Jai Shah, CEO, Kahuna

As organizations move from strategy to execution in the skills-based revolution, frontline industries—such as healthcare, energy, and field operations—face a unique set of challenges. Aligning operational readiness, regulatory compliance, and business agility requires moving beyond abstract skill frameworks to real-time, validated capability on the ground.

In this opening keynote panel, Jai Shah, CEO of Kahuna, leads a candid conversation with executive leaders Bill Hehr, Director of Healthcare Strategy at Workday and Molly Leeds, Skills Solution Lead at Mercer. Together, they will share cross-industry insights on how leading global organizations are bridging the gap between HR talent strategy and operational execution, leveraging integrated technology ecosystems, and creating a sustainable, skill-aware culture for frontline workforces.

Key Discussion Topics

• From Framework to Field: Translating high-level skills strategies into validated operational competency for frontline teams.
• Ecosystem Integration: How technology partners (like Kahuna and Workday) are coming together to provide a single, actionable view of workforce readiness.
• Industry-Specific Imperatives: Navigating high-stakes environments—from clinical nurse onboarding and accreditation in healthcare to safety, energy transition, and field workforce readiness.
• Future-Proofing the Workforce: What these Leaders are observing as best practices for scaling skills governance, managing risk, and driving business outcomes.

Attendees will leave with an insider view of where skills-based strategy is heading, real-world examples of cross-industry success, and practical steps to align human resources, learning, and operations around validated skills.

Sean Hapip, Learning & Development Manager

Managing competency is tough on its own. Doing it during and after a merger adds a whole different level of complexity.

In 2024, we went through a merger that brought together different systems, processes, and expectations around training and competency. What looked solid on paper quickly turned into inconsistent data, unclear ownership, and little visibility into whether people were actually ready to do their jobs.

This session walks through how we worked through that reality and built something that could scale. We’ll cover how we stabilized things post-merger, rolled out in 2025, expanded in 2026, and what we’re planning as we move into 2027. I’ll share what didn’t work, what we had to simplify, and what made the biggest difference: clear ownership, standardizing just enough to scale, and tying competency to real operational decisions.

If you’re dealing with multiple business units, legacy processes, or expanding your competency program beyond a single group, this session offers a practical view of what that looks like and where to focus first.

Outcomes:

• Structure a phased, multi-year rollout across different business units
• Stabilize a competency program following a merger without overhauling everything
• Simplify overly complex competency frameworks so they can scale
• Establish governance that distributes ownership and supports growth
• Shift competency from a training exercise to an operational decision-making tool

Lauren Paris, System Director, Nursing Education, Wellstar Health System

Transitioning to the electronic competency management (ECM) platform, Kahuna, greatly improved accessibility and organization for nursing orientation. The team established a core competency set for inpatient nursing and standardized specialty components, streamlining the onboarding process for nurses moving within or between specialties. A competency approval algorithm, developed with nursing and interdisciplinary input, ensured changes were aligned with current best practices. The Kahuna platform provided stronger oversight, automated version control, and a centralized repository, leading to consistent standards across all sites. Compliance was tracked during the system’s phased rollout by monitoring user access and the percentage of completed electronic orientation documents, with reports run through Kahuna. Effective change management, including in-person stakeholder engagement, clear communication, and dedicated support channels, was key to securing buy-in and improving adoption of the digital platform.

Outcomes:

• Enhanced visibility into orientation processes for nursing education and leadership teams
• Removed redundant material and established improved governance, driving greater consistency and efficiency
• Initial groups reached 80% compliance after one year, while later teams hit the same rate in just two months, showing accelerating adoption
• Revealed inefficiencies in previous competency management practices, prompting streamlined procedures and elimination of outdated components
• Standardized competency validation ensures clinical staff are equipped to deliver optimal patient care
• Reduced administrative burden and improved efficiency, supporting the nursing strategic plan through better staff satisfaction and retention

Jon Magne

The presentation will demonstrate how Kahuna moves competence assurance beyond reporting and into real-time operational decision-making.

Outcomes:

• Increased transparency through corporate KPIs that identify competence gaps, emerging risks, and areas requiring intervention
• Real-time visibility into whether installations, teams, and individuals are qualified, compliant, and ready for the next shift
• Safer task allocation based on current competency, certification, and dispensation status within Kahuna
• Stronger governance and traceability behind competency requirements, assessments, certificates, and compliance status
• More controlled and transparent management of exceptions when competency requirements are not fully met
• Improved collaboration across the Norwegian continental shelf through KompetanseHub and shared contractor competence data

Tom White, Head of Product, Kahuna

Join us for a live look at where Kahuna is headed and what that means for your organization. Kahuna VP of Product Tom White kicks off with the bigger picture: the thinking behind the roadmap and how the pieces of the platform fit into one system, build on a system of record to system of intelligence. The product team then takes over for a live walkthrough of our foundation, with less talking and more showing. See what is shipping and what is next across Skills Manager, the validated source of truth for frontline skills, including the latest in mobile, back-end performance, and the Supervisor and Time-to-Competence dashboards; and Ladder, our career progression product, proven in healthcare and now expanding into energy, manufacturing, and field service. Whether you are a system administrator, a program leader, or an executive sponsor, you will leave with something concrete to bring back to your team.

Lisa Tieman, Nursing Professional Development Practitioner

This presentation will share Lurie Children’s experiences pre-ladder with Kahuna and how Kahuna met the organization’s needs with the Ladder application. It will walk through the process to launch in November 2025 and subsequent application cycles for promotions in March 2026 and July 2026. The program is run by one of the nursing councils at Lurie Children’s, and the council’s ownership and involvement with the development of the program, both outside of Kahuna and within, has been integral to its success. The program includes a built-in two-step process involving managers for approval to continue with the application and promotion cycle. A required number of points related to various professional development activities and a narrative are required to promote on the Ladder. Applications are reviewed by a committee, and feedback is provided and changes are requested, all completed within the Ladder program. This summer, the maintenance points requirement will be launched for anyone on the ladder, an additional component for those who have been promoted on the clinical ladder to remain at their current level. Significant work has been done to share the new process with staff and leaders, which has driven adoption of the program.

Outcomes:

Attendees will see participation numbers per application cycle and promotions for each cycle, plus a review of the education process for ladder enrollment and applications and how leaders were engaged along the way. Data from the first completed maintenance points cycle will also be shared, along with challenges encountered (all addressed or in progress) and a look at administrative responsibilities and impacts to daily workflow.

Jorge Leuro, Competency Advisor

Across the energy industry, skills-based workforce development programs remain slow to design and deploy, relying on extended subject matter expert (SME) involvement, manual content development, and sequential validation cycles. These approaches routinely extend delivery timelines by months, limiting scalability and business engagement. As a result, competency frameworks often fail to provide timely, data driven insight into workforce readiness, capability gaps, and operational risk.

This session presents a proven, industry applied methodology for accelerating the design and rollout of skills-based development programs. The approach uses AI agents to generate competency content, applies AI enabled analysis to assess quality, and delivers rapidly deployable competency models aligned with business demand.

Outcomes

• Applied to six programs across all business units, covering 43 job families and approximately 900 personnel
• Spans global operational assurance, regulatory compliance, and workforce development contexts
• Reduced average time from initial engagement to field deployment from a typical 9 months to 14 weeks
• Decreased SME involvement by 84%
• Completed baseline competency assessments for up to 80% of the targeted workforce

Deslyn Wright, Learning Manager

Implementing a competency management platform is often viewed as a technology initiative, but sustainable transformation begins long before go-live and, in our case, with more questions than answers.

In this session, AdventHealth will share how a multi-state healthcare system serving more than 109,000 team members and nearly nine million patients annually is building the organizational foundation for enterprise clinical competency management. The presentation will explore the lessons learned, strategic decisions, and operational preparations required to transition from decentralized competency practices to a scalable enterprise model spanning multiple states. Our journey did not begin with a clear blueprint. It began with a shared vision, a willingness to learn, and the persistence to keep moving forward even when the answers were not yet clear.

Outcomes

Attendees will learn how to:

• Establish governance for enterprise clinical competency management amid uncertainty and complexity
• Standardize competency frameworks across a multi-state health system
• Engage clinical stakeholders across disciplines to build alignment
• Position competency management as a key pillar of a Learning Operating Model and Dynamic Learning Community
• Navigate complexity and maintain momentum while laying the foundation for enterprise competency transformation

Kahuna Product Management Team

We close the day with the AI-native side of the roadmap: the products that turn your validated skills data into automated action. The product team continues the live walkthrough with CertIQ, which uses AI and OCR to capture certifications, match them against requirements, and flag expiry risks before they become compliance gaps; and Skills Aggregator, which translates granular operational skills into broader capabilities and pushes validated data straight into Workday and other HRIS systems. We will close on where this is all heading, including AlohaAI, our natural-language interface that lets you ask plain-English questions of your skills data and get trusted answers back. Bring your questions and hear directly from the people building the product.