the market?
We sit at an interesting intersection to best understand where skills gaps might exist! Definitely a key area of high demand, where we’ve struggled to recruit ourselves, is data analytics and visualisation.
There’s so much value to be unlocked if you can get a handle on your data, whether you’re a marketing team or a hospital administrator.
The talent is hard to come by, too, and we’re increasingly seeing employers retraining or upskilling whole teams in it.
How did your strategy develop in the context of the banking crisis and economic crisis?
We’re too young for the banking crisis but we launched right into the teeth of Covid. To an extent I think we are a counter-cyclical business, insofar as people invest in themselves when they’re uncertain about what might be coming next.
How has the COVID-19 crisis affected your business/sector?
We had about a dozen employees the day we went into lockdown. We had just taken in our first 200 students, in the classroom. I remember that day we were sent home, wondering if I’d ever see any of the team in person in the office again or if we’d all be on the dole in a few months. So we ploughed into Covid as a true existential moment of crisis.
We were helped in getting significant traction that so many people, stuck at home, decided to take a course as a productive way to spend the time. That helped us to go from barely-alive startup to feasible entity.
We’ve sustained and built upon that growth thanks to an amazing team delivering on the promises we make every day, and our 200 students is now well in excess of 20,000 enrolled since day one. Onboarding scores of new staff, building processes and new capabilities, and delivering a great service remotely was one of the most interesting periods in my professional life.
I’m really motivated by the challenge of doing the hard yards to build something.
How do you define success and what drives you to succeed?
Success for me is building things with durable value. In the case of the UCD Professional Academy, we’ve built something that will add to the sum of the university for a long time. And we add to the lives of every student who completes a course with us and every employee who earns a crust delivering it.
The thought that this development or that one in the business will create more value and help give it a chance to last for even longer, really drives me. I’m really motivated by the challenge of doing the hard yards to build something.
What’s the best advice you’ve been given, or would give, in business?
People will remember you for how you made them feel. Whether that’s about your legacy as a person or, more materially, whether they’ll do business with you again in a week or stay in your company for years, it’s really important to do your best to be a good person to other people.
Sure, you might have to get tough and hold people accountable or take hard decisions involving their livelihoods. But you can choose how you behave, how you present yourself, and how you try to make someone feel in any given interaction. It took me some time and the intervention of a few good mentors to get that right.
What have been your highlights in business over the past year?
We’ve had effectively one partial and two full financial years of trading since 2020. The first year was about the scramble to survive. The second year was about proving we could scale it.
And the past year has been about adding sophistication to all that wild growth. We’ve taken our understanding of the business and translated it into new product lines, new distribution channels and new ways of working. We’ve scaled teams and entire business lines, going through all the pain of hiring and training and developing our methods… And we’ve got results.
For one example among many I could give, we turned around recently and realised we’d snuck over the line of a thousand corporate clients. Eighteen months ago, that business was a one-man band with “only” dozens of clients. It’s so invigorating to see decisions you’ve made along the way pay off.
We have to keep delivering high quality service day in, day out. The growth will follow.
What’s next for your company?
I was chatting with a pal of mine recently, who needed some of his staff to upskill in graphic design. He didn’t realise that we had a suitable course, and when I told him about it, he remarked that he didn’t think his team would go to Belfield for a classroom delivery. I pointed out that the course was online.
Rather than become disheartened, I took great satisfaction from knowing that if we’re not even famous among my friends for what we do, there’s a lot of room for the UCD Professional Academy to grow.
We have to keep delivering high quality service day in, day out. The growth will follow.
Where do you want your business/brand to be this time next year?
We have doubled the number of working professionals, as well as corporate clients, we enrol in our upskilling programmes within the past year. That’s over ten thousand additional working professionals in Irish based businesses benefitting from upskilling, which keeps Ireland’s workforce competitive and engaged.
If we are to get close to the European Commission target of having 60% of adults participating in training every year by 2030, we have to collectively push on with the workforce upskilling agenda in the next year and I want UCD Professional Academy to lead that charge.
As we face what might be a turbulent time in the jobs sector, we want to continue to support all Irish workers to remain competitive with in-demand business skills. We’re hoping our bursary programme will grow with new partnerships and we can work with the charity sector to help those who are made redundant in the coming months get back to work as soon as possible.
We’re also working with The Wheel where we’re offering reduced rates for anyone working in the voluntary or charity sector. In the coming months we hope to expand these partnerships further to bring the opportunity for upskilling or professional development to as many people as possible.
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