A Third Path to Talent Development: Delta’s Michelle McCrackin

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
How can organizations take advantage of existing deep domain knowledge? Find out how One Airline is upscaling its frontline workforce on today's episode.

**Michelle McCrackin** (0:13)
I'm Michelle McCrackin from Delta Air Lines, and you're listening to Me, Myself and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:19)
Welcome to Me, Myself and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:38)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:04)
Today, Shervin and I are excited to be joined by Michelle McCrackin, who is a senior manager of Analytics Learning and Development for Delta Air Lines.
Michelle, thanks for joining us. Welcome.

**Michelle McCrackin** (1:13)
Thank you for having me.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:14)
All right, let's get started. We got interested in what Michelle was doing because we learned about this Analytics Academy. So why don't we start with that?
Tell us about the Analytics Academy and what that means.

**Michelle McCrackin** (1:24)
Analytics Academy is a program that we started about a year ago with Georgia State University, and this program was designed to create a career pathway for our frontline employees, our operational experts, those individuals that you are interacting with day-to-day in the airport. So it might be a flight attendant, a gate agent. They are what we believe is truly the experts on what happens and what it takes to run the airline.
And this program is a nine-month program that allows them to stay in their nine-to-five job and they get to learn analytics on the side and then ultimately, at the end of the program, transition into a full-time analytics role. And we do this by the first semester, bringing them up on data foundations with Georgia State University. So they're doing this three to five hours a week on their own time, all asynchronous, so they're not in the classroom day to day, but they're able to work through it on their own time on the computer. And then the second semester, they spend with my team, the analytics learning and development team, working on how we take data and apply it at Delta and what levers we pull, what do we look at, how do we move forward. And this really allows them to take that information they learned in the first semester and really apply it to real-life examples they're familiar with. So, for example, we look at whether an airline is going to arrive on time.
That is something we report out to the DOT, but it's also a metric that we look at internally and measure against every day. We teach them how they might use analytics to drive that calculation, and this allows them to deepen their knowledge that they learned in the front line to start with. And then the third semester is where they really get to apply that information, and that is when they get to join a full-time analytics organization for an internship. They leave their full-time job for the first time in the program, and their nine-to-five is now an analytics internship. And they're still paid normally, but they get to, instead of focusing on their front line role, they get to focus on applying those new analytics skills right here in the organization.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (3:33)
That's really interesting. Can you explain what's included in the first semester with skills our students are learning there?

**Michelle McCrackin** (3:40)
So, with Data Foundations, our goal really is to challenge the student to think about data as a whole, so think differently and really challenge them to look at how to ask the question, how to get there. But then furthermore, they learn a bunch of tools to keep in their toolbox, so advanced Excel, Python, SQL.
They learn the start to Tableau and a little bit of Power BI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (4:04)
So, how long have you been doing this?

**Michelle McCrackin** (4:06)
We launched our first class in May of 2022, and our second class launched in August. And so our first class actually graduated in December, and we are excited to report that 100% of participants got placed in a full-time position.

**Sam Ransbotham** (4:24)
Oh, that's great. So how many people were involved in this?

**Michelle McCrackin** (4:28)
We had 750 applications the first time around, which we brought down to 24 students split over two cohorts. So 12 students in each cohort.