Transcript- Episode 140: Building a Sustainable Future: The Role of Clean Energy Economy Construction with Kate Gordon, CEO of CA FWD Episode 140

00:00:00 - Kate Gordon

I do think that across the board in education, we have to get better at interdisciplinarity and interconnected systems. Like if I'm going out to install solar panels on a roof, I should also be trained to do like basic electrical work because the reality is you don't want to train people for these very, very niche jobs. This needs to be part of a bigger system where people have a longer term ability to turn it into a career.

 

00:00:28 - Christina Barsi

The workforce landscape is rapidly changing and educators and their institutions need to keep up. Preparing students before they enter the workforce to make our communities and businesses stronger is at the core of getting an education. But we need to understand how to change and adjust so that we can begin to project where things are headed before we even get there. So how do we begin to predict the future?

 

00:00:53 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Hi, I'm Salvatrice Cummo, Vice President of Economic and Workforce Development at Pasadena City College and host of this podcast.

 

00:01:02 - Christina Barsi

And I'm Christina Barsi, producer and co-host of this podcast.

 

00:01:06 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

And we are starting the conversation about the future of work. We'll explore topics like how education can partner with industry, how to be more equitable, and how to attain one of our highest goals, more internships and PCC students in the workforce. We at Pasadena City College want to lead the charge in closing the gap between what our students are learning and what the demands of the workforce will be once they enter. This is a conversation that impacts all of us. You, the employers, the policymakers, the educational institutions, and the community as a whole.

 

00:01:40 - Christina Barsi

We believe change happens when we work together. And it all starts with having a conversation. Hi, I'm Christina Barci.

 

00:01:47 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

And I'm Salvatrice Cummo. And this is the Future of Work. Hi, welcome back to the Future of Work podcast. I am your host, Dr. Salvatrice Cummo. Today, we are joined by Kate Gordon, the CEO of California Forward, a statewide organization dedicated to a more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive economy across every region of California. Kate has spent the last two decades working at the intersection of climate change, energy policy, and equitable economic development. Prior to leading California Forward, she served within the Biden Harris administration as Senior Advisor to US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and in California state government as the Director of the Governor's Office of Planning and Research and Senior Climate Policy Advisor to Governor Gavin Newsom. In addition to her policy work, she teaches a regular course on climate, politics, finance, and Infrastructure at the University of California, Berkeley and serves as a nonresident scholar at Carnegie California. Today we're diving into how climate policy and energy Transitions can drive equitable growth and create meaningful community benefits and what that means to the future of work. We are so thrilled to have you with us here today, Kate. How are you? Welcome.

 

00:03:14 - Kate Gordon

I'm really well, thank you. It's great to be here.

 

00:03:16 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Thank you. Thank you. We're going to dive right in because we have a ton of questions. I think the first question we always like to ask our guest is, you have an interesting journey. We shared that a little bit in the intro, but could you tell us how you started working in this intersection of climate and economic development?

 

00:03:34 - Kate Gordon

You know, I'm a little unusual, actually, in the climate space in that I come to it from an economic development perspective. Many people come into climate policy from an environmental perspective, and I got a joint degree in law and city planning at Berkeley, and really, in that journey of getting that joint degree, got very interested in the underlying systems that lead to kind of the types of regulations we pass, the types of systems we design, the types of cities we design. So it kind of started out very interdisciplinary, and I stayed very interdisciplinary. And I think that in some ways, the world is coming around to this perspective. I've been working on the idea that climate is kind of fundamental to economic development for a really long time, and now we see through sort of the Biden and Harris administration policies and other policies that people are starting to come around to seeing that that's true. So I think, in a way, it's sort of. I was early to it, but it's definitely becoming part of the conversation.

 

00:04:27 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Thank you. This is a Future of Work podcast.

 

00:04:29 - Kate Gordon

Yeah.

 

00:04:30 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

And when we think about the future of work, where do you start looking for trends in energy transitions?

 

00:04:37 - Kate Gordon

I mean, that's a big question. So I think something that sometimes is not obvious to people who don't obsess about this like I do, we're talking about a fundamental change of our entire economy. We built the industrial economy on the back of fossil fuels. It's built on the back of an energy system. So you can't actually have a functional economy without energy. You can't do entrepreneurship. You can't build a small business. You can't run a manufacturing plant. You can't send things around the world to other markets. Like, you cannot have an economy without energy. And the energy we've been using for 150 years is fossil energy. We're now talking about shifting that to a whole different system away from sort of the inputs of coal and gas and oil into, like, hundreds of different inputs across thousands of different places, mostly connected by Wires. It's a completely different system. So what's important, I think, is that it isn't about a set of green jobs over here in a corner that are special and different. We're actually talking about greening the entire economy. And that means jobs will look different everywhere from tech to transportation to logistics to manufacturing to construction, to sort of everything. I think there's enormous opportunity. There's massive opportunity across every aspect of the economy, frankly. It is not a new thing that we've never seen before. It's just different types of jobs in existing sectors.

 

00:05:56 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Can you share a little bit about what those opportunities might look like? Potential occupations that we have not seen just yet, but you've got a closer.

 

00:06:04 - Kate Gordon

Eye to on the sort of pure energy industry side. We're shifting from a set of occupations that have to do with mining and refining and transporting and trading a commodity which is oil or coal, but mostly oil at this point in the United States. That brings with it a very specific set of occupations. Right. Like they're permanent jobs in mining, they're permanent jobs in refining. It does create a lot of jobs, actually, that set of industries. But we're moving from that to, in California, let's say the electrify everything movement. We're moving to a set of energy generation, like ideally renewable, so wind, solar, increasingly hydrogen, some geothermal, you know, some hydropower going onto wires and moving around. Right. And the thing that's different about that is it's mostly construction jobs. So if you think about a solar plant or a wind plant, the great thing about those in the long term, besides that there's zero carbon, is you don't have to mine and refine anything. The energy is free because it's the sun or the wind. But you do have to construct a big plant to do it. So what we see is that about 60% of the jobs in the emerging energy economy are construction jobs. That's also true of energy efficiency. Primarily that's construction occupations. Those aren't new. They're not different than construction jobs, but they are construction jobs. It's an interesting question about sort of a major expansion of that sector. We're already seeing job shortages on construction because of all this new build. We're also seeing the need for some new skills in construction. So skills around green building, how to put in a heat pump is a new skill for electricians. New skills around just different types of plant construction. I think that's a sector that we need to keep our eye on. We tend to think of it as these are not Permanent jobs. These are temporary. But the reality is if you're building a lot of things, construction workers can have a whole career being construction workers because there's project after project after project. So that's a big area to think about. We also see a shift in the types of skills that you know, that sort of engineering jobs. For instance, we've spent the last few decades really focused on computer engineering as the main growth area of engineering. Right. So especially in California, we've oriented a lot of education toward computer engineering. But what we're starting to see is that if you're bringing all this renewable power onto the grid, the sun only shines at certain times, the wind only blows at certain times. You need to integrate that with storage. You need to think about how to balance out that load so you actually have energy coming in all the time. That's power system engineering. That's a different kind of engineering. We have a shortage of those in the United States. Nuclear is coming back as a really significant power source in a lot of parts of the US. Nuclear engineers, I'd be hard pressed to find very many of them under 50 years old. We just don't train people to do it. So we need to be thinking about like this new system really does require a different set of skills in these industries that we're used to thinking about. But we need to kind of bring back some of those skills we've lost. The final thing I'll say is there is a ton of manufacturing opportunity in the clean energy economy. The bills passed under Biden and Harris are very focused on domestic onshoring and manufacturing in the clean energy supply chain. We should be making the solar panels, not just installing the solar panels. Manufacturing trade skills are lacking in this country. We stopped training people through career tech education. We have not focused on manufacturing and skilled trades and we are at a disadvantage because of that.

 

00:09:23 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

That's right. Yeah, we certainly are seeing that as well and adjusting as we see fit. The challenge with any of our larger institution is how swift, agile, and quick.

 

00:09:34 - Kate Gordon

We can be 100%. And you also have a kind of a geographic dislocation. Right. Like one of the things about traditional energy, fossil energy is it's very place based. Right. You have oil fields where the oil is. Right. Like you can't, you can't like do location decisions based on anything else. It's like that's where they are. That's really different than electrified system where you can do many things in many places. It's very distributed. So I think that's going to Be a question too is economic mobility and where we're training people to do what are the folks who have been trained in the fossil system. I think there are real opportunities for transitioning and job skill match for those folks. But some of the new stuff won't be where the old stuff was.

 

00:10:17 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Good point. Are you seeing a growth or specific regions within California where we might see this growth spurt in construction and those occupations emerging? Are you seeing that? And then I also wonder too what will get in the way in your opinion, what might get in the way of this growth?

 

00:10:36 - Kate Gordon

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, the construction side is pretty broadly shared across geographies just because I think we'll see a growth in the construction of major projects like big solar and big wind, mostly in the Central Valley and inland because that's where the land availability is. So that's likely where we're going to see that. We also have a lot of population growth in those areas. So it's a real opportunity. You know, we've got some mining opportunity, right, Like Lithium Valley. That's mining for the clean energy economy. That's down in the Inland Empire. That's a place without a lot of people. But that's where that opportunity happens to be. That's very place-based construction, though. Also, we're to see a lot of it in just urbanized areas because anything that has to do with energy efficiency or retrofitting existing buildings or building new green buildings is all going to be in population centers. So I think a lot of opportunity across the board, different types of construction. It's just that we know from when I was in state government that we did an analysis of all the dollars spent under the cap and trade program, all of which were spent on kind of clean energy economy work. Across California I just can tell you 60 to 70% of the jobs are in construction. We expect to see a lot of it. Manufacturing will be interesting. It'll depend on where there's industrial land. And a lot of parts of California have don't have zoning for industrial land. And so the places that still have zoned industrial land will have a leg up. Richmond, California, is a great example. The shipbuilding passed still a bunch of industrial land. It's right by a port. That's a really good kind of location for manufacturing. So I think some of it's going to be sort of a competitiveness analysis. But the interesting thing about the clean energy economy is that there's opportunities in a lot of places. They just look different. Up in Humboldt, they're rebuilding the port for offshore wind that's, you know, rekindling that port after years of it being dormant. Those are jobs that are probably folks coming out of, you know, lost jobs in logging and timber, getting retrained. It's a very regional issue. Part of why California Forward we're so focused on regional economic development is because the regions of California are bigger than most states. The way we think about the economy is really inherently regional. Oh, and challenges. I mean, some of the challenges are, you know, just the inherent challenge of workforce training, which I know you know well, which is the worry about training for jobs that don't exist. How do you get ahead of the projections? How do you know if they're real? I do think the benefit of the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act that passed under this current administration. The benefit is they're both long-term bills. So the infrastructure bill is five to 10 years spending, and the inflation reduction act is 10 years. That means there is some running room. Right? I mean, the goal there is there's 10 years of investments that then anchors an economy in a number of places. I hope that's true. I mean, that's the goal. And so I think there's some amount of planning that can happen. But look, energy transition and climate-related issues are inherently political. And so some of this is going to be about political decisions that get made that are out of our control as people who want to find high-quality jobs for workers.

 

00:13:33 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Some of it is out of our control and hopefully more dialogue is around just conversations that we're having here today. But more of those conversations get amplified so that we start to reduce some of those barriers that we inherently will see. Just because it's, you know, the nature of the beast here and some of.

 

00:13:54 - Kate Gordon

It's not politics in terms of climate. Some of the reason that we're focusing again on manufacturing and domestic supply chains is our relationship with China, which is changing dramatically. Right. So some of it is geopolitical, and I don't think that's moving to a new place anytime soon. I think a lot of these trends are sustained trends.

 

00:14:13 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

That's good to know. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the community benefits plan and your role in it and shift gears just a little bit because I think it's important for our listener to understand first explain what that is, the community benefits plan and why it's so important that energy projects like those continue to help our communities.

 

00:14:36 - Kate Gordon

Yeah, thanks for the question. When I was at Department of Energy as Chair. Jennifer Granholm Senior Advisor One of the things that happened while I was there was the infrastructure bill, which is really a significant bill. People in the climate community often talk about the Inflation Reduction Act as the big climate bill, but I would argue that actually, if you think about the impact on the economy and the workforce, the infrastructure bill, the Chips and Science Act for semiconductors, and the Inflation Reduction Act are all critically important. They're all building parts of the foundational building blocks for us having a kind of a vibrant, diversified climate energy economy. The infrastructure bill for the Department of Energy was very significant. That Bill alone appropriated $62 billion to the department. Just for context, like the entire department budget, including the nuclear side, was only about 45 billion before that. So it's a lot of money, more than 60 new programs, right? I mean, just a massive, just hard to even overstate how big this was. But it also was a different color of money. The Department of Energy has traditionally been a research and science agency. This funding is primarily for big construction projects like hydrogen hubs, direct air capture hubs, manufacturing plants like steel in the ground, and transmission build-out. So it required us to first of all redesign the whole department, which I won't go into, but was a whole thing that happened.

 

00:16:04 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

That's an undertaking in itself.

 

00:16:05 - Kate Gordon

It's a 19,000 person department, so it's a big deal. So bringing in a new Office of Infrastructure, redesigning the department. But it also required us to really think hard about what these projects would mean in places. So just to give context, energy, I said earlier, is sort of the basis of the whole economy because it's the backbone. But it's also, these projects are like anchor economic projects in places. If I'm doing a hydrogen hub in a place that doesn't have a lot of jobs right now, like that's thousands of jobs at one time in a place. One of the first investments was the small modular reactor plant for nuclear plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming. Kemmerer has about 2300 people in it in the middle of Wyoming. This plant would take a thousand people to construct. So just as an example of the impact of these things on places. Right. And so when you're doing that, you have to start thinking about is it going to actually create benefit in places. I think there's a part of the climate community that said for a long time, oh, these are inherently good because they're green projects like green jobs are good jobs. Right. The reality is that that's not always true, that unless you pay attention to pathways into careers to the true training piece into job quality, not just quantity, into environmental impacts on a place like paying attention to those things is what creates benefits from big projects. It has to be done intentionally. So that's essentially the backstory of the community benefits plans. What we did was came into this whole infrastructure bill implementation with the perspective that we had to make sure that these were beneficial projects. In places they're multi decadal projects that are about transitioning the economy. So they had to work. And so we designed a system where 20% of the points on the application for the funding, the grant funding was actually dependent on the community benefits plan of the company applying. And that plan had to include attention to disadvantaged communities through Justice 40 and that whole system, it had to include attention to job quality and pathways into jobs. And it had to include attention to diversifying the energy workforce, which at the Moment is about 85% white and male.

 

00:18:13 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

So statistic one more time for me.

 

00:18:14 - Kate Gordon

I think it's 83. I think the energy sector is very undiverse at the moment. It's about 83% white and male across all energy, traditional and clean.

 

00:18:26 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

And that's okay to say, right? Because we don't know what we don't know. Right. And so the more that we again bring light into this conversation and thinking about what's possible, that's one of the areas that is possible.

 

00:18:42 - Kate Gordon

So how do you think about that? What we asked companies was think about that both in terms of how you're marketing your jobs, like what colleges you're working with, Are you working with HSBCU colleges, are you working with tribal colleges, Are you thinking strategically about diversification not only for your workforce but also your contractors? Right. What contracts are you building, what subcontracts are you building and who are you working with? So it just brings a level of attention. And our feeling was, look, we're handing out billions in federal dollars in grant money that does not have to be paid back. We should attach to that some understanding that public dollars bring with them a public purpose.

 

00:19:22 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Excellent. And that took attentional design and it took many, many years. I bet leading up to it.

 

00:19:28 - Kate Gordon

It was a lot. It was faster than you would think. We built it out fairly quickly because the money had to get out the door fairly quickly. But it was based on a lot of years of work in this space obviously and how to build, you know, strong workforce systems and partnerships. I will say just a related thing that we did because it's interesting. One of the pieces of this energy transition is the need for battery Manufacturing batteries are a huge part of a energy system that's electrified, right. If you have solar and wind resources and they're not, they're intermittent, you need to store the resources so they can use them full time. So batteries are huge. The US did not have a battery manufacturing sector at all before these bills were passed. So we were looking at both building up battery manufacturing as a sector, but also the workforce didn't exist in the United States. So one other thing the Department of Energy did under one of my colleagues was build a battery workforce initiative to actually bring some of the early manufacturers to the table, the startup folks to the table with labor, to have a conversation about what are the skills that we are going to need in this space and how do we start working together to design shared capacity to meet the need of these range of, you know, competitive with each other battery companies. But they all have this shared need.

 

00:20:44 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Thank you for sharing that. I didn't know that. Thank you. I also wonder too, just kind of along the theme of policy, kind of projecting and looking forward, we talked about the two bills. Are there any other policies that you're kind of foreseeing in the near future that's going to affect us as we build out the next five to ten years of workforce?

 

00:21:06 - Kate Gordon

Yeah, I think there are several. There's a whole conversation to be had about the changing nature of the workforce, which I'm sure you've talked about on this podcast before, particularly around AI. You know, I think it will be interesting in the clean energy space and just the new economy space to think about the role of AI. There is a lot of potential for AI to be an enabler of projects. So one of the things we currently see is there's like a 10 year delay on connecting big solar plants to the power grid. There's the things called interconnection queues, which are lists of all the proposed projects that need to be connected. And it takes a really long time to get through those lists and evaluate the projects. That's actually in large part because of this lack of system power system engineers I talked about before. You could use AI to actually get you through those lists in a more comprehensive way that's faster and then get to the projects faster to create a bunch of jobs. So I think it can be an enabler to the system. We tend to think of AI as a drain on the system. It creates a huge amount of energy demand, but it also potentially could be an enabler. So I think that's the whole question of the role of AI in This space is really interesting and important. I also think that this issue of just literally the transition from a fossil system to a non fossil system will create a lot of dislocation. And one of the things that was in the original inflation reduction act but got taken out by Congress was funding for the dislocated worker fund at the Department of Labor that flows through the states. As you probably know, that fund is incredibly important and will become even more important. I think that fund is absolutely necessary to actually do. You know, there is some skills match between fossil and clean energy jobs. But you need to do skills, you need to do training to overcome some of those barriers. And I think that we need the dislocated worker fund both for kind of bridges while people aren't working and also to invest in that new training for these workers that are in some cases sort of middle aged, they're not coming out of college or high school. Right? And then finally there's going to be geographic dislocation. Climate impacts are real and they're increasing. And I don't think we're paying enough attention to that in our workforce system. People will be literally moving geographically from where they were to where they are going because they will be displaced by fires, by floods, by industry, impacts that make their industry go away. Agriculture is already seeing this with groundwater, you know, issues leading to fallowed land. These are workers that will have to move in some cases or be completely retrained. So I think we have to start thinking about that. It's a very hard thing to talk about. Not only will we see people move within like California, but we're going to see a lot of impacts in Mexico and Central America that will impact migration generally to the United States. We'll see migration up into Canada from the United States. These are real things that people need to start talking about.

 

00:24:00 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Right, and why do you think we're not talking about it? I mean, the obvious is fear, I would say, right Kate, But I mean, what else is getting in the way of us being just really honest about what's really happening?

 

00:24:09 - Kate Gordon

You know, I think it's. We're so used to the idea that extreme weather is an acute event that happens. We have to deal with it in like in the moment that it's a disaster and we're in a disaster mindset about it. We have to recover from the disaster, we have to rebuild from the disaster we haven't yet gotten our heads around because it's new for humanity. This fact that this is a progression, it's a chronic progression, right and that it isn't about like, do I stop emitting carbon today? Because the progression we're seeing is because of carbon that's been in the atmosphere for 50 years or more. It's happening. It's very predictable. But I think you're right. I mean I think it's hard for us to get our heads around because it's our whole kind of sense of self as humans. Like the entire kind of history of humanity is built on this assumption that the climate is basically stable. And it is now increasingly not. It's not something our brains have ever gotten around. Do you know what I mean? It's like it's just so dislocating that it's hard to think about it. But I do think that you and others who are planning the systems are going to have to start thinking about it. We're going to have to start thinking about portable credentials much more than we already are. We're going to have to start thinking about universal basic assets or universal basic income ways that people can move. When today for Americans, most of our money is tied up in our homes if we are lucky enough to own one. And if your home is destroyed, you don't have any ability to move. You have no economic mobility. We're gonna have to start thinking about new ways to address these issues because the current system is not sustainable. We're already seeing that with the Florida hurricanes just from the last couple weeks.

 

00:25:47 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

That's right. Thank you. To your point, we're not used to thinking about this in a very chronic way versus what we're currently doing right now is reactive as the disasters come.

 

00:25:59 - Kate Gordon

That's right. What we're experiencing with dislocation and energy transition now isn't so different than what we experienced with the decline of manufacturing in the 70s and 80s, which also was chronic and also was because of big forces, global forces mostly in that case, an approach to globalization and the ability to move goods around much more easily the world. And we also sort of treated that as if it was this random set of occurrences. So we are, I think it's just the human brain deals with crises in a very disaster-focused way. In general, there's been a lot of research on the psychology of climate change. It's very hard for us to understand chronic change as humans. I do think it's worth like looking back to that because that was the beginning of the industrial revolution was a massive shift from an agriculture-based economy to an industrial economy. This is on that scale what we're talking about.

 

00:26:48 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Yeah. Until we're forced to not ignore it. Right. And then I think that's where we are now. We're faced with. We cannot pretend like it's not happening 100%.

 

00:26:59 - Kate Gordon

And there's a lot of job opportunity in it, to be honest. I mean regenerative agriculture, adaptation planning, you know, wetland restoration. Like there's a lot of actually adaptive work that can be done. But it's sort of a different mindset. It's thinking about restoration as a value activity, not just production as a value activity. So I just think we have to rethink some of our systems.

 

00:27:20 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Yeah. So let's live there and for a hot minute around systems and educational institutions through your lens and as an educator, as professional, as a leader in this space. Where do you see us as educational institutions, specifically community colleges, playing a role in what you're seeing now and what you are projecting in the future as it relates to training. We talked about dislocated workers, we talked about new jobs and new occupations. Where do you see us playing a role in that and how do we be better at it?

 

00:27:51 - Kate Gordon

I think community colleges are fundamental, honestly. I mean community colleges are the most place based of colleges in the education system. You're most likely to bring students from an existing region into a system, and then they're often likely to stay in that region or to be employed near where the college is afterwards. So the system is inherently able to address sort of the regional differences in planning for this kind of economy that I talked about earlier. What you do at the community college level in terms of workforce kind of preparation up in Humboldt is going to look really different than what you do in the Imperial Valley is going to look really different than what you do in San Francisco. Right. Like, there can be responsive to the system around them I think in a much more nimble way than larger, clunkier universities, to be honest. So I think that's really important. I also think there is just going to be a need for a lot of sort of non-four-year college, shorter-term credentialing, the skill transition question, retraining, upskilling, all of that works better in a set a system of like more flexible, shorter-term credentials. So I think that's really important. And then I guess I would say, you know, one of the things that in some ways the academia world suffers from similarly to the political world is just this siloing of issues. I do think that across the board in education, we have to get better at interdisciplinarity and interconnected systems. Like if I'm going out to install solar panels on a roof. I should also be trained to do like basic electrical work. Because the reality is you don't want to train people for these very, very niche jobs. This needs to be part of a bigger system where people have a longer-term ability to turn it into a career. I think we've gotten to a place where we're kind of niche about our training to some extent on specific skills and just kind of taking a step back and saying, look, the whole system is changing. Let's talk about the kinds of foundational knowledge, energy literacy, we need to understand the system and then like what we need on top of that to do to be part of it. I just think that's important across the board. There's way too much siloization in general. This is not really a technology problem, it's a system problem. And we just need to be better at systems thinking and systems teaching.

 

00:30:02 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

What would you say is the best way for us to align ourselves, and with whom do we align ourselves with? To, you know, build out, you know, for lack of better terms, pipeline of students who are ready for the systems change that we are building them for.

 

00:30:15 - Kate Gordon

There's actually a great example that already exists, which is the relationships that many community colleges have with labor. With organized labor around construction is useful to look at construction. The whole idea of a multi-craft career training program where you're training construction focus folks going to construction for a variety of pieces of that market and where you have stackable credits, where you get trained on basics and then you stack. That was a partnership between community colleges and labor. And I think it's a really good one. We might want to look at that as a model for manufacturing. We don't currently do that. Manufacturing is mostly very company based. Like traditionally it's been like, oh, I work at GM, I am in the union, I do these things. Instead, I think we need to start thinking about stackable manufacturing skills in a similar way to stackable construction skills. And how do we kind of break down some of the silos between both the industry side and the labor side? To do that would be interesting. I also think there's just relationships with industry in general. I mean, we know Germany is always held up as a really important example of workforce training models. And in Germany, there's just a lot more relationship between industry, government policy, labor, and the workforce as well. So how do we think about sort of those training partnerships, you know, industry workforce partnerships where we're actually training towards skills that we know are being invested in by particular companies? By particular sectors instead of being kind of theoretical about it, I think is really important. I know you're already doing a lot of that, but the High Road Training Partnership program at the Department of Labor in California is a great example of that kind of approach. So I think there's definitely things to be learned. I mean, in California, we sometimes hesitate to look outside ourselves for models, but there are some great models out there of this. Wisconsin's very good at university college workforce systems. I think looking there would be interesting. The German system's interesting. So, you know, how do we start thinking about, you know, maybe kind of taking on some knowledge of systems that have worked as we're building out these new systems in California.

 

00:32:11 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Excellent. Thank you. Now, Kate, we're slowly sunsetting this conversation because we're almost at time, Kate, but I wanted to ask you, there's one thing that you would like our listener to walk away from this conversation. It's a loaded question. What might that be?

 

00:32:29 - Kate Gordon

I may have already said it, but I think the most important thing for me is that this be a conversation about the whole economy, not a conversation about the green economy. This is a transformational time that we're in. We have transformations happening geopolitically. We have with our China relationship and our Russia relationship, frankly, we have transformations happening in terms of the climate because we have more impacts, and we have transformations happening because we're trying to move to a lower carbon system. All of those things are going to affect really every industry and the entire workforce system. And so we should be thinking about them as we have thought about globalization affecting the workforce system or as we thought about the industrial revolution affecting the workforce system, Climate and geopolitical changes are going to be like that. So I guess I would just say I encourage people to think this is not a niche issue. This is an everybody issue. We, I think, owe it to future generations to get ahead of it.

 

00:33:25 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Well said. Thank you. What a beautiful way to end this conversation. And, and I genuinely look forward to more conversations with you and just working closer. That would be great to you and your organization. Please count us in.

 

00:33:39 - Kate Gordon

I would love that. That would be great. I mean, this is like a fundamental part of the conversation about the economy. So I love that you reached out. So thank you.

 

00:33:46 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

You're very, very welcome. And if our listener wanted to connect with you, Kate, what's the best way that they can connect with you?

 

00:33:52 - Kate Gordon

Yeah, the best way is through California Forward, where I just joined a CEO about four months ago. I'm on a fast ramp up period and that's C A F w d dot org and we have a great summit every year that we put on, and we do all kinds of other programming. It would be great to connect with folks.

 

00:34:07 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

You bet. All right, we'll be sure to enter those into the Show Notes. Kate, again, thank you, and I look forward to connecting with you again in the near future.

 

00:34:15 - Kate Gordon

Thank you.

 

00:34:18 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Thank you for listening to the Future of Work podcast. Make sure you're subscribed on your favorite listening platform so you can easily get new episodes every Tuesday. You can reach out to us by clicking on the website link below in the Show Notes to collaborate, partner, or just chat about all things Future of Work. We'd love to connect with you. All of us here at the Future of Work and Pasadena City College wish you safety and wellness.