The fourth episode of Talent Management’s new podcast, is now live! This bi-monthly podcast will host talent and HR professionals from across the globe sharing their stories, learnings and big ideas and ambitions for the future of talent management. This episode features a conversation between Talent Management’s managing editor, Ave Rio, and Joshua Remerowski, senior director of learning and leadership experience at Fortive.
The following is an excerpt from Talent Management’s podcast. To hear the full conversation, including Remerowski’s thoughts on developing future leaders and building successful teams, click here.
Ave Rio: Hello and welcome to the Talent Management podcast. I’m Ave Rio, Talent Mangement’s managing editor. It’s been so fun and informative to hear from leading talent and HR professionals each month as they share their stories, their learnings, and their big ideas and ambitions for the future of talent management.
I’d like to give a warm welcome to our guest today, Joshua Remerowski, senior director of learning & leadership experience at Fortive. Welcome, Joshua, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I’m excited to focus our conversation today on developing future leaders and building successful teams, but to start, I’d love to hear about your career journey and your current role. Among other places, you’ve worked at Verizon, Walmart, and now Fortive. Can you tell us about your background, how you navigated to where you are today in your career, and a little about what you do at Fortive?
Joshua Remerowski: My journey was more non-traditional than a lot of folks. I didn’t leave college with an MBA and get placed in some program somewhere. I actually left college in 2008 and became a truck driver for FedEx Ground and started doing frontline hustle and bustle type work and really learned a lot through working with people of all different backgrounds and job responsibilities there, and really began to understand, hey, maybe I want to do frontline work forever. Maybe I wanna make more impact and influence somewhere else.
So that began my journey to figuring out what I wanted to be when I grow up. I worked at a few other companies — same thing, frontline work. Some business account sales at Comcast, some installation at Direct TV — and found myself at Verizon. I became a new employee experience supervisor and worked my way up into learning and development. Baseball’s my background and being around people and coaching people and seeing them believe in themselves in ways they could never imagine really was something that I’ve always been passionate about. And that transition into becoming a senior trainer at Verizon and really training a lot of things from customer service to really technical things. Software architecture, network architecture and how hardwares on phones and computers work so that people can diagnose them, fix them, troubleshoot them, all those fun things. And I work my way up at Verizon and learning and development through doing a lot of interesting things with technology, AR, VR, building out the leadership academy.
And that brought me to Walmart where I started leading their e-commerce learning and development team. And really, as I made more impact there early on, they continued to give me more responsibility, more people, more business units to be responsible for their learning. I finished as their director of learning and development under our customer org. And then I moved into the director or head of change management, communications and strategy for my last 10 months with Walmart. Really my biggest passion of anything has been leadership development and developing employees in the front line because I’ve been that person. Now I have this really great opportunity where I’m now the senior director of leadership experience, where we oversee those programs from developing first time leaders, hopefully developing emerging leaders and identifying that talent, bringing in people from new MBA programs and becoming the future presidents of our different operating companies and really just developing our high potential folks to lead across business units. That’s where I’m at now and figuring it all out in my first seven weeks, it’s been really busy and really fascinating.
To hear the full conversation, including Remerowski’s thoughts on quiet quitting, emerging trends in the talent space, and more click here. This transcript has been edited and cut for clarity by Talent Management Managing Editor Ave Rio.
