Transcript- Episode 141: Empowering Individuals Through Hands-On Work Experience with Tim Aldinger, Vice President of Workforce and Climate Innovation Episode 141

00:00:00 - Tim Aldinger

We've recognized that our community colleges are so embedded in our communities generally have great trust that focusing on some of those adaptation ways of approaching, whether that's in a community emergency or whether it's helping bring community together to think about what the future is related to, new technologies or more climate resilience is a great role for our community colleges and you see that in all the iterations up and down the state.

 

00:00:31 - 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?

 

00:00:56 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

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

 

00:01:05 - Christina Barsi

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

 

00:01:08 - 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.

 

00:01:42 - Christina Barsi

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

 

00:01:50 - 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. Please join me in welcoming Tim Aldinger, Vice President of Workforce and Climate Innovation at Foundation for California Community Colleges. Tim has dedicated over two decades to advancing work-based learning opportunities, particularly within California's diverse communities. He has led initiatives like the California Resilient Careers and Forestry Proposal, a pivotal project that won the American Rescue Plan Good Jobs Challenge grant. Tim has also co-founded the California Workforce Association's Executive Boot Camp, helping train the next generation of workforce leaders. He has worked locally and nationally to strengthen public workforce systems and has supported over 5000 work-based learning participants annually. Today, we'll explore how work-based learning impacts both individuals and communities and how partnerships between educational institutions and industries can solve pressing workforce challenges. Tim, welcome. Welcome to the show. Pleasure to have you.

 

00:03:05 - Tim Aldinger

Thank you so much for having me. Salvatrice, it's wonderful to be here.

 

00:03:08 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

You bet, you bet. I have a little bit of intel around your background, but for those who are new to the podcast or new to the understanding of the foundation for California Community Colleges, and you particularly, can you give us a little background about how your experiences have led you here and at what point did you feel that you had the best knowledge around work based learning and the value and what it means for individuals and the industries?

 

00:03:34 - Tim Aldinger

You know, there were a couple of experiences in my own career path that I think have always informed my approach. And I think some of my story is really not unlike or quite similar to lots of our students and lots of our peers. I first went to a four-year college. I dropped out. I wasn't quite sure what direction I wanted to take. And at a point in my life that was I've characterized as low, low bank account balance, low confidence, kind of low hope.

 

00:04:09 - Tim Aldinger

I was living up in a small town up in Ashland, and in the mornings, I would go to my housekeeping job at the Stratford Inn, and then I'd have a couple hours’ break, and then I'd go to my dishwashing job at Geppetto's. And I was grateful for the work at the time, honestly, but it was also clearly not where I thought I would be in my mid-20s. And I ended up, I was living near a local college and I ended up taking a summer class. And someone came into that class and said, hey, anybody here in the class want to spend their weekends working out in the woods, get some college credit and also maybe some money to pay for college? And I thought that sounds good and maybe better than what I'm doing now.

 

00:04:55 - Tim Aldinger

And that was an AmeriCorps program. And so, for the next year, I was part of what was called RealCorps, the regional ecosystem Applied Learning Corps. And it was a transformative moment in my life. And that program, as most AmeriCorps programs and core programs, is very much steeped in work-based learning. You go out, and you, in this case, build trails. Thin forest stands at the urban wildland interface.

 

00:05:22 - Tim Aldinger

Technically, it's a wildland urban interface, the wui. And that was such a special and meaningful experience for me in terms of the space I was in in my life. It brought community, it helped me gain confidence, and it got me re-engaged in higher education and got me thinking, I do want to go back, and I do want to finish this. And so I am so grateful for that. I've shared with many that on the Last day of that program, I ugly cried. I mean, I could not stop crying because it had just fed me; it had just helped me get my feet back on the ground so much. And so that's often a touch point for me about the power of how that integrated learning, where I had classroom learning that was more in the abstract, but then I could go out and really experience what it looks like in the woods here and what the policy implications were of decisions decades ago, and then actually really help the community out.

 

00:06:22 - Tim Aldinger

Now the story goes on. I finished my studies. I did well from an academic and grades perspective, came out with a bachelor's degree, and I applied to about 50 jobs. And I got one phone interview. And that was another sort of moment of like, well, I thought we were supposed to go get our degree, and I thought that this is what would open all the doors for me.

 

00:06:47 - Tim Aldinger

And it turned out that, you know, I wasn't able to share or demonstrate what I was able to do. And I didn't necessarily have the network or the immediate ability to apply the things I had learned. And this was more in the general nonprofit space. I was not still more in the kind of forestry space. So, after eventually becoming a substitute teacher for a while, I decided to apply for a program called the KORO Fellowship in Public Affairs. For those who don't know, the flagship of that is in San Francisco, but there's also one in Los Angeles and a few others across the country. And the structure of KORO is also through and through work-based learning. Through the course of nine months, you are placed in in nonprofits, government agencies, private businesses, media outlets, organized labor.

 

00:07:38 - Tim Aldinger

And at the same time, you get incredible access to local decision makers, and you get to interview them and find out how they came to where they are. And what I'll tell then is that by the end of that program, I applied for three jobs and was offered two of them.

 

00:07:55 - Tim Aldinger

So, both of those experiences for me have led to this question that has really informed my work. Where, how I've met you and so many others in the California community colleges is why were those programs somewhat adjacent to my actual higher ed experience. Why wasn't more of my higher ed experience so steeped and rich in that kind of learning? And we are certainly seeing, I think, more of that across our colleges. And I am so happy to be here with you because I know that's a big focus at Pasadena, and there's still so much opportunity, and so far we could go in making that kind of learning more accessible.

 

00:08:33 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Thank you. You and I have had, and you just mentioned it, right? You and I have both had the unique opportunity and ability to build work-based learning programs for our systems. And if memory serves me right, gosh, we met probably 2018 or so when the foundation was looking at work-based learning holistically across our systems. And you and I both understand and know the value of, and you just shared your own personal experience on the value of work-based learning. But for our listeners, could you maybe unpack a little more how you see it benefiting not only for the individual as an example of what you shared but also for industries and organizations? What benefit and value does it bring for them?

 

00:09:17 - Tim Aldinger

How many times, Salvatrice, have you heard the saying industry and higher ed move at different speeds? Like if you're in workforce, career, technical education, you hear that all the time. And I think to a certain degree that's as it should be. There are aspects of learning that do need to have its own pace and its own culture. And I would say that to the extent that those different paces can lead to it actually being harder for our students to find and secure good, upwardly mobile, socially mobile career paths, we need to reflect on that.

 

00:09:59 - Tim Aldinger

I think what I've seen, the examples I just shared, but what I know what you've done in so many of our colleagues across the not just the California community colleges, but across the country where career connected, rich, well designed work based learning happens, those speed differences get way less and people often share sort of the gold standard of apprenticeships where actually working and learning are not separate.

 

00:10:23 - Tim Aldinger

It is the same thing. You have a job, you are learning under accomplished people. You also have classroom instruction where you get more of the theory and the underpinning to help you do your work. But every day you are working. But then there's so many iterations of that, whether it's an internship, whether it's other forms of earn and learn, short term work experience, or even the experiences like I mentioned, Quora, where you have an opportunity to talk to somebody who's had an interesting career path of their own. All those things bring context and nuance to what is learned just in the classroom, to that student.

 

00:11:06 - Tim Aldinger

So that they're picking up, oh, this is how people operate in the work world. This is how they talk about this thing I learned in a class, but I didn't know this is how they talked about it. Or lo and behold, yes, I got to apply myself in my lab on this kind of technology, but this company actually has this other kind of technology, and I have the frameworks and the understanding, but now I need to apply it in a different way.

 

00:11:31 - Tim Aldinger

So much of that, I think, generally can only really happen in the real world and in an applied sense. So for our students, I think it's just a rich, rich way of learning. My team here at the foundation has had the opportunity to work with the California Workforce Development Board on a project helping individuals who are coming out of incarceration to get good jobs, called the Hire Initiative. At a recent convening we put on, the state Director of Career and Technical Education for the California Department of Corrections spoke. He was such an advocate for career technical education and he spoke about how the recidivism rates and the success rates for individuals incarceration coming out who have been part of career technical education are so much better, tens and tens and 20 to 30, 40, 50% better than others, because that type of learning, it engages different parts of your mind, different parts of your brain structure, helps you perhaps unlearn things that need to be unlearned and unlock new parts of yourself.

 

00:12:37 - Tim Aldinger

So all that to say, this rich kind of learning is so good for such a wide range of students. Now to the other part of your question. We also in workforce development, as professionals, we hear so much from our employer partners, our industry partners of, well, the students, they may have the technical skills, but they don't know how to interact with others or they don't know how to deal with conflict, or they, they don't show up with time and on and on and on.

 

00:13:01 - Tim Aldinger

So, pick your poison. Is that soft skills, essential skills, 21st-century skills, whatever those are, that again, I come back to work-based learning as a benefit to the employer that they are getting a chance to help these individuals learn what the workplace is like, learn about that culture. That's certainly for me, again, like when I think about my experience in koro, I got to see so many different iterations and find out, oh, this could be interesting.

 

00:13:27 - Tim Aldinger

I had told the people at Coro that I was very interested in third-party candidates. So they said, okay, you can go work for a third-party candidate. And it was a real eye-opener for me, especially when my other students were working on really pressing statewide races and things. And I wasn't having that kind of access at the time, but again, that was important learning. And how many times have we heard the classic story of the student that thought they wanted to go into healthcare but found that they didn't like the real world implications, the blood or whatever it might be, the pain, the real pain you have to deal with that is all benefiting the employer side as well.

 

00:14:03 - Tim Aldinger

They want the people who are cut out for the work, that have the aptitude, that have the drive. And there's I wish I had this, and maybe we'll put it in the show notes.

 

00:14:13 - Tim Aldinger

But there is the research that shows that well-structured internship programs benefit employers in terms of retention, lower their recruiting costs. That can be really significant costs for a business, all that. But it all takes work. And I know that's what this podcast is about. It's what you do every day. It's still a little bit countercultural to our institutions. So, real quick, part of what we try to do at the foundation for California Community Colleges and partner with the Chancellor's office and with local colleges and regions is, is how can we provide tools, supports, training to help make that happen.

 

00:14:51 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Thank you, Tim, for unpacking that. And I also really appreciate the fact that you underscored the value for industry. Sometimes, that short-term commitment feels very heavy for an organization. I understand having our own family businesses. However, that short-term commitment is a long-term gain for the organization. All the things that you said, retention, bottom line. And we're developing new talent and new workforce. And I would also say that organizations have an opportunity to upskill their existing workforce, and there are work-based learning opportunities within their own respective organizations for their current employees. And sometimes we forget about that. We forget about the existing employees, and we're always focused on new talent. Which led me to think about, you know, when we first met, we were just kind of exploring all of what is possible with work-based learning and how does it fit within our respective systems. We had a chance to work through a program. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

 

00:15:55 - Tim Aldinger

I do. Thank you for bringing that up. I was thinking about our time together. I was thinking, you know, I first met you, Salvatrice, I think it was 2017 and at the time we were working with the Chancellor's office on a project we called the Work-Based Learning Planning and Tools Pilot. It was great. Pasadena was one of actually about 34 colleges. We were thrilled with the response that actually participated.

 

00:16:21 - Tim Aldinger

And I will, I'd love to share a little bit because I think it's really informed my sense of if we do want to see more of this kind of learning, what would it take? So at that time, I'd been in my role here at the foundation for three to four years, and a lot of the work I had been doing was under the operating assumption that there was great demand for work-based learning, both from students and employers and our colleges. And so a big thing that needed to be addressed was really just the operationalizing of that work-based learning.

 

00:16:55 - Tim Aldinger

So the purpose of the work-based learning planning tools pilot was to do both of those, to do some planning. So, I still remember coming to Pasadena City College biased here. And I know people yell at me, one of the, if not the most beautiful community college. I mean, just such stunning architecture. I was like, wow, this is an incredible place. And we sat in one of your rooms and really started to talk about all the programs you were doing, all the efforts you were making. And we got to do that up and down the state with a wide range of community colleges. And then we had this suite of tools. At the time, we had actually a digital platform that was designed to help match employers and students for a range of work-based learning we had at the time.

 

00:17:36 - Tim Aldinger

And we still have our service in which we provide employer of record services for colleges, workforce agencies, nonprofits, where we can step in and do the actual HR and employment functions. And at the time, we even had a digital app that helped students explore their career interests and even see how far away they were from an actual career community college and what their offerings were.

 

00:18:00 - Tim Aldinger

And they're great, they're all tools. But there was such learning with you and with all these others that really all those colleges, none of them had the infrastructure to even know how many students were engaged in work-based learning at the time. So even the baseline of knowing where they were starting and where you wanted to go wasn't quite available. We realized that there was an incredible, often decentralization of work-based learning. And just for the record, it's not advocacy for fully centralizing either, just to be clear, but lots of deans, vice presidents, faculty members didn't know what another was doing.

 

00:18:42 - Tim Aldinger

Sometimes multiple people talking to businesses at the same time. So the point of all this was a kind of a learning and frankly a real humbling on my part that there's still quite a bit of work to do back then and I think now, and I love that you're doing this podcast and that so many more of our peers are having this type of conversation of, well, what would it take to make work based learning, applied learning, career connected learning, just not a separate thing for our students, but a real thing. So Salvatore is one of the things we learned through the work-based learning planning and tools pilot was the importance of storytelling.

 

00:19:21 - Tim Aldinger

And by the way, I really enjoyed the podcast you recently did with the woman talking about the importance of storytelling. And I'm so this document here, you may recall, this is a document that we put together that was about mapping your career path. And we had you and lots of your peers, and then my team basically chart out the steps in your career journey, reflecting on what kind of work-based learning you have had in your own life, and really encouraging as much openness and authenticity as possible. So that means when you got fired, or when you had a job you didn't like, or when you started down a path that really turned out to be not very good for you, because that's all important learning along the way.

 

00:20:07 - Tim Aldinger

And when we made that available for people, you could feel it in the room. People were just so moved by the opportunity to do that reflection on their own. But then just the different aha's about various threads in their life, various mentors that they hadn't thought about. But what I was most excited about was that I think it helped a number of the colleagues of ours who are in that work reflect a little more on.

 

00:20:33 - Tim Aldinger

Oh, a lot of my important learning was not necessarily just in the classroom. It was in that not great job or it was in that not great boss. So I bring that up is that I think if one of the questions is we want to make this kind of learning more available across the board, then yes, we need support all the way up to the president and the chancellor. We need staffing of people who can work and partner with employers and businesses and understand their pressures and their timelines.

 

00:21:01 - Tim Aldinger

We do need technology and technological supports. And I often wonder, can this storytelling and sharing piece be a real catalyst at every level of people sharing those stories and then making sure that they're thinking about how that translates to how their students are learning? Because I do think, naturally our colleges are full of individuals who have benefited from traditional higher education careers, which is great. And so it also then creates a sense that that's the modality and the path for most people. We naturally think that, like, I had this, I want everyone else to benefit from this. But lots of people's paths look very different and are winding in different ways. And I think that kind of storytelling can really help open up that conversation.

 

00:21:51 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Yeah, it'd be really kind of interesting. Just as a side note, maybe you and I connect on where we are now. You know, you mentioned how we met and how we started our programming together. But I would be delighted to sit with you and share with you what Pasadena has done and how we've been able to track and centralize- not centralize the efforts, but centralize the Tracking as best as we can so that we can report out. And you know, in leading, we're leading one of the work-based learning programs for the Los Angeles Regional Consortium, and we're sharing our model. So it'd be kind of cool to have you take a look at the model and see where we've come from. That initial conversation that you and I had, so it was instrumental in shaping the model for pcc and I don't think I've ever had a chance to tell you that, but it really has because to your point, it allowed us to look at other things or other activities, processes, people, programming, everything, and it really forced us to examine what we have, take inventory, evaluate the outcomes, and then figure out another way of either supplying work based learning. Right. And supporting those opportunities and efforts and tracking. So it'd be really kind of cool offline to like, talk about those things.

 

00:23:08 - Tim Aldinger

I would love that.

 

00:23:10 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's make that happen. For sure, for sure. You know, I'm gonna switch gears just a little bit, Tim, on how instrumental you've been in in the climate resilience efforts with the foundation. And I'm interested in understanding a little bit more how you see workforce innovation in that space of climate change and what does really the future hold for us, or for us maybe, but more specifically, those industries that are affected by it.

 

00:23:41 - Tim Aldinger

Absolutely. I'm so grateful that I've had the opportunity to get more involved with climate resiliency efforts. And let me give a little bit of the backstory on that, and then we can look forward. But you know, for actually dozens of years, the foundation's had the opportunity to support programs, especially with my colleague, Idis Aguilar, programs that help support cleaner air, whether that's through smog check referees or working with air quality districts. So we've had some of that work at the foundation, and then I think some of the AHA's for me came actually not long after we met.

 

00:24:22 - Tim Aldinger

We were supporting a number of, well, really one agency, workforce agency in the far north of the state. And at the same time they had a flood recovery, drought recovery and fire recovery project at the same time. You know, it was a running joke with our partners. You know, it was also this like, wow, this is wild how fast and furious these kinds of experiences are coming. And it got me starting to have conversations with other peers at the foundation of, I think we maybe need to start thinking about how to raise up this work around climate resilience more explicitly. It was happening here and there, but let's make it more explicit. Almost three years ago now, the foundation was able to make some of its own investments to bring in my colleague Jeffrey Clary, who had spent many years at UC Davis managing some of their natural landscapes on behalf of students and learning and research.

 

00:25:22 - Tim Aldinger

He has a great background in ecology. His PhD is in California Grasslands. He came over to the foundation to help think about what would it look like for a system like ours, 116 colleges in every corner of California, to be involved in some way with climate resilience.

 

00:25:40 - Tim Aldinger

So not long after he came on board, he and I had an opportunity to go down to Kern Community College District, to Bakersfield, and then Kern Community College District Chancellor Sonia Christian, now our California Community College Chancellor, Sonja Christian, was putting on a summit really focused on energy. And that summit was a real eye-opener for us. As you may know, Kern County is highest producer of more legacy energy sources, but also the highest producer of renewable energy sources in the state.

 

00:26:12 - Tim Aldinger

So it's a very dynamic place. And a lot of the conversations about changing how we meet our energy needs really happen at a local level there. So we went to this summit that Chancellor Christian and her team put on, and we're really moved by the diversity of groups that were there, including at one point, conversation between an environmental justice group and an energy company, which you don't see that often. And Jeff and I both felt like, what an incredible example of the trust that community colleges can engender in their communities, that they're a group that can bring both of those parties together.

 

00:26:51 - Tim Aldinger

There's not a lot of groups that can have that widespread amount of trust to have those difficult conversations about how are we going to meet our energy needs in the future in a way that is good for all communities. Very difficult conversations. So that has really led. And then, as Chancellor, Christian has come into the statewide role, a great partnership with her and her team at the Chancellor's office to really think about this.

 

00:27:16 - Tim Aldinger

And so the way that has emerged is really focusing on three, I think, core competencies of our colleges in climate work. And I just want to say this a little bit. It's been helpful for me. It might be helpful for your listeners. Jeff Clary has really helped me understand that when we think about climate, what we're most in terms of general awareness, most aware of, is the goals to mitigate our carbon footprint, and which the logic is then that will mitigate likely more extreme weather events, extreme heat, wildfires, et cetera. And so a lot of our policies, a lot of our funding and programming goes to that, and so you call that mitigation. But also, there is the importance of adaptation, which means lots of climate change and climate policy change is and has been happening. And many of our communities, including many of our very vulnerable communities, have already had to deal with the those changes.

 

00:28:14 - Tim Aldinger

The obvious ones being wildfire, but it could be floods, it could be extreme heat, etc. And so we've recognized that our community colleges are so embedded in our communities generally have great trust that focusing on some of those adaptation ways of approaching, whether that's in a community emergency or whether it's helping bring community together to think about what the future future is related to new technologies or more. Climate resilience is a great role for our community colleges, and you see that in all the iterations up and down the state. So that really turns into three buckets of work or fields of practice. But I'll talk a little bit about them, but workforce development, community engagement, and facilities and operational stewardship.

 

00:29:03 - Tim Aldinger

So if you start with that last one, that, again is what a lot of our institutions have been doing for a while. Most of them have a plan to reduce energy usage, have a cleaner energy footprint, have cleaner procurement, and we have sustainability professionals. And so we've got great bandwidth and great expertise in that space. The two other areas, though, are really this role of community engagement.

 

00:29:32 - Tim Aldinger

And again, whether that looks like emergency responses or having community conversations about how does our energy future look for us, we've had the opportunity again, my colleague Idis Aguilar, in the past has worked with the California Air Resources Board to utilize our community colleges as hubs in what are called disadvantaged, it's a term of art, disadvantaged communities, to have conversations about the resources that can be brought to bear to, to clean up the environmental quality there. And our community colleges are right there. But the third one, and central to our work, is the workforce development for these emerging and sometimes current industry sectors and so that have some kind of role in either mitigation or adaptation for more climate resilience.

 

00:30:22 - Tim Aldinger

So that includes a lot of the forestry work that we've been involved with because if we have healthier forests, then we have less catastrophic wildfire, better carbon sinks, and just healthier air all around. You may not think of those as climate-relevant jobs, but they do have a big impact. But that also includes the more visually well-known around electric vehicles. We're working with the Air Resources Board on getting funding out to different colleges that have zero emission vehicle programs, either maintenance or manufacturing, to help them build and expand those programs so we have more Capacity, even from charging infrastructure all the way to supporting the maintenance of the cars right in your backyard.

 

00:31:07 - Tim Aldinger

And what you all are doing, you know, the LA region is such a great example of what you've done at the regional level with bcap, you know, Blue Economy Climate Action Pathways, as I was actually with a couple of your colleagues presenting nationally a couple months ago ago about BCAP as just a great example of okay, in Los Angeles, right on the water, what does that mean for ocean energy and better tending to the ocean ecosystem and all those things. There you have West Los Angeles College with the climate center that they have and what they're doing around curriculum and student opportunities. So there are so many assets in our state around these workforce pathways that that are tailored regionally, which is one of our strengths as a system. It's been really exciting to be a part of this work.

 

00:31:53 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Thanks. And speaking of workforce pathways, I'm glad you said that because your work has been geared and with a high focus on accessibility of workforce development programming and pathways to diverse communities and underserved communities. And naturally, there's always barriers in this arena. It's just the way it is. And we keep working really, really diligently on reducing those barriers. And I thought that maybe we could spend some time, if you can share with us what you think are the biggest barriers to continue to create equitable workforce pathways for our communities.

 

00:32:34 - Tim Aldinger

It really is multilayered. So let me approach this broadly and come back more concretely to your question. But in the fall of 2024, I spent a lot of time going to conferences on the East Coast about future of higher education. And one study in particular that came up multiple times was the Gallup poll on Confidence in Higher Education. I don't know if you've seen that, but. And for your readers, you can look it up. But for about 10 years now, Gallup has tracked confidence in higher education. And when they started around 20, 2015, you know, it was disproportionately high numbers of either high confidence or moderate confidence and a very little low to zero confidence. Those have kind of flipped by the last couple of years so that an equal amount of people that have not a lot of confidence with confidence, and there's a lot of concern about that when you pair that with demographic changes about smaller numbers of people in high school and when Gallup has dug in a little bit to why would you say you don't have a lot of confidence in higher education? A few things come up, but two in particular are the sense that people are not getting the right kind of skills for success in their life after college, and two, the cost. So I bring that up to say the community colleges have a great comparative advantage addressing those concerns to many of our higher ed partners. In our other systems, we have a much broader and really robust system of career education and workforce development, and we are comparatively affordable. And I bring all that up to say when we're talking about accessibility and making it an opportunity for everybody, many, many people turn to the community colleges as that place where I either can't afford or I can't make it, or I don't have the academic credentials to get there. Can I start here? That then comes back to the conversation we were having earlier of when they get to the community colleges, can we do our best to ensure that it's going to lead to a good pathway? Because I do think a lot of the infrastructure for people to come into our colleges and be met and supported is there. We have a lot of people who really care about inclusivity and bringing everybody in. And yet sometimes we're honestly doing our best, but in models that may not lead students into the career paths that help them out. So part of it, I think, to your question, Salvatrice, is actually, can we, particularly in the community colleges, really own that skill, that capacity, that strength we have in workforce education and really put it on par with our opportunities we create for people to transfer? And it's not a knock on either or just trying to put workforce up because I'm a workforce guy. But really to say it's a both and I would say broadly, in my time in the community colleges, there tends to be a big focus on transfer, which is important. It's good for almost everybody that does that, and yet it's still not necessarily for everybody. And it's funny that it's a controversial statement, but that's not a knock on anybody that doesn't want that.

 

00:35:48 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Well, there's dualities, right, Tim?

 

00:35:50 - Tim Aldinger

To that point, I think we last physically bumped into each other at the CCCAOE Fall conference. And in one of the sessions, one of our colleagues talked about that in their career education programs, I believe they said it was 35% of the students already had bachelor's degrees. And I think that number actually goes up or down in some of our other institutions. Institutions, again, this is not an indictment on bachelor's degrees, but if individuals in good faith went to get their bachelor's degree and then incurred debt and then found they were not able to find pathways that helped them and then come back to the community colleges to find those pathways. To your point about accessibility and you know, really bringing everybody in, those connections with employers, those understanding of your local labor market, those skill based. Again, when I talk about my story and Coro and AmeriCorps, I like was learning things. I could actually do things at the end. So good for confidence. It's so good for what employers want. So in many ways, I think a lot of the ingredients are there. It's more let's keep putting our focus on it in this moment in time. Let's own that. Let's really celebrate what we can offer, and let's invest in that.

 

00:37:08 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Tim, if you had a magic wand and you said Salvatores, there's one, two or three specific changes that we as an educational system need to make in order to adapt to industries and vice versa so that we can best prepare for the future of work and all of the emerging occupations that we've been witnessing the last year or two, what would you say those changes need to be?

 

00:37:33 - Tim Aldinger

I think there are great seeds and expressions of that in what Chancellor Christian is seeking to do with Vision 2030. And I'll call a couple things out specifically, but you'll hear Chancellor Christian and lots of our colleagues talk about credit for prior learning, and that I know for individuals not in higher education, seems a little esoteric. But the idea and the expression of it is that individuals who have had life experience have learned in other ways that can come to our institutions and show that they have that knowledge, can then receive credit. And there are great studies. There's some research out there to show that that really helps groups who otherwise would not have even thought about college when they know that that cuts their time at college down by a year. And these are people who usually have a family are supporting. A lot of people have one or two or three jobs if they can fit that in with a credit for prior learning infrastructure, we all need to keep working on that. I know many institutions are, and we're working on what that looks like statewide. And that's a big part of several of the demonstration projects in Vision 2030 that I think is a really exciting opportunity. Another in that kind of emerging space is this idea of competency-based education where you're really focused on that ability to be able to demonstrate what you are learning and have it focused on competency versus the more traditional kind of seat time, if you will. Again, really hard for how we measure, pay for and structure our institutions, but for lots and lots of people and how they learn, whether that's just going to YouTube or other social media outlets to be like, I just need to learn how to fix this thing on my door in my garage because it won't close and I can just watch this video and learn it. Like knowing that that's more and more the expectation. And I'm not saying that's perfect, and I'm not trying to take away from the richer, fuller learning environments that we provide, but somewhere there has to be that shorter competency-focused learning. And then this is not new, but I think still hard to focus on is these kind of credentials that can be more shorter term and stackable. As people say, those are not a silver bullet. In fact, Kathy Booth over at Wested has done really great research with some of her colleagues on which of those shorter-term credentials actually provide upward mobility and which don't. It's not a cure-all, but I think it does. When people think that going to college has to mean two years off or four years off and hold everything and then they find out, oh, I could take one or two classes and build these skills, it just opens more doors, I think to people's minds. So continuing that movement, which I think you all and lots of colleges are doing for more flexibility, I think is going to help achieve that goal of more open and accessible institutions.

 

00:40:45 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Thank you, Tim. This has been an amazing conversation, and you and I could talk for hours for sure. There's too much. There's too much to talk about, right?

 

00:40:55 - Tim Aldinger

It's true.

 

00:40:56 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

It is very true. And I know that this conversation will continue to unfold; it will connect again. And I am going to share with you where we've come since the last time, you know, we start initially started the work-based learning project. So I'm really excited to share that with you. But if you had one main takeaway from this conversation that you would like our listener to really hold on to, what would that be? How did I know?

 

00:41:25 - Tim Aldinger

I'll give you three. But let's start with a story. I honestly think that if we all can come back to reflecting on and then sharing our own stories, the good, the bad, the ugly and where those bumps in the road that are often linked to work in some way and ideally and hopefully for many of us, some kind of work based learning or some work based learning would have helped. I think that could open the door to rethinking because it comes to the heart and not just the head. Right. I would encourage everyone. I haven't talked too much about it, and I would really encourage everyone though to check out foundationccc.org, that is our website. We have learned a lot, and I look forward to sharing also with you, Salvatrice what we've learned. But we still do have quite a few resources and tools and trainings that, in partnership with the Chancellor's office and lots of colleges and workforce agencies, ways to help make these programs successful. So please do check us out there. And then finally, to the extent that we, especially in the community colleges, can recognize and celebrate our career-focused offerings and continue to invest in those, I think that'd be great.

 

00:42:40 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Thank you so much. We'll be sure to include in the Show Notes Foundation CCC as well as the study. And if our listeners wanted to connect with you, what's the best way to do that?

 

00:42:51 - Tim Aldinger

Go to our website, go to our Workforce section. And I am really fortunate to have an incredible team. I really appreciate the team that I work with and also our overall foundation team. You can find either connections to me or connections to my colleagues working on that. Yeah, you can check them out there.

 

00:43:10 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

Thank you so much, Tim, and I look forward to connecting again in the future. This has been lovely.

 

00:43:15 - Tim Aldinger

Yeah, thank you. Really. I appreciate being able to share some of this. I had the blessing to be able to work on this for many years, and I really appreciate being able to talk about it.

 

00:43:25 - Dr. Salvatrice Cummo

You're very welcome anytime. Thank you for listening to the Future of Work podcast. Make sure you subscribe 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