Mr. Jay Moore, a Siena alumnus, is the Chief Learning Officer at General Electric. He was generous enough to sit down for an interview about the timeline of his career at General Electric, his responsibilities as Chief Learning Officer, and the evolving trends in the industry he leads, which will culminate in his talk for Siena’s The Lewis Golub Executive Lecture Series on the intersection of Leadership and Artificial Intelligence.
The Siena College School of Business annually presents The Lewis Golub Executive Lecture Series, which was established by Shari Golub Schillinger ’86, and honors Lewis Golub ’53, a renowned philanthropist and food industry visionary. According to Dr. Rashmi Assudani, Dean of the School of Business, this year’s event is reimagined to engage our students, faculty, staff and our friends in the Capital Region community. More information on this April 11th event is at this [link].
What are your responsibilities as Chief Learning Officer and how does this important role factor into General Electric’s business model?
“The title is Chief Learning Officer at General Electric corporate, and the primary focus over the past two years has been prepping the businesses for their day-one activities as we separate and spin our business units. You may have read in the news about GE, we announced over two years ago that GE is separating/spinning into three distinct business units where our Healthcare business has recently celebrated their one year anniversary as a standalone business. In April we will complete our final separations where our GE Energy and Renewables businesses will be a standalone business under the name of “GE Vernova” and our Aerospace business will be separately traded as GE going forward.
My role has been helping each of those three business units and those business units’ Chief Learning Officers prepare for day one. When you think of a Chief Learning Officer’s role, they have to set a learning strategy. They have to have the right organization to fulfill that strategy and budget for that strategy. They have to have the right tech stack for that strategy. They have to have the right content. So I have to take this core group of centralized resources of corporate and help with the knowledge transfer in every one of those three areas. So we’ve been able to put in some capabilities that we didn’t have before within these business units.”
How did you begin your career at General Electric? How did this introduction inform your
future at the company?
“I graduated in 1987. At that time, that tradition of internships at Siena was core to the business program in 1987 just as much as it is now. I found myself at General Electric. They actually had two internships.
One was at GE Silicones where they had a long-standing relationship of hosting interns. It was an excellent internship to gain. I wanted to try something new with GE and it turned out that they just scored a new internship at GE Plastics. In 1987, they had centralized all of their customer service right here at Corporate Woods in Albany at that time and it was a role in customer service & inside sales. So, from a marketing perspective, that kind of caught my curiosity. At that time, we received course credits …and it was worth much more than just the credit hours as the experience opened up my eyes in a big way! At the end of the internship there was a job opening and they were good enough to open up the role to the interns to interview for the position. They found a candidate who had incredible experience (no, it was not me). Fortunately, I was asked to stay on over the summer, not to take on a full-time role, but on a part-time basis. I really wanted to make sure my first job really matched my values and the place I wanted to be in, so I stayed on during the summer.
Business was growing and by October of that year, they said, “Hey, we really like what you’ve done. We’d like to keep you on board. Would you like a full-time job?” So that’s how I got my first job at GE. I was a marketing student, and this role was working with the plant sites with field sales teams and working with customers. It was the best launch site for me in my career without a doubt. They would fly me once a quarter to go see customers out on the West Coast to see how products were being put to use and to build relationships with the customers I interfaced with each day. It was the perfect first job. But I also saw the investment they were making in me and being a marketing student, after I got my foot in the door knowing that short term I wanted a marketing role. This is when I took a break to pursue my master’s degree while working a co-op with GE which then led to landing a position in their Commercial Leadership Program. At first I started in pricing analytics for the marketing team and eventually made a move to field sales. Their philosophy, which I agreed with, was that in order to be a good marketer, you had to do field sales first. After a few years in field sales I then moved to a field marketing role where my role was to gain new specifications for our materials. There is nothing like having a customer facing role and those opportunities continue to serve me to this day. This then led to a new position starting with new opportunities with the GE initiative of Six Sigma. Because I had a background working with customers, working in customer service, and working with manufacturing sites, there was an opportunity in the supply chain to become a Black Belt. You have these various levels in Six Sigma where Green Belts are coached and mentored by Black Belts. Black Belts are coached and mentored by Master Black Belts who are then coached and mentored by quality leaders. So, I became a Black Belt and was certified to work in Supply Chain. My next move was to then our Silicones business where they were creating a new joint venture. I had the opportunity to become the global Supply Chain Leader for that consumer business.
This gave me a larger responsibility in managing customer service logistics: planning, and forecasting. My scope of work really started increasing and having people leadership for the first time at a pretty big scale. I had a little bit prior, but this really tested that skill base, which was wonderful. Part of the way you would advance in Six Sigma and in Supply Chain was then to become a Master Black Belt where the Master Black Belt is coaching and guiding Black Belts. And that’s when it kind of struck me where I’m having to teach at that stage and coach people. I just really found something that resonated strongly with me. With an ever-changing landscape I recognized I had a skill gap as it related to the burgeoning growth of the internet, I ended up doing a distance master’s in science in E-Commerce, because, think about where the internet was: we were just introducing that at that time. I then made a larger commitment to learning where I had the opportunity to create the Marketing curricula for GE followed by creating executive programs. That then led to a stint at NBCU in managing their sales and marketing training and their undergraduate sales leadership program and then moved to GE Healthcare as their Business Learning Leader and had oversight for their sales, marketing, and leadership curricula. From Healthcare, I moved back to the corporate side where I was leading all of our global leadership where I had faculty and universities in Shanghai, Europe, Rio de Janeiro, and Bangalore and then I also had the campus programs, and that ultimately led into what I have today.”
What is your favorite part of working on GE’s Crotonville Campus? What does a typical day look like for you? Did you originally envision your career at GE leading you here?
“What I’ve always enjoyed about GE’s Crotonville Campus is that for me, it was always bringing the best of the company under one roof. So, you would have from early career interns to first-time leaders to executives to the CEO, along with customers, all functions, all representation across the globe, including customers. It was all heralded upon alignment of strategy, culture, and learning. I walk the floor, that’s how I start my day. I meet with each of the program managers. I’m meeting with staff and will walk the campus to ensure it’s safe and clean. I never envisioned when I came out of my internship to be in this position today! I think of all of those practical experiences that have grown my career and being able to work with the various CEOs, and being able to work at a global level really set up well from where I started first functionally in marketing.
Was there a common skill you were able to utilize throughout your time in all of your roles?
“If I came down to three, it would be the ability to change for the need at the time. I think two, staying relevant. Then three, we talk about this resiliency. Leaders need to be resilient. As you’re seeing things around you change, you have to adapt to that. We’re talking about AI right now. Do you shy away from it? Or do you embrace it? Do you experiment and learn and fail? I think the resilience piece is the ability to know that you’re going to have times of great exuberance and growth. And you’re going to have times, a period of challenge in downtrends. You learn more about the downtrends in yourself and others around you than you will in the growth side. Growth can be hard too. But when things get really tough, that’s when you see the best in leadership come out in the worst of leadership. How do I act? How do I behave? What am I going to learn from that? That’s not going to change at any point in your career, right? So that’s part of the way you keep going ahead.”
What is one thing you have learned from your time and education at Siena College that you have been able to apply to your career?
“If I had to boil that down, for me, it’s about the human aspect of it. When we talk about liberal arts and the humanities side of it, it’s part of the ethos of the Siena brand. And I’ve taken that on throughout my career. So doing right by your team is an important factor [as well as] your customers, the integrity by which you conduct business, and also doing well in the community. I was a marketing major. I was really good in certain disciplines of statistics and accounting, but my joy was always on the marketing side. You’re going to find those skill sets and frameworks and tools, you’re always going to be challenging yourself to learn those things. But at the end of the day, it’s about the people you work with. Much of it goes back to the individual and the human side of the equation. And in the world professionally, it’s about having a much larger lens. We talk about sustainability. We talk about what you are doing in the workplace from a fairness perspective, right? And diversity and equity, right? These things matter. And they’re only going to become increasingly more important. You’re only going to receive what you give back. I always like over-indexing on the giving back versus the receive side, because the receive side comes back in a lot of different ways. And I just think that philosophy is always going to stand well for your career.”
Mr. Moore will return to Siena College this April for The Lewis Golub Executive Lecture Series. It welcomes business executives to Siena College to lecture on business principles and practices, such as business ethics. The lecture speakers enlighten Siena College students on socially responsible behavior in business by those who lead these initiatives. Mr. Moore will be sharing perspectives in his lecture, titled “Leadership in the Era of AI: A Perspective on the Ethics, Application and Behaviors Needed to Thrive.”
How does your perspective as the Chief Learning Officer inform the topics you will discuss at your lecture?
“As I spend time with Chief Learning Officers outside of GE, you have two topics that tend to be top of mind. One is on AI. That’s going to be part of the conversation. The other one is on the topic of sustainability. Those are two that you tend to see, but a much higher spotlight right now is on AI. Sustainability still has a very strong place, but some of that spotlight is more so going on AI these days because I think it’s just so much in our faces every day. There are ethical concerns around it. I always think about, as a leader and in the role, in Learning, what are we doing to prepare our employees and our leaders for this technology? I recognize my own gap in this as well. There’s a gap of understanding. What I want to address is: what are the leadership behaviors and actions we can take? How do we advance against this before this technology gets ahead of us? I’m doing a tremendous amount of research around leadership behaviors and the behaviors we need to be doing from a leadership perspective in setting the right environment. What are the ethical considerations that are now popping up around this that as a leader, you need to be aware of? What are some of the actions we can take? That’s where my emphasis of research is and that’s what I’m looking to share. But I’m also going to work on what I can do to embrace the side of this that is going to bring some goodness to the world as well.”
A special thank you to Mr. Jay Moore for his time and contributions to this article.