Work Forces
Seeking to optimize your organization for the future of work and learning? Join workforce and education strategists Julian Alssid and Kaitlin LeMoine as they speak with the innovators who are shaping the future of workforce and career preparation. Together, they will unpack the big problems these individuals are solving and discuss the strategies and tactics that really work. This bi-weekly show is for practitioners and policymakers looking for practical workforce and learning solutions that can be scaled and sustained.
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Work Forces Rewind: Scott Carlson and Ned Laff on Hacking College
08/12/2025
Work Forces Rewind: Scott Carlson and Ned Laff on Hacking College
Scott Carlson and Ned Laff, authors of "Hacking College," discuss how to craft a higher education experience that intentionally links student learning to future work and career success. They emphasize the necessity of a proactive and personalized approach to higher education, tapping into students' passions and hidden intellectualism. Carlson and Laff champion a field of study approach, empowering students to actively design their undergraduate degrees, unearth hidden job markets, and leverage faculty expertise. They underscore the significance of cultural and social capital, urging institutions to adapt and support this student-centric model. The conversation illuminates the ways that higher education administrators and faculty, and students themselves, can personalize the learning experience to ensure higher ed graduates are well-equipped to navigate diverse career opportunities. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Happy summer all. We're back with one more rewind episode featuring Scott Carlson and Ned Laff. And in this conversation, we dive deep into their new book Hacking College. Amongst many topics, we discuss a framework to approach college and the college experience with a personalized focus on future careers and long-term goals. We hope you enjoy this conversation and look forward to kicking off our next season in our next episode. So Julian, I've noticed a real shift in our conversations lately, both with clients and on the podcast, we seem to be delving deeper into the complexities of the school-to-work transition, especially for young adults and for working adults. Julian Alssid: It's true. Kaitlin, and it really highlights the increasing complexity of that transition. The job market is constantly evolving, and it can be tough for students to figure out where they fit in, especially with so many opportunities hidden from public view. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a tall order for educators and institutions too. For example, faculty are being asked to wear many hats and skills like career advising can sometimes feel separate from their day to day roles and require new sets of tools and related training. Julian Alssid: Right? It's not just about helping students find a job, but about guiding them through a process of self discovery, exploration and network building and helping them understand their own interests and strengths and how those connect to real world opportunities. Kaitlin LeMoine: And that's where I think our guests today, Scott Carlson and Ned Laff, have some really valuable insights. They've literally written the book on this. It's called "Hacking College", and we're talking to them on the book's release date. Julian Alssid: Yes, and congratulations, guys. The book offers a framework for faculty and staff to help students take a more proactive and personalized approach to their college experience with a real focus on future careers and life goals. Kaitlin LeMoine: Though we'll ask Scott and Ned, to give their own background, Scott's a Senior Writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he's been writing about the trends shaping higher education for over 25 years. As his LinkedIn profile states, he writes about where education is headed, how it serves or doesn't serve students and the public, and how the sector can stay relevant and resilient. Julian Alssid: And Ned has over 35 years of experience in higher ed, helping students design successful undergraduate experiences. He's held leadership roles at numerous colleges and universities focused on academic advising, curriculum development and student engagement. Kaitlin LeMoine: Scott and Ned, welcome to Work Forces. Congratulations on the publication of this book, and we're excited to dive in with you today to learn more about Hacking College. Ned Laff: Thank you so much. Scott Carlson: Thanks for having us on. Julian Alssid: So to get the conversation started, love to hear a bit more about your respective backgrounds and how you came together to write this book. Scott Carlson: Well, as Kaitlin had said, I was at The Chronicle for about 25 years. I've you know, in the years leading up to the pandemic, I was writing a lot about inequality and the path from college to work. I wrote a couple of Chronicle reports about the future of work and how students wind up getting jobs. And in writing some of this, these reports, and writing some of these stories, the follow up stories in The Chronicle, I had been getting a lot of notes from one Ned Laff who had been contacting me and had been working in this area for some time. And this is, in fact, how we got to know each other and got to meet each other, because Ned was just writing me over and over again about, oh, there's a better way. There's a better way to do this. I'll let him take the story from there. Ned Laff: Yeah, I have the work that I had been doing in higher ed. It's hard to call it something like advising. It's, it's in this middle, middle ground. I got into this when I was a grad student at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where I was working in a program called Individual Plans of Study, where students could design their own academic major, provided it couldn't be done in any of the colleges at the University of Illinois Urbana. And what we began to find out working is that students would be coming in and we would help them figure out how they could do essentially, the heart of an individual plan of study, but underneath the rubric of a major. And that started to raise questions in my mind about what is the nature of a college curriculum from the eyes of a student. What is the relationship of a college curriculum to the world of work? If there is this giant thing called the hidden job market, which is not advertised in career services, you don't see it on, you don't see it on. Indeed. You don't see it anywhere. And what does this mean in terms of student engagement, and how students can tap what they're genuinely interested in, what we call hidden intellectualism, and how they actually better engage learning and and the university they're at. And I would send Scott these. I'm like, probably about 100 emails a week, just nagging them. I got something here. I got something here. Just give me five minutes, though. Kaitlin LeMoine: You share about this in this, in the book, a little bit. We'd love to hear about how the book title came to be. And can you share a bit about the major challenges you hope to tackle when writing this book? Scott Carlson: Well, I think when I was writing some of that stuff for the Chronicle about the path from college to work, I was sort of following along the kind of narrative that everyone else sort of follows. And it's, you know, it's sort of about skills. What do you do with liberal arts education? How do you get students to land internships and all of that. And you know, really, one of the points that we that we make in hacking college is that a lot of that just sort of comes about by luck. For a lot of students, they just sort of happen to run into the right person who shows them how to play the game, or they come from a lot of social and cultural capital that sort of paves the way to where they want to go. And part of what we're trying to do with hacking college is to describe, kind of, the principles of how people wind up creating valuable undergraduate degrees. We're kind of looking at the whole issue of what is the empty college degree. You know, the empty college degree being sort of this degree that is a quote, unquote useful major, and then a bunch of other stuff in the degree that doesn't really knit together. And a lot of students graduate with that kind of degree. You know, we think this is like a huge part of what drives the national conversation about underemployment and of the value of college right now, and that emptiness being sort of the main problem there. And so with Hacking College, we're trying to tackle this, this question like, how do you actually get to something that's valuable? The term hacking comes from the notion that colleges sort of set up a bunch of rules around, you know, how do you get through? How do you, what do you major in? How do you, how do you fill up the rest of the undergraduate degree? And we're using the metaphor of hacking we're talking about like, how do you, how do you use these different structures that you find in college and then knit them together in a conscious way? How do you, how do you create opportunities and create a program that plays off the strengths that you already bring to college? This is a big part of the hacking metaphor there, coming out of the work of Bruce Schneier, who talks about how hacking is across society. People hack the tax code. People hack regulations, government regulations. People hack their lives in all sorts of ways. And of course, the wealthy hack college in hiring expensive college consultants, in, you know, in lining up opportunities for their children in all sorts of ways. How can we do this for students who don't bring these kinds of resources to the undergraduate experience? Julian Alssid: So Ned, you so in the book, I think you used the term earlier, you described approaching this undergraduate experience as a field of study. Ned Laff: Yes. Julian Alssid: What does that mean? What exactly do you mean? And how does approaching college with that lens impact their learner experience? Ned Laff: The interesting thing about using field of study is, I asked students once, can you tell me the difference between your college faculty and your high school faculty, and they couldn't and it was a wonderful experience, because what it meant was basically 90% of what faculty have to offer, what a university has to offer, is invisible. So when you look at faculty, faculty are field of study specialists. They aren't just, I'm a professor of English or I'm a professor of biology, they are I'm a professor of environmental biology, and I'm looking at the migration patterns of whales. And that is looking at it is defining a problem which we call in the book wicked problems, which demand a multi disciplinary approach. And how you approach those wicked problems depends on how you define it. So it's not unusual to hear students come out and say, I just graduated with my degree. I'm at Northwestern University. I actually heard this the other day at the gym. I'm at Northwestern University. I'm graduating, and I have no idea what I'm doing with my degree. I don't know how it adds up, because no one had ever asked them a question like this. I'm going to go into accounting. I have no idea what. Talking about, can you explain that to me? And as soon as you ask for that explanation, whole bunches of things open up. And among those things that open up are all this possibility in what Scott and I call the hidden job market. So the other part of field of study is that it brings an outward looking perspective into how students think inwardly about the college. When they begin to do this, what they realize is there's three basic components to an undergraduate education. When you look at most colleges, right, Gen Ed, the major, and what are you going to do with the rest of the hours, which is almost a third or more of your hours? Sometimes it could add up to 50 hours, because some courses in the gen ed count for the major. Well, when you look at a degree audit, it's except for the basic required courses. It's blank spaces to be filled in. How you fill that in is either going to lead to a profound field, the study for you, where you're using the that thing that you're interested in, your hidden, what we call hidden intellectualism, to guide the way you start looking at the learning opportunities on campus and filling these pieces in so they integrate and they fit together. So Gen Ed links with elective courses, which link with how you select what you want to take from this thing called the major department, and how you begin to identify faculty by their fields of specialty. So for instance, take psychology. There's developmental psychologists, there's social psychologists, there are psychologists that focus on Labor and Industrial Relations. There are cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, all of those, if, depending on how you're going to look at the problem you want to study, all of those represent a different way of organizing the learning opportunities on campus. How you organize those learning opportunities that starts building out a field of study. But the other thing that's important in doing this is finding out who is doing that thing you want to do, because all of a sudden you walk out into the world, right? And this world, by the way, could be faculty doing their research and they're discovering things that, wow, if I was to do it all over again, I would be doing this for my course selection instead of that, because this is what I'm encountering right now, and students can bring that information back into how they begin to design what their curriculum or their course of study is, and that's the difference. It's an active design process, not from an advisor or a faculty member talking about degree requirements, but from a student designing the pieces of their curriculum. Julian Alssid: Just going back for a minute. I mean, this makes all the great sense and and I think anyone you know, so many of us can hearken back to that faculty or administrator that kind of helped us help the lights go off. But I guess I do wonder, and I don't know, maybe I'll love this one to you, Scott, this requires a bit of a mind shift for a lot of faculty. I mean, I don't think you know, they signed on to be the Career Counselor, the social networking expert, along with the, you know, the content expert and expert instructor. So A, what's your view about that? And B, how are we going to get from here to where you guys think we need to go? Scott Carlson: I mean, I think what you're asking is sort of what I'm picking up from what you're asking is, you know, an implement, an implementation sort of factor here, like, how does this actually happen on a college campus, right? And so kind of part, you know, what we envision, you know, we wrote Hacking College in this very conversational style that allows anyone to read it and anyone to sort of adopt the practices there. Because, you know, on one hand, people you know, they sort of asked us, do you want after this, this book came out of a story that I wrote for The Chronicle called the crusade against terrible advising, right? And after the article came out, you know, Johns Hopkins Press and others had asked, Do you want to turn this into a book? Do you want to write a book about advising? And we really didn't want to write a book about advising. We wanted to write about these structures that cause students to fall off the path. And in writing the book, we wanted to write it in this accessible style, because we sort of felt that everyone on a campus should be able to read this and then work with the students that they, in particular, have in their orbit. That's how you're going to sort of increase, increase the touches that that students have with people on campus, right? We can't just sort of lay this all on advisors, or lay this all on faculty advisors, and in part of the part of implementing this, part of what we're getting at is that what the colleges can do is they can, they can sort of adopt this as a mind frame at the colleges where everyone is sort of speaking this field of study, language and instructing students how to how to go about this, how to talk to people, how to find these contacts that are going to help instruct them in how to design their undergraduate degree. Now, these can be faculty members, but we're hopeful that when the students do encounter the faculty members, when they are working with them. They're working with the faculty members that share this kind of passion, or this hidden intellectualism, or this area of interest, this place where they're going to have a head start on the conversation, because they're already into what the faculty are talking about. And those faculty members, members then will be motivated to work with those students, because those students are in the area that they're interested in. I mean, a big part of the social capital that we talk about in hacking college comes through cultural capital. You know, the conversation about social capital is everywhere in higher ed right now. It's about who you know, right? But a big point that we're making in hacking college is that what drives the social capital is the cultural capital. It's the stuff that you're bringing as a person to the other person in making this link across interests, hidden intellectualism, obsessions, that kind of thing. So this is, I think, a big key to sort of making these relationships work. Ned Laff: And another part of it is this is very much the student is agent. So there's a student in doing this, they're creating networks. So it's not like I'm I am dependent on a faculty member. There could be three or four faculty members. There could be somebody in student affairs that they talk to, they go out on what we call this research, investigative inquiry, and start talking to people in the areas that they're interested in, and they're bringing information back there. Then they can sit, perhaps with somebody in an advising office and say, Here, I've got all this information. Now, how do I put the how do these pieces start to come together so that I can graduate under the requirements of a major, right? But design the pieces so it gets me to where I want to go. So it's very much a process of students building out their social capital, building out their cultural capital, learning how to network with people on campus and off campus, right? These are all the skills that everyone says people need, right? But they're doing this to design their undergraduate field of study. So in the process of doing their undergraduate education, all these mystical skills of oral communication and teamwork and stuff, they're all coming together, because what's driving it is the students' hidden intellectualism and their vocational purpose. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, I mean, I really appreciated in the in the book, when you know you had a line, it's not where you go to college, but how you do college that matters. That really stuck out to me. And I think, you know, as as we're thinking about the the social and cultural capital, and you know, one point in the book, you raise this concept of the hidden jobs, and you take it in a slightly different direction than I think we sometimes hear it talked about like it's not just about what's posted on LinkedIn as a job opportunity or not, but really that other definition around like pulling back the curtain of the world of work and helping learners really get an understanding of what are all the different job opportunities and career paths available in what might be. I mean, you, I love the scenario of working in a museum, right, like, but would love to, would love just to hear you talk a little bit more about that and what that, you know, what going down that path, through those hidden jobs, can really unearth for learners. Ned Laff: You know, this is where students, all of a sudden, everything changes for them. I sent this...
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Work Forces Rewind: NACE's Shawn VanDerziel on Colleges & Employers
07/29/2025
Work Forces Rewind: NACE's Shawn VanDerziel on Colleges & Employers
Shawn VanDerziel, President and CEO of the , kicks off a special three-part series exploring the crucial intersection of higher education and industry. Drawing on his extensive experience in HR and recruitment, VanDerziel discusses how the evolving economy is reshaping entry-level hiring practices and the growing importance of skills-based recruitment. He highlights the challenges facing both employers and higher education institutions, including the “language gap” that prevents students from effectively articulating their skills to employers. VanDerziel also examines how AI is transforming both recruitment strategies and career services, drawing employers back to campus recruiting while offering new opportunities for understaffed career offices. The conversation offers practical strategies for helping students translate their academic experiences into workplace-relevant skills, ultimately strengthening the vital bridge between post-secondary education and meaningful employment. Transcript Kaitlin LeMoine: Hi all, hope you all are doing well. As we plan for our next podcast season, we're posting a few Work Forces Rewinds featuring some of the insightful conversations you may have missed from this past season. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did. While we'll be back with new episodes in the coming weeks, we want to pause to express our appreciation for you, our listeners. Julian and I are so grateful for your feedback, your likes and shares and overall engagement with the Work Forces podcast. Your encouragement and perspectives continue to shape the conversations we hold on the podcast and inform how we approach our consulting efforts as well. We hope you enjoy these Rewind episodes and we'll be back to kick off our next season soon. So here we go. Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Julian. We've spent a lot of time on this podcast exploring the connections between higher ed and industry. Among many topics, we've discussed experiential learning, skills based education, business, higher ed partnerships and the impact of AI. We've examined how colleges are continuing to adapt to workforce needs and how innovative collaborations are aligning academic programs with evolving career opportunities. Julian Alssid: That's right Kaitlin, and we're excited to share that we've partnered with the National Association of Colleges and Employers, or NACE, for a special three part mini series focused on a really critical piece of the higher ed-industry connection. Kaitlin LeMoine: For our listeners who may be less familiar, NACE is the leading professional organization for career services and university relations and recruiting professionals. As described on their website, NACE empowers and connects the community of professionals who support, develop, and employ the college educated workforce. Julian Alssid: This series will examine the work happening at the crucial intersection of learning and work in three parts. First, we'll discuss the broader landscape surrounding college career services and recruiting. Then we'll explore NACE's latest research, including projections for the class of 2025, and finally, we'll look at how leading colleges and employers are putting these insights into practice. To kick off today's conversation, we're honored to be joined by Shawn VanDerziel, President and CEO of NACE. Kaitlin LeMoine: Shawn, thanks so much for joining us today. We're excited to have you on this podcast. Shawn VanDerziel: Well, thanks for inviting us. I'm excited to be here with you all. Kaitlin LeMoine: So, Shawn, as we jump in today, can you please give us some background on yourself and what led you to NACE. Shawn VanDerziel: Sure I've had a windy road to my current position. I'm going to start back way back into college and move quickly through my career, so you can see the perspective by which I approach my work. I graduated from a large state school with my undergraduate and had no idea what I was going to do with my degree, and I had an opportunity to move to Chicago afterwards, which was a great move for me. And I found my first position working in college admissions, student enrollment, which was a natural for me, because in college, I was one of those overly involved students. I was a first generation student, so I didn't have the same resources as as many others may have had, and and wasn't quite sure how to approach my job search, etc, but I knew some things from my college experience, such as like giving campus tours, working with the admissions office, leading student groups, and I found my way into admissions. It was a great way to start my career. Worked my way up, and I got really burned out, and but what can I do? I was so tired of traveling all the time, being up until 10 o'clock at night, going to college fairs at high schools, all of those things. And so I thought, how can I transition these skills into something else? And I thought about recruiting, recruiting employees. So I was recruiting students. Why couldn't I recruit employees? And I found an organization that was really interested in me because of my connection to college students. They were very interested in connecting with college students to their employment opportunities. It was the first time that an outsourced service. Well, I should say, Fortune 500 company, utilized a outsourced service to fully take over the recruitment function. And so I worked for a company called Norrell Corporation, which was a billion dollar staffing company at the time, and we took over Bank of America's recruiting function for their Midwest region because they were expanding banks. So they were opening over 100 banks throughout the Chicagoland area in a period of about a year and a half. And I started as the recruitment manager, hiring all of these folks who are going to work in these banks, particularly through their management trainee programs and for tellers. And they wanted college students to be involved with that. So I was back on college campuses, looking for those students. Well again, I got really burned out, and I was like, Oh my gosh, this is the i being an outsourced service is a no joke kind of job. And I thought again, like, how can I transition this? And I already had the recruitment experience. I had always wanted to work at a museum, and finally, I had the skill to actually do something in a museum, and that was to work in a human resources office within a museum which is very niche, but I found a job and that I could apply for, and I actually got the job. And so I spent almost 25 years at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, which is one of the world's largest natural history museums, and I worked my way up from a human resources rep doing recruitment and employee relations to becoming the Chief Human Resources Officer, Chief of Staff. And I oversaw lots of different departments over time, including our IT department, our education department, marketing for a short while, and also oversaw our Board of Trustees and the functions related to that. While I was at The Field Museum, I built a really large internship program that included over 200 interns every summer. And that experience led me to NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers as a volunteer, I became a volunteer leader and eventually the Chair of the Board of NACE. Over a decade ago, when the executive director of NACE was about to retire, I became a part of the search process, and was lucky enough to actually be offered the job at the end of that executive search process. So five years ago, I started as this President and CEO of NACE, and am so delighted to be representing this organization to the world. Julian Alssid: Always so great to hear peoples' origin stories. And so tell us a bit more about NACE. So give us an overview, if you will, Shawn and and then the role that nice really plays at the sort of intersection of higher ed and industry. Shawn VanDerziel: Yeah, simply put, that's exactly what we do. We bridge post secondary education to employment. We're all about outcomes and equitable outcomes for all students who pursue post secondary education. What that means on a day to day basis is that we are a membership association that represents folks who work on college campuses, mostly in the career services offices. So we represent every type of college and university, small, large, private, public, community college, four year, you name it, that's about two thirds of our members. One third of our members are the employers who go into college campuses and recruit college students for employment opportunities, for full time internships, co ops, apprenticeships, you name it, the full gambit of opportunities. We represent close to 3,000 organizations, and over 17,000 almost 18,000 individuals are a part of the association. Kaitlin LeMoine: Wow. Yeah. So this is, this is an extensive operation you have going on, and I would imagine, thank you. Thank you for the background you provided, because it just feels like, wow, you're drawing on, I'm sure, all the different skills and experiences gathered over the years, especially both on the college recruitment side and then on the employer recruitment side as well. It's quite striking. Shawn VanDerziel: Yeah, it's a lot of fun. And one of the things that on important work, really important work. And we're not insular, so meaning, like we just don't do things for our members. We do things for the public at large, so that they understand what's happening with the outcomes of students. So at the center of everything that we do is research. We're a knowledge based organization, so we're able to study the employment market from a variety of perspectives. We can see what's happening at college campuses to prepare students for employment opportunities. We can talk with students about what they're looking for in their jobs and how they're being prepared for jobs in their careers, and we talk to the employers about what they're looking for and how those other two pieces need to evolve to meet the growing and demanding needs of the workplace of the future. Kaitlin LeMoine: Amazing. So with all that being said, given the rapidly shifting environment that we're currently operating in this very dynamic space, we'd love to dive into a couple of different areas that you just that you mentioned, and that NACE raised recently as part of a recent more environmental scan. I believe you posted about it on LinkedIn not too long ago. So one question we have is, first, how do you see the current economy and economic outlook reshaping how employers are hiring entry level talent, and how, with a different lens how colleges are preparing those learners for success as well. Shawn VanDerziel: What we know right now is that the employment market is contracting so there are fewer opportunities for college graduates to join the workforce as compared to, let's say, two or three years ago, and that is from general full time employment all the way through to internships. With that we also know that employers are continually telling us that there's a gap between what college students offer and what they're looking to hire. So they have, they have made a bunch of shifts in their hiring and how they hire, which is no different than the general employment landscape. So we keep hearing about skills based hiring. Well, this has caused employers, particularly with early talent to really focus on that skills based hiring. So what they're saying is, is that in the old days, they would look at students who had a particular major, and they would look to see what their grade point average is as a starting place for the hiring process, and today, they're telling us for some jobs, we will do that, particularly highly technical jobs that require technical skills. So if you're going to be an engineer, Well, you certainly don't want someone working on your airplane who didn't get good grades, right? So you want to know that they're the top of their class because they have the knowledge to do the job. So they might still be screened by GPA. But if I'm looking for someone who's going into a management trainee program of some sort, that's more of a generalist or etc, I might think a little bit more broadly. I don't necessarily have to have someone who has the highest GPA. What I want is someone who has the skills and competencies to do the job. So how am I then going to find that person? Well, I have to substitute something in there to screen that person by we know from talking to employers that work experiences in general are very important to them. So anytime a student can demonstrate work experiences, and they can list what they actually gained in skill or competency in that work is super important, and they look for internship experience, either internship experience with them as their that student's employer, or they look for industry experience. So did the person have an internship in something that's closely aligned? And those are the students that they're saying they probably have the skills to do the job. They're also, of course, doing things like keyword searches and and using AI as part of part of the recruitment process. But they're really trying to dig down to find students who are going to succeed long term, and that's also one of the reasons that they invest so much money, particularly large companies, into internship programs, because we know that internship programs are the number one return on investment for employers from a recruitment perspective, the cost value is there for them. They know that they can convert at least 50% of those interns into being full time employees. They know that when they hire that student who starts as an intern, they're going to be with the company, more likely a year later and more likely five years later. We know that we've got that that data data to back it up, so the return on investment is really there. So we're finding more and more interest from employers and and partnering with schools to make sure their internship programs are solid. We're also finding that they are returning to campus, so they've been doing hiring on the web for quite some time. They've been focusing on it virtually, but they're also finding a need to get back in person so that they can weed through some of the talent a little bit more quickly. Julian Alssid: That's so interesting that they're they're coming back. Shawn VanDerziel: Yeah, absolutely. And AI has a lot to do with that, and we certainly can talk more about AI and how that's impacting everything, but there's an impersonalization that's happening, and there really is a business case for for getting back on campus and finding that talent. Julian Alssid: Yeah, so before we go into AI, which definitely we want to hear more about, it's all the rage, as you may have heard, interested to talk a little bit more about the skills based practices, because there's been some written about how... The Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Center on Workforce wrote a piece a few months ago, which, of course, could be ancient history at this point, that companies were not picking up so much on on skills based practices. And so I'm interested to hear your take on that. You know, I get it with respect to the jobs where they're they are looking for skills. But how is it? Are they integrating this more broadly into their organizations? Are you seeing that? Shawn VanDerziel: Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So employers in our surveying do say that they, the majority of them, are doing some type of skills based hiring. Where they are doing it is either through keyword searches as an example, in screening the resumes through automated systems or the the other bulk is through behavioral based interviewing questions. So when a student actually lands an interview, being able to talk through with them what they have actually accomplished, and what they have the ability to be able to do based upon the skills and competencies that they've gained. And so by providing those concrete examples, they're able to kind of dig through that. But it also goes back to what I was mentioning just a few minutes ago, which is around they're kind of substituting when they say skills based hiring, what we say academically doesn't necessarily match what employers are doing logistically. There's always this gap between industry and higher ed and the language. And this is a really good example. And so when, from an academic perspective, we think of skill, we think, well, gosh, you're looking for someone who has great verbal speaking skills, right? You can do public speaking. Okay, great. So then, how do you screen for that? Well, what are those employers going to do to find that they're not going to put a test in place to have every candidate come through and do some kind of speech, right? That's not what they're going to do to get to that skill. What they're going to do is they're going to look on that resume and say, oh, gosh, did this student have an internship? And in that internship, did they use their verbal communication skills? Did they designate that on there? So if that skill is not listed, the employer isn't going to find it as a starting place, and then they're not going to be able to dig deeper on it when they get them into an interview. So this comes full circle to what's happening on campuses and preparing students to be career ready, and bridging that employment because we have an onus in higher education with these students to help them to articulate their skills and their competencies in a way that an employer can translate it and employers speak a totally different language. They want the shortcut. They want to get to the candidate in the fastest way possible. So they are going to put any mechanism in place to do that. And so it behooves us to help those graduates to be able to articulate it in every which way, all of the experiences that they have, right? So it doesn't even have they can come from unexpected ways. It could come from student activities. It could come from work study. It could come from a whole variety of places that a student may have obtained skills and competencies throughout their college career. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, it's really interesting to hear you talk about the language gap that exists Shawn and kind and the difference between, you know, maybe how, on the academic side, we describe a skill, and then the shortcut language that employers might use, I feel like that's, that's an area that we've I feel like has, you know, it's been around for for so long now, and it feels like there's just, there's more and more great work happening around how to close that gap. And you know, I think that if we're going to turn to the conversation of AI, it seems like there's some really interesting work there that might be able to support some of the closing of those gaps. But then there's also some new challenges that emerge as well. So would love to transition over to talk a little bit more about AI and how what you're seeing from the perspective of both use on the employer side with respect to recruitment and hiring, and also when we think about career services and preparing learners for really bridging that gap between post secondary and employer....
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Work Forces Rewind: Jean Eddy on Youth Career Exploration
07/15/2025
Work Forces Rewind: Jean Eddy on Youth Career Exploration
Jean Eddy, President & CEO of American Student Assistance (ASA), discusses how middle and high school students can develop career awareness and gain meaningful workplace experiences before college. Drawing on research showing middle school as the optimal window for career exploration, Eddy details ASA's digital platform approach, which reaches 15 million students through engaging, mobile-based tools that help them discover interests and connect to potential career paths. She emphasizes the critical "testing and trying" phase where students need hands-on experiences, highlighting ASA's grant-making initiatives that fund intermediary organizations bridging gaps between schools and employers. The conversation explores scaling these efforts through policy engagement and community buy-in, with Eddy advocating for making career exploration an integral part of education rather than a disconnected add-on for teachers while offering practical collaboration strategies for all stakeholders to help students find paths that "make their hearts sing." Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. We've spent much of our time on this podcast exploring learning and career pathways, especially for college students and adults, and while those conversations are important, we also know that it helps learners when they begin a process of career exploration much earlier on in their academic journeys. By the time someone gets to college, it can often be too late for foundational career exploration. We need to help K-12 learners develop an awareness and curiosity of various career options, get them age appropriate experience and help them link their academic interests to the world of work. Julian Alssid: That's right, Kaitlin, and it's something we both know firsthand. We both started our careers in innovative high schools, where we each designed project based and experiential learning opportunities intentionally integrated with internships and real world experiences. We so, you know, we understand the complexities of this work, particularly figuring out the right level of exposure to workplace skills and experiences for young people, you know, how do we best help them explore, gain experience, build social capital and discover their likes and dislikes? Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes, it is about developing the skills and awareness learners need to navigate the world of work and thinking about practical implementation. It's about working with employers who can meaningfully support this process, and about providing educators with the time and creative space to make these integrated learning experiences happen. Julian Alssid: This is a complex topic to unpack, and that's why we're so pleased to have Jean Eddie with us today as President & CEO of American student assistance, or ASA, she's leading the charge in changing how kids learn about careers and prepare for their futures. Jean is an accomplished leader with over 30 years of experience in higher ed, and has held leadership positions at Rhode Island School of Design, Brandeis University, and Northeastern University. She's a nationally recognized speaker and subject matter expert, cited frequently in major publications and a contributor to forbes.com Jean is deeply committed to student success and is the author of crisis proofing today's learners, and co host of The One Question Podcast with Michael Horn, who was a recent guest on Work Forces. Jean, we're looking forward to discussing ASA's innovative approaches to career readiness for middle and high school students, and how you're reaching them in new and novel ways. Welcome to Work Forces. Jean Eddy: So happy to be here, looking forward to the conversation. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes, so are we Jean. It's such a pleasure to be with you today. So as we dive into today's conversation, can you please tell us more about your background and what led you to ASA? Jean Eddy: What is interesting is I met a colleague this morning for breakfast, quite early, and I worked with that person at one of the colleges that you mentioned. We were talking about the fact that we worked with a lot of young people who are on a college campus, and they really didn't know why they were there. And my colleague was basically saying that he oftentimes felt as though he was taking care of young people who were really not they couldn't find their own way. And I would have to say it reminded me of my own journey. I was in high school, and no one approached me about what was next. Never talked about it, never got prepared for it, etc. And if it weren't for the fact that I ended up, after leaving high school, going to a community college, I was lucky, you know, I met people who were interested in me and wanted to kind of show me some way or some path. Who knows where I'd be right now. But I guess, you know, I ended up in higher education because I was so taken with my own experience at a community college. And I worked in higher ed, as you said, for a number of years, but I worked with a lot of young people who really didn't know why they were in college, and I would say that some of them really should have taken another path, and instead, went on to college, spent an awful lot of money that they didn't need to spend, and then ended up with quite a bit of debt that they had to repay somehow, some way. So fast forward now to ASA. I became involved with ASA because ASA is a federal guarantor, and as a person who worked in higher ed I was on the board of ASA for a number of years. And why, why I was interested in ASA is because of the fact. They were really committed to helping young people. It was a very personal relationship, which with a lot of guarantors. It was not but at ASA, it was. And I stayed committed because I was so interested in how they interacted with students. When I was asked to become the CEO here, which was eight years ago now, we were talking about how we could think about working with young people before a problem arose. What we were doing was basically trying to put a band aid on something at the end of the day, rather than getting in front of the problem to see what we could do about that. So we did an awful lot of research and found out that the best time to really talk about careers was in middle school, and that seems kind of young, you know, sixth grade, seventh grade, but what we found was is that kids who are in that age bracket are really open to exploration. They aren't hardwired that they want to do this or they want to do that, and furthermore, their friends haven't made such a huge impact on them that they don't they were willing to go and find their own way. So we then did research about, how do we interact with these young people? What's the best way to do that? And we tried a number of things, but at the end of the day, what we found was we needed to kids meet kids where they are, and that's on a mobile device that's on their cell phone. So like it or not, 97% of the kids who are between 13 and 18 year old, 18 years old, have a cell phone. And so we created mobile, friendly programs that would allow young people to, first off, go out and have fun. Because to me, learning is all about fun. Let's start with that. It doesn't need to be something that's imposed and sometimes treacherous. It's rather what can be fun. So the first thing we developed was something that allowed a young person to have fun, but to basically do puzzles and games, which actually came up with kind of an indicator of things that somebody was good at, but moreover what they liked to do. And then we showed them all kinds of ways to be able to get to that in a successful career. And it's not to say at someone who's in the sixth or seventh grade is saying I'm going to be an X, but rather, I'm interested in these things. And let's see all the possibilities for if you're interested in this, what is possible. And then we went on to build more programs that allowed kids to test and try, which is really key here, testing and trying, having them figure out, maybe I like this, but is there some aspect of it that I really can't do or I don't want to do? And so when we develop these programs, testing and trying, really came in in high school, and the reason for that is by the time students leave high school. We want them to have a plan. And so it's not that again, that they have a road that's absolutely mapped out, but rather, this is the this is the path I can take to see what might come of this, to see what might come with what I love to do with what I'm good at. And can I be able to relate this to that job, that career, that pathway? Julian Alssid: Great to hear the bit about your journey and and the genesis of ASA. So. So now, what are the Could you give us an overview where you are now at ASA with the types of initiatives that you're focused on, and what are the key problems that you know you're looking to, the key challenges or problems you're looking to solve. Jean Eddy: So, you know, the initiatives that we are working on currently, you know, I mentioned the digital we have four digital programs which really bring students from the discovery phase right on through the testing and trying, you know, getting a mentor, getting an apprenticeship, understanding how to be able to get ready for to dress for success, all those kinds of things. There are many, many things kids can do there. We have about 15 million kids on our platforms at any given time. They're between 13 and 18 years old. But in addition to that, we also work with schools, school districts and states who are interested in infusing this kind of a career exploration into their into their curriculum. The biggest one I always talk about is Delaware. Delaware is the nice sized state you can get your arms around it. So we worked with a couple of other funders to basically put career exploration into middle schools in Delaware, so every kid in Delaware has an opportunity to do this kind of career exploration. But I think the biggest challenge we have is the next step is the testing and trying. Because I would have to say, I. So we need employers to be able to help us do that. But any employer will tell you, and I've talked with many, they don't have the infrastructure to be able to provide that, and sometimes they are. They are quite hesitant to get into this, because, again, they don't have the staff, they don't have the know how, and they cannot figure out how to connect with the school district with a system. So a lot of our initiatives are now working with intermediaries places who basically go in and they take care of the things that need to happen at the high school and things that need to happen with the employer, and we do a lot of funding in those respects. My favorite is the caps network. They are national, and they basically give they work with employers and they work with schools to be able to have kids have first hand experiences in how a career could actually map out in a given field. They are beyond impressive. I could talk about them all day, but there are many of them. There are also states who get involved in this, and I will pick on Rhode Island native Rhode Islander, we've worked with skills for Rhode Island for a number of years. They are great intermediaries in basically bringing employers and schools together to provide apprenticeships and internships for young people to test and try. So I think that that is, that is, I'm going to say next big Frontier, we need more opportunities to connect employers and schools in a way that makes sense, and it actually it works for everybody. Kaitlin LeMoine: That last point, you just ended on Jean right? I feel like that's where the rubber meets the road. And all of this work is like, how to make these, these relationships happen? What are you I know, you know you mentioned the intermediary work. What are some of the best practices, or like strategies that you know that are working well to bridge those gaps? Because I think that for so many you know whether, whether it's actually higher ed institutions, K 12 institutions, employers. It's about like, how do we bridge those worlds and in a scalable way? Jean Eddy: So, I think that there are a few things, getting the word out is incredibly important, thought leadership and getting people to understand or or be able to see the kinds of opportunities that are available. But moreover, the funding that is available. There are a lot of programs out there right now, and we participate in some of these funds, which basically back financially, back opportunities for employers and schools to be able to come together and do this kind of work. And one thing I didn't mention before is the amount of grant making we do, and the grant making we do has everything to do with those kinds of opportunities. Historically, we've given up between $10 and $20 million a year, and it is to fund those kind of opportunities where they have not existed before, or to grow networks that you know have started off but have not how to reach across the country, because what we're trying to do is impact kids everywhere. You know, not only in the places that I think, with the northeast, we have so many colleges and universities, we are so focused on kind of these connections, but there are parts of the country where that's not the case, and particularly in the middle of the country. You know, it's really up to us to do a better job in connecting those intermediaries who work in those places to provide opportunities for young people who otherwise are thinking, Okay, what do I do next? You know, what are my opportunities? And they're not as I would not say that there's not a rich as rich of an offering as there could be, because kids just don't know. Julian Alssid: So I get the scaling with, you know, your the digital stuff, and how that you know you've been able to reach so many young people directly, I guess my big question is, with the work, with the intermediaries, or the sort of the partnerships, how does that scale? And how do you ensure that it can live beyond the life of your grants? Like, how does this get baked in to what communities do, what educators do, what employers do, and then, how do you scale that? Jean Eddy: You know, we worked with the state of Massachusetts, and we funded a program that basically put pathways into high schools. It was one of Governor Baker's big initiatives and part of his legacy, I would have to say, the idea in doing some of these things. And we did it in Delaware as well. We did it in Rhode Island. As you start to fund these programs, you do it with the hope that you're working with policy makers who are going to encourage the state legislature to put it in the budget and have it move forward. And that has happened in every single one of these cases, I would have to say you have to have buy in, not only from the intermediary and the school and the employer, but you also need buy in with policy makers, because if they don't believe this. Yes, and they don't see, I'm going to say a road map for a state prospering. It's not going to go anyplace. But again, in the state of Massachusetts, we have an enormous shortage in the trades, construction, tech, skill trades, and we worked with the workforce council here to try and develop programs that would allow us to be able to, I'm going to say, start the pipeline for the jobs that we cannot fill and and that, I think, is really it's a problem that we have across the country. We have so many unfilled jobs right now, and I do believe that half the reason why we have that is because young people are not aware of those jobs, and we're not doing the best, the best work we could possibly do, in making sure they know it, but moreover, that they could try those things and find that they could fall in love with something that they didn't even know was existing. Julian Alssid: Interestingly, we have been working in Massachusetts on the very topic, actually, with the community college and focused on manufacturing. And it's incredible the opportunities that are going wanting because kids and their families know nothing about these roles and the paths associated. Jean Eddy: You know, just this morning, I was listening, I think it was on NPR, they were talking about the fact that there are wait lists for kids in technical high schools, and that they are trying to now impose a lottery system to let young people in, just that is such a telling update on on what is happening in this state. But moreover, in this country, we should be thinking about, how do we integrate the aspects of those vocational high schools into all of our high schools to give kids an opportunity. And I'm not saying that there aren't high schools who do that, because there are, but it usually requires either a principal or a super superintendent who has that drive and that feeling in their gut that this is what has to happen, and then they make it happen. We need more of that. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, and that combination of both of the leadership, and then, as you mentioned earlier, Gene, the financial backing as well, right to, like, especially for some of the more technical programs that require a lot of equipment and, like, lab space, right? I mean, like, the infrastructure required in some cases is is more significant than others. But like, that's another huge factor in this whole effort. One thing that I find really fascinating about the different digital solutions that ASA has built is it seems like it's a pretty low lift for schools to implement and for learners to engage with I'm curious, how do what's the split? I guess, that you see across like learners who engage with these tools on their own as individual users, versus who are introduced through a classroom like experience like, how do learners come to these materials? Maybe individually? How do they find that? Jean Eddy: So I would say, by and large, young people come to us directly. We have, obviously, connections with teachers, with superintendents, etc. And many will use our products as a way to have a hybrid experience. As far as career exploration is concerned, they are using it for that purpose. So they're basically saying, Go out to asa.org, look at this, look at that, etc. But by and large, most of it is coming from kids who come directly to us. And I think I when we first started talking, I talked about the fact that I wanted kids to have fun. So what we basically do, I'm going to say, we invade the time that young people are using their phones, which is on average, five hours a day, which is frightening to me, frankly. But we approach them and it's something that they can take it or leave it. So we go through Tiktok, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. We throw out these things. Invite kids to come in. They either do it or they don't. Most of the time, we find they do it. We have a high level of engagement, but it's got everything to do with that. They're seeing it as this is curious, this is fun, and then suddenly we're opening up another world to them, and then kids stay and so we have four platforms, and it's amazing to me that they keep going. And of course, again, it's all about fun. So I think that that is really the key to this, and what is really, really important, particularly with with young people in this, in this generation of young people, they want agency. They want...
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Holly Zanville: Mapping the Skills-Based Learning Ecosystem
07/01/2025
Holly Zanville: Mapping the Skills-Based Learning Ecosystem
Holly Zanville, research professor at the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy and founder of the Learn and Work Ecosystem Library, discusses her approach to organizing information about the rapidly evolving skills-based learning landscape. Drawing from her extensive background across education, state systems, and philanthropy, Zanville explains how she created a specialized digital hub that curates resources about key ecosystem components. She explores the growing tension between degree-centric and skills-based approaches in higher education, highlighting how institutions are navigating the "both-and" reality of offering traditional degrees alongside competency-based programs. Zanville shares insights from her collaboration with the Society for Human Resource Management's new Center for Skills First Future, which aims to transform hiring practices for 100,000 employers over the next decade. The conversation examines how employers across five leading industry sectors are implementing skills-based hiring practices, while addressing the critical need for better information sharing and standardized language across the fragmented learn-and-work ecosystem. Zanville emphasizes the importance of collaboration and community engagement in building resources that serve learners, educators, employers, and policymakers navigating this complex landscape. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Julian Alssid: Kaitlin feels like every day the way we help people advance their learning and careers becomes more and more complex. Kaitlin LeMoine: Indeed it does, Julian. From employers rethinking hiring practices with skills based approaches to educators, redesigning learning models with AI and experiential learning, our podcast guests have highlighted many new models and cutting edge innovations, and we see these efforts impacting our consulting projects as well. Julian Alssid: Absolutely, and keeping track of this dynamic and ever changing environment is no small feat. It requires a deep understanding of what's working, what's not, and how all these interconnected pieces fit together. Kaitlin LeMoine: Which brings us to our guest today. We're so excited to be speaking with a leader who is doing just that, making sense of this intricate and ever changing ecosystem. Julian Alssid: We are thrilled to be joined by Holly Zanville. Holly is a research professor at the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy and codirector of the Program on Skills, Credentials and Workforce Policy. She's also the founder and lead of the Learn & Work Ecosystem Library. Previously, Holly co-led the national initiative Credential As You Go and served as a strategy director at Lumina Foundation. Her background includes leadership positions at state higher education systems and boards in Oregon, Washington, and WICHE, as well as academic roles at community colleges and non-traditional university programs. Kaitlin LeMoine: So without further ado, Holly, welcome to Work Forces. We're looking forward to learning more about your work. Holly Zanville: I am so glad to be joining you today. Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, thank you for being with us. So as we get going, Holly, can you please tell us? I mean, Julian talked a little bit about your background, but we'd love to hear more from you about your background and what led you to founding the Learn & Work Ecosystem Library. Holly Zanville: Great. So as you already heard, my background is pretty wide ranging. I've worked in K 12, community colleges, universities, non traditional programs, coordinating boards and systems in states and in philanthropy, as the strategy director at Lumina Foundation and all those jobs really, I realized recently carry one thread, and that kind of reminds me of what I've always really cared about, and that is my long-standing interest in both information, the quality information and systems, believing that if we're going to make improvements in all of our systems, in education and workforce, we're going to have to seed these relationships and work in collaboratives. And so a lot of my work over the years has really focused on acting like a system and making improvements in systems and sharing information and collaborating. So that's a little bit of my background and what brings me, I think, to really the topic of the Learner and Work Ecosystem Library. And, you know the why. Where did this idea even come from for a library? And actually, it started with my work at Lumina Foundation, when several of the national foundations were starting to pay attention to changes in credentialing that were going on, and especially noting that 40 million some Americans who come under that title that we don't like called some college and no credential. So they had some background in college work, but they never received any credential. And we were really increasingly concerned about what we could do to help with these kinds of issues. So at that time, and this was about 2017, 2018 about 40 of the foundations, mostly national foundations actually came to a meeting to compare notes. How could we really better learn about what investments we were all making on these issues of importance, particularly around micro credentialing, was just coming to the fore around that time so that we could maybe leverage our monies to make them go farther, because we could all see what was coming in the tea leaves. So the outcome of that meeting was actually a call to action, and folks were saying, well, could we develop a map? Could we try to map out the key initiatives, the big footprint initiatives that were being funded mostly by the foundations at that time to improve our information about them, and once we maybe could get the map, maybe we could collaborate more effectively as a group of foundations. So being a person who likes system work and challenging work and mapping, et cetera, I raised my hand to work on this. And so a small number of us from a few of the foundations actually designed what a map of key initiatives might look like, and we put on the map who was working on initiatives, because who's doing the work is really important for us to know. And then we classified them into some key categories. There were actually, over a period of years, three versions of the map, and I think this speaks to how quickly changes were going on in the innovation space of the nation, and Lumina posted it at its website. There's still remnants of it at the website. And one of the things we could all see was that there were important philanthropic investments in all these areas. They were growing, because we could see the number of actual things on the map growing every year, and that there were many collaborations that were going on we were picking up among states, employers, higher ed institutions. And that one really interesting thing to us was that managing a lot of these big scale initiatives were coming from intermediaries, the third party groups that we all know that play such an important role in helping, particularly with collaborations. So this was a really interesting area I became extremely interested in, and my read of the system that we were all looking at the map was that it was going to keep growing in importance and confusion and be marked by lack of information. And so I really wanted to expand the mapping effort then so we could take this a little further. That really was not a priority of the foundation at that time. They wanted more direct funding of the innovative initiatives. And so that was when I left philanthropy to go, after 15 years, to become a research professor at George Washington University. And I kind of took it on as a personal mission to here's my I'm going to bring in FedEx as an example. So I decided it would be good to come up with a bitter airplane that could deliver needed information. And it would, but it would be a specialty airplane. It'd be like a FedEx airport with special airplanes that we'd be carrying specialized information about the learn and work ecosystem. So I started, I reached out to lots of experts around the US. I think many of them have probably been on your podcast, and we designed the special collection and called it a library, the learn and work ecosystem library. It's really a hub. It's like an airport, as it were, where we collect, we curate, we coordinate digital content about key components of the ecosystem. We think there are maybe 12 of them. And if you go to our library, you'll see what the 12 are. There are key topic reports for more in depth coverage of what some of the leading topics are going on in the ecosystem. We included those initiatives and special projects that are working to improve the ecosystem, like we did on the original map, that mostly are, I think 80% of them are probably funded by foundations. So the foundations are playing a big role, and have been in, in fueling the innovation agenda, I think, for the US. We also identified the organizations doing the work and several other features. So we opened for business our little airport in late 2022. We've been growing really quickly. Now we're using AI to help users who come to us to find information using more natural language queries, and we've been adding just two features, and then I'll stop. I'll stop here. We've entered into partnerships with other organizations. If it was FedEx, we found that people have a lot of baggage, and they need to have a place to put their information, and they don't really put it. It's easier for them to put it at a place like the library, where we can host it, and then all their members and other groups can come and see that information there, rather than putting it in a siloed website among all these different collaborators, and furthermore, we're working with a lot of organizations to test the usability of the other library. Does this really meet information needs? Because we're so early, we need to keep testing the waters about that. So we've grown from a few 100 artifacts at launch to over 1500 now we have a glossary of nearly 600 terms that are used throughout the learn and work ecosystem, and we've made that available free to organizations that want to put the glossary at their website, so that as visitors come to their website but they don't know what some of these terms mean, like, what does a micro credential mean, or what is badging and what's up skilling and re skilling, what are skills versus skills based hiring, we have all that captured, and they can put our our glossary, if they like, there and or folks can just be advised to come to our library where we have terms. Julian Alssid: Given your work now at the intersection, or should I say, the learning and learning and work airport, perhaps we'd like to talk first about the education side of the equation. And we know that one of the themes that has been taking on greater and greater prominence, and we've talked a lot about it on our podcast, is a focus on skills and competencies. And so we're interested to hear your take on how educational organizations and institutions are shifting their efforts to focus more on skills and competencies. And if you could give us an example or two that we should follow. Holly Zanville: So the library and or the airport where education is takes up a lot of space at the airport, as it should, because the preparation of folks for jobs is a very large effort that we all care so much about and is so important to our economy. So but, but to go back to something we've been witnessing for several years now, this growing dilemma for higher education, the big question, should we remain degree centric and continue our literally 200 plus your focus on college degrees as maybe the best preparation for good jobs in the US, or move to shorter term credentials of value. And I'm purposely portraying this dilemma as an either or, but we know that there's growing recognition that the answer really has to be both and. So the and the reason is that higher ed has to be closely aligned to workforce demands by both employer demands and student demands, and there are significant needs and some different needs by industry sectors. So we can't have the same answer for everybody. So degrees and licenses are essential for professional jobs in medicine, nursing, law, architecture, engineering, and a much longer list than that, but there are a growing number of other types of credentials, shorter term credentials, like certificates, badges, micro credentials, energy certifications, that they do have value in many areas of the workforce, and they're often used in which is a good thing, I think, a combination with traditional degrees like associate degrees, baccalaureate and The various graduate level degrees and the impacts of AI are changing and coming on strong, because it's really impacting job getting and job keeping in major ways. So we don't think higher ed, I don't think anyone thinks higher ed can throw away the traditional degrees they offer, but I think there's growing agreement that higher ed needs to update their offerings and expand their offerings to meet changing workforce demands through shorter term credential options. So within this dilemma, along comes the competency based education push for the last, oh, I don't know, more than a decade. And then comes the skills agenda, coming on really strong, with employers who are asking candidates for jobs, but they're also asking their own employees, do you have the right skills for the jobs we have open, show us what you know and can do. And the emphasis is really increasingly on can do. So how are we going to know when somebody has the right competence skills? And I would say that higher ed tends to use the word competencies more to define the learning outcomes that occur in higher ed programs. And employers tend to use the skills word more, but they're coming together, and those words are graying, and now everyone is using the terms back and forth across those fences. If there are actual fence lines between higher ed and important, some of us think there are, but they're coming down, and movement is rapidly approaching. So to answer your question directly about competency based, many of the higher institutions have been shifting their focus toward competencies and actually skills to better align with workforce needs. And we're noting, which we think is really interesting, that educational institutions are adopting frameworks to do this, all kinds of credentialing systems and partnerships to understand what should the new array of credentials be? And we're seeing institutions that are doing both. They're doing both, and they have a portion of their programs that are competency based, are mostly competency based, but there are other programs at their institutions that are not so what's interesting is to have both curricular models on the same campus. But there are also some institutions, but the research data shows that there's relatively few, maybe only about 15 institutions that either are entirely or mostly comps based education. So even though the conversation is rich around competency-based education, the actual number of institutions that have really gone to the major full shift, pretty few, except we know that the ones that have made the shift are very well known. And I'm just, I have a short list of them here. You know Western Governors University Capella, University of Wisconsin Extended Campus, their flexible option, Walden, Charter, Oak College, Purdue Global. And then there's some that are mostly competency based, but not entirely: Southern New Hampshire, Texas, A & M University has several Northern Arizona University, Thomas Edison and Central New Mexico Community College, Austin Community College. I won't go through the whole list, but the point is that we're in the middle of a shift. Some people have already put the landing gear down on their plane, and I think they're saying, well, we've done the areas of programs that really are competency based, like, like nursing that is, or cybersecurity that are led by national organizations that are very strong on here are the competencies in this profession. But there are other ones, particularly the liberal arts, that are not being led as much to being set up as competency based programs. So the institutes have to make their piece, and we all have to put together a system which has a little bit of a lot of things, and this is creating, I think, a lack of information about who's got what and why is this important? So once you accept the fact that differences are good and there's a good reason why we have these differences, then you move to this question of, are we creating a system that is really confusing for employers to understand, for students to understand, for policymakers to understand, for faculty. Yes, we are. We're sorry. We're all sorry about that. But in fact, it's a more difficult learn and work ecosystem now than we've had in the past. And there are some organizations that are making it a little clearer, and on the competency based side, especially, Julian, you asked for an example. I think one of the best ones is the Competency-Based Education Network, or C-BEN. They've really been growing rapidly, working with institutions that really want to understand how to do compass based education and why to do it, and what happens on a campus where you've got both-ands, how are they, how they are navigating the choppy waters. So I would say that through the kinds of workshops, webinars, training opportunities, C-BEN provides, they're a really good example on the higher ed side for competency based education. And I've already named some of the institutions that are really on that side. So I think I'll stop there, because I think that's a lot of the background, least that I think about when I, when I think about the competency based side of things with higher risk. Kaitlin LeMoine: Well and and I think what you've just talked us through there Holly shows right exactly the complexity that we're facing here, and that with this confusion, the need for a library is more and more essential. I just had one quick follow up regarding the library. Who is the primary target audience for the library? Is it professionals in the field? Is it learners themselves? Could it be both? Holly Zanville: It's all, and in fact, when we have a slide, when we do slide presentations, it has 26 stakeholder groups, and when you go to the library, you can do a search by your stakeholder group, so you could be primarily a policymaker interested in content. You could be a credential provider interested in content. You could be an employer and workforce. You could be a workforce board. You could be more aligned with the data structures around that side of the shop. You could be more of a journalist trying to understand, where do I go to get information and examples for stories. So and students we're really hoping are using the library, particularly students that might want to get a job someday working in this with the think tanks, with the research and policy think tanks, the intermediaries that I talked about where, if you're in graduate school now, and you might be in education or political science or economics, you'll get some of this information, but you are not. I just would bet no one's going...
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Steve Lee on a Coalition Approach to Workforce Impact
06/17/2025
Steve Lee on a Coalition Approach to Workforce Impact
Steve Lee, CEO of SkillUp Coalition, discusses how his nonprofit technology platform connects nearly 3.5 million workers without college degrees to career training and job opportunities nationwide. Drawing from his diverse background spanning corporate law, educational technology, and philanthropy, Lee explains the coalition's "data-driven, heart-led" approach that ingests labor market data from partners and tests it with real workers to improve outcomes. He shares insights on navigating AI's impact on gateway jobs like customer service, emphasizing the shift toward skilled trades, advanced manufacturing, and green jobs as more automation-resistant career paths. Lee discusses the importance of balancing national reach with regional customization through 35 localized sites that reflect specific labor market demands, and explains how combining "air game" technology with "ground game" wraparound services creates more effective worker support. The conversation explores practical strategies for building mutually beneficial partnerships in workforce development, with Lee advocating for humility, value-addition, and collective impact as essential elements for scaling upskilling efforts and addressing intergenerational poverty. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin Lemoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. A central focus in our consulting practice and on this podcast is practically how to make meaningful connections between the various organizations and resources that exist to help people close gaps and advance their careers. Julian Alssid: Absolutely, we've seen a surge of new tech products designed to bridge skills gaps, connecting individuals with training programs and with the employers who can hire them. And key to their success are solutions that are designed for and responsive to the needs of the end user. Kaitlin LeMoine Precisely. And that's why today we're excited to dive into a conversation with a leader who is at the forefront of using technology to connect millions of workers to meaningful career opportunities. Our guest is Steve Lee, the CEO of Skill Up Coalition. Steve has a fascinating career journey that began as a corporate lawyer, then saw him found and successfully exit an educational software company and work at Bain & Company. He then transitioned to the social sector, including a significant role at the Robin Hood Foundation, before taking the helm at Skill Up. Julian Alssid: Steve brings a blend of business acumen and a deep commitment to social good, and we're looking forward to speaking with him about how to upscale efforts in a world of rapid change, especially with the increasing influence of AI. Since launching Skill Up in 2020, Skill Up's nonprofit technology platform has already connected nearly 3.5 million workers without a college degree to career training and job supports nationwide, and the coalition now includes more than 150 partners. Impressive. Kaitlin LeMoine: Truly. So Steve, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad you could join us to share more about these impactful efforts. Steve Lee: I am so honored and thrilled to be here. Thank you both very much for the current show. I will say my family, says I'm a dork and so, true story and so anyway, just thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and looking forward to the conversation. Kaitlin LeMoine: Great. Well, as we get started, can you please tell us a bit more about your background and what led you to your work at Skill Up Coalition. Steve Lee: So as you, as you alluded to. I was in a private sector for a good chunk of, let's say, the first half of my career, but I've always sort of been interested in having some impact on the social side. I had a really good conversation with a nonprofit leader when I was in the private sector, and she said something which I thought was really interesting. She said, Steve, I've been doing this work for 50 years, and I serve young people and adults. And she said to me that when I serve young people, there's a very good chance that 30 years later I'm gonna see the same person to serve their needs. And what that struck me is this idea of not only just poverty, but this idea of intergenerational poverty, where poverty goes to multiple generations. I'm like, damn, this is not good. This is not the country I want to live in. So what the heck can we do about it? And so that's one of the main reasons I joined philanthropy, is to think about a way, in a very small way, obviously, right where I could have some impact, if you will, in a small way, on this idea of improving what I think is one of the biggest scourges in this country is intergenerational poverty and the fact that half of 30 year olds in this country now are worse off than their parents were when they were 30. You know, inflation adjusted, that is a very bad step. All right, that's what, that's what that that's what drives me with the work I do. It's why I came to Skill Up. Because I feel like one of the ways is you can, one of the ways you can address that is, if you have stable wages for good work you have stable families, you have stable kids, and the kids can do better in life. Because every parent in the world, I don't care who you are, rich, poor, you know, Democrat, Republican, urban. It doesn't matter. Every parent wants to carry do better in life, every single parent. So when we're doing a very, very bad job of that. And so that's why I take this work that we do at scope is important, and why the ecosystem is important. So that's the reason. Julian Alssid: It's really sobering when you see those stats about declining wealth, and we've got to fix this, because we've helped create this mess - our generation, the concentration of wealth. And I mean, we could go on, but tell us a little bit more about who Skill Up serves, who you're looking to serve in this kind of intergenerational approach and the range of initiatives that you've developed. Steve Lee: We are, we're primarily designed to serve STARS, if you know that terminology, those are Skilled Through Alternative Routes, which is basically folks that don't have a college degree. We have a particular focus on the lower rung of that ladder, right? Those who are maybe on public benefits, those are the most marginalized in this country. And we serve youth all the way to dos, and on this journey, I think the most important thing for this journey for us is the fact that we are a coalition, so it's actually our official name. We're not, we're not Skill Up we’re Skill Up Coalition. That's actually our IRS registered name, and that means a lot to us, because we're a small nonprofit, right? What the hell are we going to do by ourselves? Like nothing, like literally nothing, right? So we can only do something if we work together with some of our core partners. And if you go to our site, you can see some of our core partners. These are folks who are leaders in the field, and we do our best right to add value into that ecosystem. We can talk a little bit more about what value means, but the most important thing for us as an organization is to truly partner for mutual benefit. This is one of what our funders love to say, mutual benefit. It's actually pretty hard to do mutual benefit, to work with others to create collective effect. I can give you examples of that, but that is one of the most important things we can do. Kaitlin LeMoine : Please say a little bit more about that when you say mutual benefit. Let's dive in there a little bit. Steve Lee: Yeah. So let's talk about what I think is one of our key jams, right? One of the core value sets that we have, one of our core principles is to be data driven, heart led. I've always liked that term, because as a technology nonprofit, we are driven by data. Obviously, I'll talk about what that means. But everything we do, we hope, is for the benefit of workers, right? And we have workers at scale, and we've learned the time. And so one of the coolest ways that I think we work with partners is on the data side. And let me explain what that means. So we have become a platform for low wage workers, where people are coming to us to some degree with data sets, and what they want to do is they want to test those data sets with real workers to get their worker voice on whether this stuff works or not. So I'll give you some examples. There are some really interesting data sets on the employer side. Groups like American Opportunity Index, which is funded by Burning Glass in partnership with the Schultz Family Foundation. There's a Credential Value of Index, I think that's what it's called. Used to be called EQOS, which has sort of the signals of quality for training programs in America. What these programs, what these data sets have, is really, really good data, but they have no way to surface that data with real workers. And so what we're doing is we're ingesting those data sets, and then we're spitting those data sets into the arms of workers across America, using a skills platform as a vehicle to do that, and then we're learning to see what works for real workers. This is what I call heart led right? What's the worker voice? What are they telling us what works and what doesn't work? And then we're spitting that back into our partners to improve their data sets. So it all comes full circle, this idea of ingestion, spitting out data, learning from data, and going back to the original source as a full circle, that's like, really, really important, I think, in the broader ecosystem. And I think we're one of the few platforms that can actually do that right, because we have technology, we have good UX/UI, we have workers, we can send things out to, and then we can test a real scale, like 10s of 1000s, right? Within a week or two, to have statistically significant data that comes back to us that we can inform the field that's a real value, and that's what that's mutual benefit, like, we're helping our workers, right? And in theory, we're also helping the data sets. That doesn't happen all the time, like mutual benefits, actually pretty hard, but that's one example, Kwsaitlin and how we're thinking about mutual benefit, particularly around benefit, particularly around data, because I think that is probably one of our biggest jams, is the ingestion of data, plus the data driven heart led, right? The ability to access workers and get their workable voice. Kaitlin LeMoine: That's a complex space in which you're sitting to build that mutual benefit with, as you said, right, like the end users, like the people you're looking to serve, as well as with your data partners. Steve Lee: Correct. Kaitlin LeMoine: Living in the middle of that space, I imagine, is exciting and also pretty complicated. Steve Lee: You know what's interesting? What I've learned is, like, this is gonna get very wonky, but like, data is it's basically just like a bunch of fields. But what's tricky is that you have to match those fields like this is, like, wonky data stuff, and like, actually matching those fields to collect the right information to get out to the right is actually very tricky, right, because there are so many fields. So that's actually the hard work. But once you get there, it can be pretty powerful. In terms of stuff that you learn. Julian Alssid: So Steve, just sticking with this one a little bit longer. Again. Steve Lee: Sure. Julian Alssid: This is the geeking out, because I think our listeners will be very interested. We want to talk about AI and the workforce. But of course, are you using AI in this effort to then sort of mine and collate and organize this data? Steve Lee: Yeah, we're using AI, I think, so why call this idea of more stuff and better stuff? So this is like, like third grade English, right? And so what we can do with our, with our AI, is the data sets that we have, we can have more of the things that we want. And what I mean by that is that our main call to action for our users is, hey, what's the right career you have? What could work? What career do you want? What job do you want? And three, you probably need some kind of training to get the right credential to get the job. All right? So what training is available to you? So what AI can do is that it can surface up more opportunities that we wouldn't be able to surface up, but for the power of AI. So that's one, and second, we could be better at what we offer. One of the things that we pride ourselves as being high quality, and we curate all the opportunities. And the curation is done a lot by data sets, plus desk research. The desk research can be somewhat replaced by AI, right? So rather than having a human, or in conjunction with a human, you have AI to make that research better, and so you have better stuff that we show up as high quality content, as opposed to just having a human, plus data sets, plus you have more stuff, because there are some things that we're missing, because it's a big country or a small nonprofit, right? And so more stuff, better stuff is not what we're doing in terms of the things that we power. The other thing we're doing around AI is what I call horizontal integration. So as you guys know, the journey from a low wage worker starting to look for a job, to finding the job, can actually be more than just a few inches. It can be miles and miles and miles, right? It takes a long time. It takes months, sometimes years, right? And so if our users stick with us, what we can do with AI, no matter where they are in their journey, you can offer AI as a recommendation, no matter where you are. So your beginning part of the journey, AI will make some kind of recommendation to Julian saying, We think you should do A, B and C, but Kaitlin is further along in her journey and is about to interview for a job. We could offer a different AI experience. So can say, hey, you should think about doing this for an interview, things of that sort. And AI can do that almost like when you do a Google search. Now, you don't see this, you don't see the search results. You see Google AI, overview, right? That's the first thing you see. Similar concept for us, no matter where you are, you're going to get something around AI, and then hopefully that helps you drive to at&t organizations. So that's a horizontal integration, right? And the vertical is more stuff, better stuff. Julian Alssid: Are the learners, workers, whatever you're calling the clients. Are they staying with you? I mean, you've, you've now, you know, you do have this growing data set. Steve Lee: It's the trickiest wicket of a direct to consumer platform. You know, unless you're Meta or Google, it's hard for direct to consumer users to stick right. And we have the same issues as others. I always say about roughly half of our users drop off after sort of initial experience and then, but the other half stick around to some manner of form. And the first that's actually pretty good, right? As a direct to consumer, nonprofit, right? So we're actually proud with, like, the half that stick. But what our partners say sometimes, even if they come and they bounce, maybe there's value that you just don't know. They come, they browse a little bit, they leave after 30 seconds, you don't know, you don't know what value you've had. So our friend was like, okay, the fact they don't stick around for you. That's okay, because maybe they have some value just in the 30 seconds that spark an idea, and then they go someplace else. But maybe we sparked an idea. We just don't know that Julian. Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, and we are living at such a, you know, complex moment with respect to the labor market and the shifts we're seeing there. And I'm curious, Steve, you know, to hear you speak a little bit to that as it pertains to the platform and other initiatives you're working on as well, because I can imagine, you know, part of what you're saying about whether people stick or not, I mean, it has to for sure. That has to do with all these other shifts that are happening in the broader landscape. Steve Lee: You know, it's funny. One of the things that we think a lot, I think about a lot, is where, where's the puck going? I'm a big hockey fan of all things. And you know, as a kid. I used to follow Wayne Gretzky, and he had like, three eyes in the back of his head. He knew where the puck was going, right? And we're not that, but we try to prognosticate. And there are data sets that do this kind of stuff, right, and there's desk research. Yeah. And so to be very specific about it, in the world of AI, because that is where the puck is going. In fact, that's where the puck is. How do we have a platform that is going to serve the worker now and serve the worker two years from now and five years from now? The thing that's come up most recently, and it's fairly, fairly obvious, is the world of skills, trades, advanced manufacturing, uh, green jobs, things of that sort that have come to the fore recently, one, because there's been a lot of money that's been pumped into through the Biden administration, right? Rightfully so. But also, I think people are realizing that this might be sort of what I call the anti AI, right, as we think about, like, entry level jobs. And we've sort of, there's been research, some recent research through BGI and some others. Let's say, you know, college grads are not getting hired as much in the most recent cycle, in part, maybe because of AI, right? So we don't know what's going to be bounced right because of AI. I happen to think even though some of the jobs that Skill Up has now will be bounced because of AI, and if that's the case, then we shouldn't have those jobs anymore, right? Let's be honest. So we're trying to think about where the jobs are so we think skilled trades, advanced manufacturing, there's a piece of that. We have some pretty big efforts afoot right to do that across America, tied to some big federal federal grants with a couple of key partners, and tied to some community colleges that are doing, I think, really cutting edge work on some of the training aspects around getting people the right credential for some of these advanced manufacturing, green jobs, and I think some of the stuff will be important. Yeah, this is it takes a long time to get this to fruition. We're working on that now, as I want to call the anti AI, right? As we incorporate AI into our specific product experience. Julian Alssid: As we're trying to hone in on the future and where the puck's going. What are you learning and what are some of the challenges you're facing? Steve Lee: I think we're learning something. But what I just say, right, yeah, which I think, and this applies to Skill Up, because Skill Up's main jam is to help people get what we call gateway jobs. And the discipline knowledge that Opportunity@Work has created through their STARSs Tear the Paper Ceiling Campaign. The challenge with gateway jobs in the world of AI is, I think some of those gateway jobs ain't gonna be here. Like, I really don't right think about things like, like, a customer service rep. I'm going to use that as an example. That is, that is one of our gateway jobs, at least. I think it is right. You think that's gonna be around three years from now? I don't know. All right, let's say that's the level of scale. So I think what we're learning now is that some of those things ain't gonna be here anymore. The challenge is, if that's...
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Niesha Taylor: Best Practices to Bridge Higher Ed & Industry
06/03/2025
Niesha Taylor: Best Practices to Bridge Higher Ed & Industry
Niesha Taylor, Director of Career Readiness at the (NACE), concludes our three-part series with Jessica Perez from LaGuardia Community College and Bryan Quick from Abbott, showcasing how institutions and employers are successfully implementing NACE's career readiness competencies. The conversation explores practical examples of breaking down silos between higher education and industry, from LaGuardia's digital badging program that has provided 700+ students with paid internships to Abbott's skills-based hiring approach achieving a 70% intern-to-full-time conversion rate. Taylor emphasizes the critical need for faculty professional development to help students articulate their classroom learning as career-relevant experience, while Perez and Quick describe how career readiness competencies create a common language across the education-to-employment bridge. The discussion offers actionable strategies for creating supportive environments where students can confidently showcase their skills and for employers to develop comprehensive frameworks that prioritize workforce readiness over traditional degree requirements. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the third and final installment in our special mini series with the National Association of Colleges and Employers, or NACE. In our first episode, we spoke with NACE, President and CEO, Shawn VanDerziel, who provided a high level overview of the college career services and recruiting landscape. And then we dove deeper into the data in our second episode with Mary Gatta, who leads naces research efforts. Julian Alssid: Now in this third episode, we'll explore how colleges and employers are optimizing academic programs, career services, and recruitment practices for our evolving economy. We're excited to be joined by Niesha Taylor NACE's, Director of Career Readiness, with a background as a former Dean for Academic Innovation and Career Success at the City University of New York's Gottman Community College and Senior Director for career pathways at the New York Jobs CEO Council, Niesha draws on her range of experiences bridging higher ed and industry in her role at NACE. In an exciting new twist for Work Forces, Nisha will join us today, along with a college and business leader who work actively with NACE to implement innovative models. Jessica Perez, Director of the Center for Career and Professional Development at LaGuardia Community College -- my former employer, too, Jessica, we'll have to talk about that -- and Bryan Quick, Director of Global University Relations at Abbott. Jessica Perez: To give a bit more background, Jessica oversees the SOAR Experiential Learning Program, the Almezzi Foundation Career Fellows Program, CUNY Career Launch, Spring Forward and several other internship programs at LaGuardia. She's also an adjunct assistant professor at Lehman College and a Career Research & Development Consultant for Virginia Peninsula Community College. And Bryan is the head of Global Early Careers at Abbott, responsible for a worldwide team accountable for the design and delivery of the enterprise strategy to attract and recruit next generation talent. In his role, he oversees a global team dedicated to building strong partnerships with universities and managing early talent engagement programs. Jessica and Bryan are both involved with NACE, serving on various committees and in leadership committee roles. So welcome to you all. We're excited to have you with us for today's conversation. Kaitlin LeMoine: Great. So as we jump in today, Niesha, we'll start with you. Can you please tell us more about your background and your role at NACE. Niesha Taylor: I think the sort of critical first chunk of my time that makes sense to mention here is that I worked in higher education for many, many, many years, always with a focus on increasing access and really expanding economic mobility for the City University of New York students. I came out of K through 12 background, so I've always been thinking about that, that access point, and helping students become more successful and really get the most out of their college opportunities. In the last couple of positions I had, I worked on a variety of grants and initiatives that really worked to integrate career thinking into higher education. That actually started with Jessica Perez. I'll say she kicked off all of my thinking in this area. Gave me the sort of sort of background tools. That's the first time I heard of NACE and learned a little bit about the NACE career competencies, which I'm sure we'll talk a lot about in today's conversation. So really helping students see how they're learning and academic experience and beyond academic experience, were things that were really relevant to mention and put forward in connecting into their first career opportunities. So as that happened for me in higher education, I got deeper and deeper into the commitment to helping students really see that next step beyond college. In the role that I had at Guttman Community College, I kind of learned more and new ways of connecting career thinking into the classroom. Working with faculty quite a bit, which was really where I started to do a lot of faculty professional development to help them see how to bring the academic experience, sort of in connection, or bridging into the world of first jobs and first interviews for students. As I headed into the New York job CEO Council, my first step outside of higher education, it made me really understand how siloed higher education can be, and how much more we need to connect with employers and really help students see that bridge more clearly, take those steps more directly. And so that's really kind of what landed me at NACE is kind of building that firmer stance for students understanding how their learning connects into the first step into career. So NACE has developed itself in this area of career readiness, and again, that connects to this idea of understanding core competencies, those competencies that employers are looking for. I'd worked with those so much over the last stretch of years, and had started to work with NACE in building an assessment tool for those career competencies. And that kind of walked me towards the experience of starting, as you know, working with NACE full time and doing a lot of faculty professional development and really connecting into our employer partners to see how NACE competency development could really be developed across that bridge into employment. Yeah, I think that's kind of the sort of core story there and and really, the area that I oversee is really called Career Readiness and and connects down into the focus on those competencies and career learning in the classroom and beyond the classroom for students. Julian Alssid: Can you talk a little bit more about, you know, kind of how then you're, you know, what are the tools and services that that NACE offers, and you talked a bit about your faculty development work and the competency work, obviously, and and then how are you working with both educators and the employers to break down these silos? Niesha Taylor: What's interesting is that there's such a strong presence at NACE of career services professionals and leaders, and they have for many, many years, been focusing on those career competencies as a kind of foundation and a structure to integrate into various student experiences. So NACE really, has for many years worked with career services folks, and I think part of what's happening now is there's a broader awareness that this is a critical part of the college experience, and they're looking for ways to expand the professional knowledge and really tap into the professional knowledge of career services and stretch it across colleges. So what that looks like is always continuing to have deep and focused conversations with career services professionals, but help them advocate for expanding that focus across a college experience, so connecting it into academic affairs, teaching faculty about it, having program development that builds NACE competencies over time, so that it's not it really can't sit just with career services, especially because career services are typically very under resourced. They just cannot stretch. I mean, Jessica will tell you maybe some of the numbers of like, how many students her office is supposed to serve, and it is often true that there's not enough people in career services to have, like, a decent caseload of students. So NACE works a lot to help a college see how to start to integrate that career thinking across the experience, how leadership can get on board, how faculty can start to learn what's going on, and then how to build just an ethos of focus on career readiness from beginning to end of an academic experience. So that's really the higher ed side. And I think that numbers are something like 75% of the colleges we work with engage career readiness and the core career competencies, something like 30% do that really across the college. I think about 40% do it in a like department wide or stretched across a couple of departments. LaGuardia actually does a really beautiful job at it expanding, but it's, it's really rare that a college gets and really spreads it across the college experience, which is ideal for a student so NACE really brings in efforts to the college to help do that work, particularly to me, that's faculty professional development for the most part. But we also might work with, let's say, if it's focused in career services already, might expand it into advisement, for example, or take it over into student leadership work or things like that, to start to take those next steps, but it's a lot of professional development and support and community engagement to get that going. On the employer side, it's working with recruitment folks, and you'll hear this story from Bryan, more specifically, of understanding that so many colleges. Across the US are really building on this idea of of career readiness and how to engage that conversation as they're focusing and talking to students on college campuses, and then how to help them build their skills as they're coming into early, early career or internship programs at the college so that trying to sort of create the common language across higher education into employment, so that students can really leap, you know, and grow as they enter into those first layers of employment on the other side. And that work is newer to me, but really is exciting. It's, you know, you'll hear this story, but it's there are so many employers that I've spoken to are really grabbing this idea and being able to tell the story better for students as they're bridging over into employment as well. Great. Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, thank you so much for explaining at a high level how you go about doing this work across higher ed institutions and with employers. And so we're excited to dive into a couple of examples. Jessica, I guess, and Niesha, let's let's start there. Can we talk a little bit about the relationship between NACE and LaGuardia Community College, and you know, how did the relationship develop, and what have been some successes you've experienced in your work together, and some challenges or things you're working on as well. Jessica Perez: A little bit about my history when I started in higher education back in 2009 I think I'm aging myself now, but that's when I first was introduced to NACE being the Assistant Director of Career Services at Bronx Community College, which is also part of the City University of New York. And my involvement started it very simple as resources, right access to professional development, really being up to date with industry trends, that was really the goal of being involved with NACE and then let's fast forward to my role at LaGuardia Community College. When I first started at the college about maybe a few semesters in, we started this new initiative of co-curricular transcripts, and how could we document the student experience outside of the classroom, but with that twist of career readiness. So what we started, and that was when my work started with Niesha, was that we developed digital badges at the college in different areas, but I'll speak specifically what we did in career services. We have the Career Readiness Digital Badging program, which still exists to this day. We started very small with just federal work study students, providing professional development to those students so they have a real experience versus, right, not just being in a front desk answering phones. And then what we did was we aligned the job descriptions of the students for each department to the competencies, and I also aligned with the competencies of the college. So again, we're speaking one language when it comes to competencies, right? Because competencies, the word competencies, could be very foreign to our students, and from there, it has evolved to our current SOAR Experiential Learning Program, which is funded through the LaGuardia Foundation, and students are placed in entry level internship positions related to their major. So if they're interested in accounting, we will find them an entry level accounting position, and they will do a 12 week internship, and they get paid a $2,000 stipend, and they get awarded a digital badge. So actually, I just presented on Friday with some colleagues at City Tech, which is also part of CUNY, and we were talking about these microcredentials, and the value that students find. It motivates them to want to complete the internship, and they also build self confidence for our students. So again, right to answer the original question, that's what has allowed me to continue being involved with NACE and also in various leadership roles, because I'm very passionate about the work, especially for our first generation students that is mostly our population within CUNY, and helping them find value in their own career readiness and also leverage career connectedness across the college so because really, career is we all own it right? Career services, we lead the work, but we need our stakeholders and our partners, specifically faculty, to be successful in this work, and they have been my biggest stakeholders. Julian Alssid: I'm interested to hear a little bit more about kind of the successes and challenges that you've experienced in this work. Jessica Perez: Sure. So successes I just mentioned that, right? We want to, we have a really successful internship program. We've, we've provided at least 700 students with paid internships that have earned digital badges, which have led for them to either find a second internship, I get hired at a second internship on their own because of the career readiness competencies, or the student has been hired by the employer, or even found independently, right with our resources, another job which right a couple of years ago that was unheard of for community college students, that they're completing at least two internships before graduation. That's a major success. But again, that's all thanks to right? The framework that NACE has developed that we've been able to tweak and make our own at LaGuardia. Challenges, of course, is getting buy in from across the board, right? Especially when it came to the digital badges. Not everyone... They feel that it's extra work on the student or it's extra work on them, whether it's right, whether it's a staff or faculty member. So it's really having those conversations of what is the value, especially from the student perspective. They are finding the value in this. They are finding it helpful, and it's helping them align what they're learning in the classroom in their minds, right to what they're doing outside of the classroom. Because when they're meeting with an employer and Brian, you could probably speak to this, right, they don't know how to articulate what they're learning in the classroom as experience. They say, I have zero experience. Now let's talk about the different projects you've done, research projects, service learning activities, they're like, oh, wow, I actually have a lot of experience in this area. But again, it's our job as career services professionals or higher education educators, right in general, to educate, coach, and and help students articulate these skills that they actually have. So I would say that it's a strength, but also a challenge getting students to really be able to understand that they are proficient in these skills. It's just a matter of they. I had a sorry, I'm gonna go into a little rant, but a student of mine, and actually in one of the courses I teach, didn't feel confident that they actually have skills to put on their LinkedIn. But it's a coaching and saying, Hey, what have you done in the classroom, in this in this class? Oh, you've done two presentations. What does that mean? Oh, I have communication skills. Yes, you're able to present. And he's, he's done an excellent job in doing that. So again, it's about coaching and bringing that awareness to the students, to be able to share and not feel shy, to show off everything they've accomplished. Niesha Taylor: If I could jump in here too. So I really learned about the challenges when I was first working with Jessica. We were working on a project that brought advisors together with faculty. We were doing, like an advisement team, and it was the first time I like Jessica, just like, brought her folks to be a part of those teams, and then where things went well, faculty members who had been kind of like, I would like, say, dismissive of career services under started to understand the depth of knowledge that those folks brought to the table. This happens over and over again. It's worth mentioning that, like in higher education, there are all of these hierarchies where the faculty feel that this is a side thing. It's an over there thing. And so the more we can really dispel those myths and really raise up the expertise of this group of folks that have a critical function at the colleges, I think we start to help to bring that conversation into the classroom and help because it shouldn't be that a student goes to that class that you just described, where they presented twice, but they never thought of what that real learning meant and how to bring it into the into the room. And I always use that idea of showing off Jessica, because I have met so many CUNY students who like I think there's a lot of sort of cultural barriers to that, that feeling of what you're supposed to do in an interview, which does feel like showing off or bragging. And so I had a faculty member I worked with who framed it nicely. She said she'll have her students practice talking about what they accomplished, and then she'll ask them to do it again with pride and try to put their shoulders back and say, like, what would this look like if you walk in and you just feel like I really do have an amazing set of skills here, and I'm going to tell you about it, so that articulation point is really critical. When we do faculty professional development at NACE we make sure not only that a faculty member understands how to point to those experiences that might work on a resume or in an interview, but that the student is handed the opportunity to talk about it, to say those things, to try to...
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Mary Gatta: Decoding Career Trends Through NACE Research
05/27/2025
Mary Gatta: Decoding Career Trends Through NACE Research
Mary Gatta, Director of Research and Policy at the (NACE), continues our three-part series exploring the intersection of higher education and industry. Gatta shares up-to-date insights from NACE's latest Job Outlook Survey, highlights the growing importance of experiential learning for the job prospects of new graduates, and discusses the significant shift from GPA-based hiring to skills-based approaches, with two-thirds of employers now implementing skills-based practices. Gatta also emphasizes the critical need for faculty involvement in helping students translate classroom learning into career-ready competencies. The conversation offers valuable research insights for higher education professionals, employers, and students navigating the evolving landscape of college-to-career transitions. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Welcome to the second interview in our three part mini series with the National Association of Colleges and Employers, or NACE. In our first interview with NACE, President and CEO, Shawn VanDerziel, we discussed the broader landscape surrounding College Career Services and recruiting. Shawn provided an overview of the field and NACE's work, highlighting its central role as a knowledge-based organization with research at its core. Today, we're looking forward to delving deeper into that research with Mary Gatta, who leads NACE's research efforts. Julian Alssid: As Director of Research and Policy, Mary brings over 20 years of experience in teaching, research and advocacy on issues of education, employment and retirement, inequity. Her work focuses on evidence based research analysis, developing solutions around economic security, education, and workforce policies. Before joining NACE, she held faculty and research positions at the City University of New York, Gottman Community College, Rutgers, University's Center for Women and Work and Wider Opportunities for Women in Washington, DC, which is, I think, Mary, where we may have actually first met. Mary Gatta: It was it was where we met, yep. Julian Alssid: Indeed. So welcome to Work Forces. Great to have you. Mary Gatta: Thank you for having me. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes. So great to be with you today, Mary. Thanks so much for joining us. And as we get going today, can you please tell us more about your background and your role at NACE. Mary Gatta: I come out of higher education. For the most part, I spent most of my career in higher ed, in faculty roles. My training is in sociology, so I have a PhD in sociology, and my study, my research, and also a lot of my teaching has really been around work and understanding the impacts of education on labor market rewards, looking at the impacts of systemic inequities and how to mitigate them. So when I joined NACE as our director of research and public policy about four years ago, I was really excited, because the work that we do in terms of our research work at NACE really focuses on how to better understand the outcomes, the career outcomes, of college graduates, how to understand it across lines, levels of equity, and also how to understand the employer side, like, what are employers looking for in recent college grads? So it was a really great opportunity to kind of marry all of that for my own career, and also we know how important evidence-based research is around career outcomes for college graduates and for university recruiters. So that has been, is, really the focus of our research work at NACE. Julian Alssid: So tell us a little bit more. I mean, at NACE, you're sitting on a real trove of data. So I know you must be in, you know, in researcher heaven, tell us a little bit about that data that you sit on, and add a little bit more about the types of specifically the types of reports you generate, and who uses them and who they're intended for. Mary Gatta: We do a variety of surveys for our research throughout the year, and we in terms of kind of our samples, we are using...we're fortunate that we're able to survey our members, both our higher education members, who mostly sit in the career service kind of field, and also our employer members who really focus on university recruiters. And what we do throughout the year is do research, sort of, on career centers, right, career services. So what's going on in higher ed? What's going on with employers coming to campus to recruit career fairs? Kind of those basic benchmarks. We also, on the employer side, look at recruiting benchmarks. So what does the recruiting cycle look like, right? What is the hiring cycle look like for college grads? What is the hiring cycle for internships? What are the projections for the upcoming graduating class in terms of entry level hires? What are employers? How are employers thinking about things like skills based hiring, for example, and skills based practices. So throughout the year, we survey both our higher ed and our employer communities on those topics. We also, once a year, do a student survey, where we send that out in the spring through our higher ed partners to students, right where we are able. You know, how are students thinking about experiential learning? What have been their experiences? How are students thinking about the job market? What have been their experiences on how many interviews have they had? How have they sourced those interviews through career fairs, except networks. This year, for the first time, we did over this past summer, a survey of early career talent. So we surveyed college grads who are one to 10 years out to kind of look a little deeper into their outcomes. How did things like experiential learning opportunities during their college tenure impact their career outcomes? And then the final little piece of data. We do is our it's not little, it's actually quite big. Is our first destination survey, which is we look at aggregated levels of what are the outcomes six months post graduation. So we're in the process now of collecting that data for this class of '24 and then that report will be out in the fall. Kaitlin LeMoine: So you are busy, you're there's a lot you're collecting from a lot of different stakeholders, and really, living at the intersection of these worlds is really fascinating. Can you tell us? I mean, there's so many different directions we could go in this conversation. But given that you've recently conducted the job outlook for 2025 can we start there? Like, what have you learned? Mary Gatta: Yes. So we have just released, this is hot off the press, our Job Outlook Survey, which is a survey of our university recruiters of employers about what the job outlook looks like for the class of 2025. And we do this survey twice a year, I should say once in the fall, and getting those projections and then again in the spring. So what we are seeing now from our very, very hot off the press data is that right now, college hiring, college graduate hiring, is expected to be about flat, right? We're just seeing about a .6% increase. And just to put this in a little context, in comparison, in the fall, when we surveyed our employers, their projections was they were expecting hiring to increase over 7% from last year from the class of '24 levels. So I think that's a really important data point that we now that we're into the spring, and we're seeing basically a flat increase, a flat hiring projection, really not much of an increase from last year. When we go a little deeper into it, we see that about 65% of the employers in our survey intended to just maintain last year's hiring level, and a little less than a quarter expected to increase that. And just related to that, we do an internship survey every year looking at the benchmarks and the hiring and in our internship survey that we conducted just this past winter, we saw that employers were expecting to bring in fewer interns this year than they did last year. They are projecting a decrease in about 3% in intern hiring. So that's sort of an early sign that there might be some softening going on around hiring, because typically our job outlook projections and our internship projections felt like kind of run or pretty much aligned. So where that's sort of just some other interesting point that we're seeing right now. Julian Alssid: Mary, can you? Can you tell us a little bit of what you're saying by industry? I mean, are there particular, is there anything that jumps out at you with those terms? Mary Gatta: Yeah, no, we're kind of seeing it pretty comparable across industries, and so I don't think what we're seeing specifically in terms of industry, it seems to be relatively steady overall. When we look specifically at some industries, we are seeing some hiring projections with increasing around wholesale trade industry, management consulting, and transportation, and some decreases, larger decreases In chemical manufacturing, like pharmaceutical manufacturing, computer and electronics manufacturing, and motor vehicle manufacturing. But of course, with any industry analysis, you know, our Ns are really important here, so I would just take that a little bit into consideration, but that's pretty much what we're seeing. Kaitlin LeMoine: It's interesting to hear you speak about what sounds like a separate survey done around internships, but seeing that there's also a slight decrease there. And yeah, I feel like we're hearing kind of across the landscape the importance of experience and going into the job market with experience. I'm curious just to hear your thoughts. Mary Gatta: We did a survey about two years ago, on employers, and 80% of employers told us the best return on investment they get for recruiting strategy is internships. And further to that, in our job outlook, we collect data on using the GPA as a filter. So what that means is our employers using the GPA to filter out college grads and back in 2019, before COVID, about 75% of employers said, yeah, they're using the filter. The GPA is a filter. Now we're seeing that decrease to about anywhere between 30 and 40% of employers. And what's replacing that (and it's even for employers that are still using the GPA) is experiential learning, so having internship experience, work experience, and also being able to articulate your skills. So I think even though we're seeing this dip in internship and projections of internship hiring, experiential learning writ large, is really important as a recruitment strategy. And then just added on to that in our early career talent survey that we conducted over the summer, we ran the analysis of students who did some type of experiential learning, whether it was an internship, whether it was undergraduate research, whether it was work, study, study abroad, and those who did not. And what we found in the first one to three years after graduation, those who were experiential learners had more jobs, career satisfaction, saw a higher value to their higher ed, and had an average of $15,000 higher salary. We very much have consistently seen in our research the importance of experiential learning, coupled with (and experience learning is a great way to do this) being able to fully articulate what are the skills that you're learning, be it in the classroom or in a co curricular. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, well, that's it's really, I appreciate you broadening the lens on internships to really be about that experiential education piece, and the recognition that maybe it does come from an internship, or maybe it comes from your involvement with a student activity or a club or leadership experience, or what have you. So I think that's a really interesting and important call out at a time where experiential education just feels so important to kind of demonstrating skill sets, right? And being able to articulate. Mary Gatta: Yeah, being able to demonstrate skill sets. And also, I mean, there are other important benefits. Think about social capital, type benefits, right? Access to mentors, networks, you know, kind of an understanding of work. All of that is really important that comes from experiential opportunities. Julian Alssid: Looking beyond the job, the job outlook report, can you speak a little bit more to some of these trends that you're seeing that are sticking out in following the tracking of, you know, skills, skills based hiring. Love to hear more about that, what you're seeing and how that ties back to all of what we're talking about. Mary Gatta: What we're seeing in our research for about the past two years now is that when we survey our employers, if they're using skills based hiring, almost two thirds of them say they are. They're using skills based hiring at some point in the recruiting process, 90% of those employers say they're using it at the interview stage, and two thirds say they're incorporating skills based hiring in the screening process. So another three quarters also said that they've developed skills based job descriptions, for example, and more than half use a kind of a skills based interview rubric. And then obviously assessments kind of play a role here too, that we know. And about 40% of our employers created internal assessment tools to assess skills, and another quarter or so use external created tools. So I think the skills based hiring. I mean, the fact that two thirds of our employers are saying they're using it at some point, shows it's really important, and it's really important that college grads, and that we help prepare college grads to be in an interview, in a have a resume and a cover letter that is focused around skills based hiring, right? And that incorporates those practices. And this ties also to what I said earlier about the decline of the GPA, right? So experiential learning is part of that right? Employers are looking for experiential learning. But also employers tell us that they really do want students to be able to articulate their skills and competencies, so and be that you know in their interview, be that through their descriptions, etc, through that a work portfolio. That is really important. Another, you know, critically important thing that employers are telling us to be helping prepare students and college grads for that will help give that, get them prepared, and give that and for it like up. Julian Alssid: So then, how do these trends kind of shape the advice and the guidance that nice provides, you know, career services professionals and students and employers. Mary Gatta: Yeah. So I think our resource is helpful, you know, across the board, right? So when we're able to get our data, whether it be around skills based hiring the GPA from employers, higher ed career service centers, faculty, staff, etc, are able to then incorporate that into their workshops, into their curriculum in the classroom, right? So having that knowledge of what employers are looking for from amongst college grads will help them maybe adapt syllabi, for example, to align course outcomes with competencies, career readiness competencies, right? So the students can then kind of share with a prospective employer. You know, in my sociology course, for example, I was able, I learned sociology and theory and methods, but I also developed critical thinking skills by engaging in a research project. Or I developed, I worked in teamwork on a group project on X, so that data is really important. The data also from our student survey. For example, we ask our students, what are they looking for in jobs, like, what are the benefits they're looking for? What are the attributes of the job, you know. And overall, our data shows they're looking for economic security type benefits, right, job security, for example. So that helps to inform employers right when they're recruiting students on what the graduates are looking for and what college grads are looking for. So that is really, I think, helpful. I think what's exciting about our early career talent survey, for example, is for the first time, we were able to kind of look at, you know, in, you know, in a self reported way. Obviously, all the data from students is self reported. But how, for the data around experiential learning, for example, how we're able to see a correlation between taking or participating in experiential learning opportunities during your college years and the impact on your early career. And that's informative for students. That's informative for parents to talk with their students, to talk with their children about. So I think that's really also helpful. And, you know, we also have, you know, compensation guides, for example, internship compensation guides that are helpful for employers to sort of gauge, you know, intern pay. We do a salary survey every year, and I should say, our first destination survey, which is the survey that we have on, what are, what are the outcomes six months out, that is open to the public, so that is not behind a paywall at NACE. And you can, we have a dashboard, and you can filter that by type of, you know, type of school region, the northeast, the southeast, etc, the west. And that can also help you think about by major. So it gives you, gives students, it gives, you know, everyone really a sense of, you know, how, what are the outcomes across different whether it's geographic variables, types of Carnegie classifications, etc. So I think you know, college outcome data is really important, because obviously it helps to inform a student's decision about their major, their career path, but it also helps inform both employers and higher ed professionals about the each other, right? Because they're both really important part of the college recruiting. Kaitlin LeMoine: Absolutely Mary, and I think it's really interesting to hear you talk about how kind of some of these shifts that are happening, like, for example, when you raise skills based hiring or an emphasis on internships, I'm curious to know. I mean, given your years in this space, what are some of the trends you've kind of seen shift pretty significantly over time. And in addition, I mean, you know, what are those shifting? Because when you've seen those things shift over time, what does that make you think about future state, you know, where we are now and where we're headed? Mary Gatta: One of the things, I think, is, and it's something we're working on at NACE, is really engaging faculty in these conversations, connecting career services and faculty more directly. We do know from our student survey that students go to their faculty for career advice. You know, speaking as a former faculty member, you know, we need to help ensure that our faculty are able to connect the amazing work that we're doing in the classroom in our disciplinary area with careers, right? And that work, you know, really requires us not to really change our syllabi significantly in any way, but, or what we're teaching differently in any way, but what it really does, it just kind of overlay on, you know, what are the I'm learning these sociological skills, right? Or I'm learning these skills in biology, but what, how does it, how do I help my students translate that to in an interview? How do I help my students connect that? How do I engage in some type of experiential learning with my students in the classroom on that? So I think we are seeing more and...
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Shawn VanDerziel: NACE’s Role within Higher Ed & Industry
05/20/2025
Shawn VanDerziel: NACE’s Role within Higher Ed & Industry
Shawn VanDerziel, President and CEO of the , kicks off a special three-part series exploring the crucial intersection of higher education and industry. Drawing on his extensive experience in HR and recruitment, VanDerziel discusses how the evolving economy is reshaping entry-level hiring practices and the growing importance of skills-based recruitment. He highlights the challenges facing both employers and higher education institutions, including the “language gap” that prevents students from effectively articulating their skills to employers. VanDerziel also examines how AI is transforming both recruitment strategies and career services, drawing employers back to campus recruiting while offering new opportunities for understaffed career offices. The conversation offers practical strategies for helping students translate their academic experiences into workplace-relevant skills, ultimately strengthening the vital bridge between post-secondary education and meaningful employment. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Julian. We've spent a lot of time on this podcast exploring the connections between higher ed and industry. Among many topics, we've discussed experiential learning, skills based education, business, higher ed partnerships and the impact of AI. We've examined how colleges are continuing to adapt to workforce needs and how innovative collaborations are aligning academic programs with evolving career opportunities. Julian Alssid: That's right Kaitlin, and we're excited to share that we've partnered with the National Association of Colleges and Employers, or NACE, for a special three part mini series focused on a really critical piece of the higher ed-industry connection. Kaitlin LeMoine: For our listeners who may be less familiar, NACE is the leading professional organization for career services and university relations and recruiting professionals. As described on their website, NACE empowers and connects the community of professionals who support, develop, and employ the college educated workforce. Julian Alssid: This series will examine the work happening at the crucial intersection of learning and work in three parts. First, we'll discuss the broader landscape surrounding college career services and recruiting. Then we'll explore NACE's latest research, including projections for the class of 2025, and finally, we'll look at how leading colleges and employers are putting these insights into practice. To kick off today's conversation, we're honored to be joined by Shawn VanDerziel, President and CEO of NACE. Kaitlin LeMoine: Shawn, thanks so much for joining us today. We're excited to have you on this podcast. Shawn VanDerziel: Well, thanks for inviting us. I'm excited to be here with you all. Kaitlin LeMoine: So, Shawn, as we jump in today, can you please give us some background on yourself and what led you to NACE. Shawn VanDerziel: Sure I've had a windy road to my current position. I'm going to start back way back into college and move quickly through my career, so you can see the perspective by which I approach my work. I graduated from a large state school with my undergraduate and had no idea what I was going to do with my degree, and I had an opportunity to move to Chicago afterwards, which was a great move for me. And I found my first position working in college admissions, student enrollment, which was a natural for me, because in college, I was one of those overly involved students. I was a first generation student, so I didn't have the same resources as as many others may have had, and and wasn't quite sure how to approach my job search, etc, but I knew some things from my college experience, such as like giving campus tours, working with the admissions office, leading student groups, and I found my way into admissions. It was a great way to start my career. Worked my way up, and I got really burned out, and but what can I do? I was so tired of traveling all the time, being up until 10 o'clock at night, going to college fairs at high schools, all of those things. And so I thought, how can I transition these skills into something else? And I thought about recruiting, recruiting employees. So I was recruiting students. Why couldn't I recruit employees? And I found an organization that was really interested in me because of my connection to college students. They were very interested in connecting with college students to their employment opportunities. It was the first time that an outsourced service. Well, I should say, Fortune 500 company, utilized a outsourced service to fully take over the recruitment function. And so I worked for a company called Norrell Corporation, which was a billion dollar staffing company at the time, and we took over Bank of America's recruiting function for their Midwest region because they were expanding banks. So they were opening over 100 banks throughout the Chicagoland area in a period of about a year and a half. And I started as the recruitment manager, hiring all of these folks who are going to work in these banks, particularly through their management trainee programs and for tellers. And they wanted college students to be involved with that. So I was back on college campuses, looking for those students. Well again, I got really burned out, and I was like, Oh my gosh, this is the i being an outsourced service is a no joke kind of job. And I thought again, like, how can I transition this? And I already had the recruitment experience. I had always wanted to work at a museum, and finally, I had the skill to actually do something in a museum, and that was to work in a human resources office within a museum which is very niche, but I found a job and that I could apply for, and I actually got the job. And so I spent almost 25 years at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, which is one of the world's largest natural history museums, and I worked my way up from a human resources rep doing recruitment and employee relations to becoming the Chief Human Resources Officer, Chief of Staff. And I oversaw lots of different departments over time, including our IT department, our education department, marketing for a short while, and also oversaw our Board of Trustees and the functions related to that. While I was at The Field Museum, I built a really large internship program that included over 200 interns every summer. And that experience led me to NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers as a volunteer, I became a volunteer leader and eventually the Chair of the Board of NACE. Over a decade ago, when the executive director of NACE was about to retire, I became a part of the search process, and was lucky enough to actually be offered the job at the end of that executive search process. So five years ago, I started as this President and CEO of NACE, and am so delighted to be representing this organization to the world. Julian Alssid: Always so great to hear peoples' origin stories. And so tell us a bit more about NACE. So give us an overview, if you will, Shawn and and then the role that nice really plays at the sort of intersection of higher ed and industry. Shawn VanDerziel: Yeah, simply put, that's exactly what we do. We bridge post secondary education to employment. We're all about outcomes and equitable outcomes for all students who pursue post secondary education. What that means on a day to day basis is that we are a membership association that represents folks who work on college campuses, mostly in the career services offices. So we represent every type of college and university, small, large, private, public, community college, four year, you name it, that's about two thirds of our members. One third of our members are the employers who go into college campuses and recruit college students for employment opportunities, for full time internships, co ops, apprenticeships, you name it, the full gambit of opportunities. We represent close to 3,000 organizations, and over 17,000 almost 18,000 individuals are a part of the association. Kaitlin LeMoine: Wow. Yeah. So this is, this is an extensive operation you have going on, and I would imagine, thank you. Thank you for the background you provided, because it just feels like, wow, you're drawing on, I'm sure, all the different skills and experiences gathered over the years, especially both on the college recruitment side and then on the employer recruitment side as well. It's quite striking. Shawn VanDerziel: Yeah, it's a lot of fun. And one of the things that on important work, really important work. And we're not insular, so meaning, like we just don't do things for our members. We do things for the public at large, so that they understand what's happening with the outcomes of students. So at the center of everything that we do is research. We're a knowledge based organization, so we're able to study the employment market from a variety of perspectives. We can see what's happening at college campuses to prepare students for employment opportunities. We can talk with students about what they're looking for in their jobs and how they're being prepared for jobs in their careers, and we talk to the employers about what they're looking for and how those other two pieces need to evolve to meet the growing and demanding needs of the workplace of the future. Kaitlin LeMoine: Amazing. So with all that being said, given the rapidly shifting environment that we're currently operating in this very dynamic space, we'd love to dive into a couple of different areas that you just that you mentioned, and that NACE raised recently as part of a recent more environmental scan. I believe you posted about it on LinkedIn not too long ago. So one question we have is, first, how do you see the current economy and economic outlook reshaping how employers are hiring entry level talent, and how, with a different lens how colleges are preparing those learners for success as well. Shawn VanDerziel: What we know right now is that the employment market is contracting so there are fewer opportunities for college graduates to join the workforce as compared to, let's say, two or three years ago, and that is from general full time employment all the way through to internships. With that we also know that employers are continually telling us that there's a gap between what college students offer and what they're looking to hire. So they have, they have made a bunch of shifts in their hiring and how they hire, which is no different than the general employment landscape. So we keep hearing about skills based hiring. Well, this has caused employers, particularly with early talent to really focus on that skills based hiring. So what they're saying is, is that in the old days, they would look at students who had a particular major, and they would look to see what their grade point average is as a starting place for the hiring process, and today, they're telling us for some jobs, we will do that, particularly highly technical jobs that require technical skills. So if you're going to be an engineer, Well, you certainly don't want someone working on your airplane who didn't get good grades, right? So you want to know that they're the top of their class because they have the knowledge to do the job. So they might still be screened by GPA. But if I'm looking for someone who's going into a management trainee program of some sort, that's more of a generalist or etc, I might think a little bit more broadly. I don't necessarily have to have someone who has the highest GPA. What I want is someone who has the skills and competencies to do the job. So how am I then going to find that person? Well, I have to substitute something in there to screen that person by we know from talking to employers that work experiences in general are very important to them. So anytime a student can demonstrate work experiences, and they can list what they actually gained in skill or competency in that work is super important, and they look for internship experience, either internship experience with them as their that student's employer, or they look for industry experience. So did the person have an internship in something that's closely aligned? And those are the students that they're saying they probably have the skills to do the job. They're also, of course, doing things like keyword searches and and using AI as part of part of the recruitment process. But they're really trying to dig down to find students who are going to succeed long term, and that's also one of the reasons that they invest so much money, particularly large companies, into internship programs, because we know that internship programs are the number one return on investment for employers from a recruitment perspective, the cost value is there for them. They know that they can convert at least 50% of those interns into being full time employees. They know that when they hire that student who starts as an intern, they're going to be with the company, more likely a year later and more likely five years later. We know that we've got that that data data to back it up, so the return on investment is really there. So we're finding more and more interest from employers and and partnering with schools to make sure their internship programs are solid. We're also finding that they are returning to campus, so they've been doing hiring on the web for quite some time. They've been focusing on it virtually, but they're also finding a need to get back in person so that they can weed through some of the talent a little bit more quickly. Julian Alssid: That's so interesting that they're they're coming back. Shawn VanDerziel: Yeah, absolutely. And AI has a lot to do with that, and we certainly can talk more about AI and how that's impacting everything, but there's an impersonalization that's happening, and there really is a business case for for getting back on campus and finding that talent. Julian Alssid: Yeah, so before we go into AI, which definitely we want to hear more about, it's all the rage, as you may have heard, interested to talk a little bit more about the skills based practices, because there's been some written about how... The Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Center on Workforce wrote a piece a few months ago, which, of course, could be ancient history at this point, that companies were not picking up so much on on skills based practices. And so I'm interested to hear your take on that. You know, I get it with respect to the jobs where they're they are looking for skills. But how is it? Are they integrating this more broadly into their organizations? Are you seeing that? Shawn VanDerziel: Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So employers in our surveying do say that they, the majority of them, are doing some type of skills based hiring. Where they are doing it is either through keyword searches as an example, in screening the resumes through automated systems or the the other bulk is through behavioral based interviewing questions. So when a student actually lands an interview, being able to talk through with them what they have actually accomplished, and what they have the ability to be able to do based upon the skills and competencies that they've gained. And so by providing those concrete examples, they're able to kind of dig through that. But it also goes back to what I was mentioning just a few minutes ago, which is around they're kind of substituting when they say skills based hiring, what we say academically doesn't necessarily match what employers are doing logistically. There's always this gap between industry and higher ed and the language. And this is a really good example. And so when, from an academic perspective, we think of skill, we think, well, gosh, you're looking for someone who has great verbal speaking skills, right? You can do public speaking. Okay, great. So then, how do you screen for that? Well, what are those employers going to do to find that they're not going to put a test in place to have every candidate come through and do some kind of speech, right? That's not what they're going to do to get to that skill. What they're going to do is they're going to look on that resume and say, oh, gosh, did this student have an internship? And in that internship, did they use their verbal communication skills? Did they designate that on there? So if that skill is not listed, the employer isn't going to find it as a starting place, and then they're not going to be able to dig deeper on it when they get them into an interview. So this comes full circle to what's happening on campuses and preparing students to be career ready, and bridging that employment because we have an onus in higher education with these students to help them to articulate their skills and their competencies in a way that an employer can translate it and employers speak a totally different language. They want the shortcut. They want to get to the candidate in the fastest way possible. So they are going to put any mechanism in place to do that. And so it behooves us to help those graduates to be able to articulate it in every which way, all of the experiences that they have, right? So it doesn't even have they can come from unexpected ways. It could come from student activities. It could come from work study. It could come from a whole variety of places that a student may have obtained skills and competencies throughout their college career. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, it's really interesting to hear you talk about the language gap that exists Shawn and kind and the difference between, you know, maybe how, on the academic side, we describe a skill, and then the shortcut language that employers might use, I feel like that's, that's an area that we've I feel like has, you know, it's been around for for so long now, and it feels like there's just, there's more and more great work happening around how to close that gap. And you know, I think that if we're going to turn to the conversation of AI, it seems like there's some really interesting work there that might be able to support some of the closing of those gaps. But then there's also some new challenges that emerge as well. So would love to transition over to talk a little bit more about AI and how what you're seeing from the perspective of both use on the employer side with respect to recruitment and hiring, and also when we think about career services and preparing learners for really bridging that gap between post secondary and employer. Where is AI, you know, used well, where is it less effective? And you know, where do we still have work to do? Shawn VanDerziel: I'll start with the employers. So as I mentioned earlier, employers are using it for screening, most definitely, and they've been doing that for a long time, using various AI technologies to help them screen resumes. But an interesting thing is happening right now, which is because of the explosion of AI, there are some employers that are seeing an explosion of resumes hitting them, and because of these bots that are out there, and there are fake candidates that are hitting employers by the hundreds of thousands. And there are job seekers who are literally sending out thousands of resumes at a time. And so when that happens, an employer...
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Ellie Bertani: Driving Social Impact & ROI in Philanthropy
05/13/2025
Ellie Bertani: Driving Social Impact & ROI in Philanthropy
Ellie Bertani, President and CEO of GitLab Foundation, discusses the foundation’s unique approach to philanthropy that prioritizes ROI, risk-taking, and speed to support economic mobility initiatives. Drawing from her cross-sectoral experience in nonprofit, public, and private sectors, Bertani explains how the foundation measures impact by tracking how every dollar invested aims to generate at least $100 in additional lifetime earnings for people living below a living wage. She shares success stories from a portfolio of over 120 grants across Colombia, Kenya, and the United States, highlighting investments in areas like green jobs, short-form credentials, and technology infrastructure. Bertani also discusses their Learning for Action Fund, which helps grantees build monitoring and evaluation capacity, and offers practical advice for nonprofits on becoming more outcomes-focused through agile, data-driven approaches to program design and implementation. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Julian Alssid: On the workforces podcast. We feature a range of companies and organizations offering various programs, products, and initiatives that live at the nexus of work and learning. Some are funded through public dollars, other through private investments, and we don't always dive into those details in our conversations. However, today we're taking a slightly different approach and speaking directly with the leader of a foundation that's focused on supporting a range of innovative organizations seeking to solve significant challenges. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes, Julian, we're looking forward to this conversation. The mission of the GitLab Foundation is to improve lifetime earnings through access to opportunities by supporting organizations in a number of different focus areas. The Foundation seeks to have impact in three different geographic regions, Colombia, Kenya and the United States. The foundation's focus on ROI is particularly distinct. They pay close attention to how their dollars contribute to the total lifetime earnings for low income families. Julian Alssid: Yes, and at a time in which we're navigating significant change in the world of work and learning from policy shifts, economic uncertainty, the rapid advancement of AI, we're looking to dive deep into a conversation with the President and CEO of GitLab Foundation, Ellie Bertani. We'll discuss how they monitor and measure impact and ensure that every dollar spent drives true and lasting change. Kaitlin LeMoine: With a background in the nonprofit, public and private sectors, Ellie brings a shared value cross-sectoral approach to drive sustainable impact. Prior to joining the GitLab Foundation, Ellie spent 10 years in the private sector with roles at Wells, Fargo and Walmart, and much of her work focused on frontline worker economic stability and mobility. Earlier in her career, Ellie spent nearly 10 years in the nonprofit and public sector, including positions with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the US, State Department, Third Sector Capital Partners and Rotary International. Ellie, thanks so much for joining us for today's conversation. We're so excited to have you with us. Ellie Bertani: Oh, I'm so grateful for the invitation. It's great to be here. Julian Alssid: Yes, Ellie, thank you so much. And if you would tell us about your background and what led you to GitLab Foundation. Ellie Bertani: As you can tell, my background is a mix of 10 years in the nonprofit and philanthropic space early in my career, and then 10 years in the private sector, and I've really tried to combine perspectives of what makes each of those sectors impactful and what can contribute to drive social change into GitLab Foundation, as we have launched it and founded it two and a half years ago. I think in particular, we're trying to say, what are the most important factors that drive great investment in the private sector, some approaches from venture capital in particular, that we think, when translated into a philanthropic setting, can really help us make evidence based smart decisions, help us move really quickly as an organization, and help us find these really sort of diamonds in the rough jewels of projects or organizations that have great new ideas that can really help people who need economic mobility get money into their pockets and move up the ladder. Kaitlin LeMoine: So you're starting to take us in this direction, Ellie, but can you provide, I know we said a little bit about the GitLab Foundation, but can you know you provide more of a background on on an overview of the foundation, and really what makes your investment strategy unique? Ellie Bertani: We are a global, independent, private foundation, as you said, working in three markets today. We have a mission to improve lifetime earnings through access to opportunities. And we really think about economic mobility pretty broadly. We think there are tremendous number of factors that can help support an individual to grow their earnings over time. Some of those supports may be skills development and workforce training programs. Some of those supports may be things like early education and earlier in their lives, their access to great opportunities at younger ages, and some of those may be access to technology solutions that can help them navigate or find new opportunities as they're working through their lives. But we really take I think there are three different things that make our investment approach a bit unique in philanthropy, first is our focus on ROI. Here we estimate and track the impact of every investment that we make using a unique what we call North Star return on investment methodology. That means for every dollar that we invest, we seek to drive at least $100 in additional lifetime earnings for people who live below a living wage. We seek out solutions that lead people to pathways to prosperity, and we recognize that it's really important to have financial stability as a foundation to drive economic mobility. The second thing that is a bit unique about us is we have a pretty high risk tolerance. We believe that philanthropy is in a unique position to take risk and test out new social innovations in a way that others, for example, the public sector, really can't, since they're using taxpayer dollars. And so building on that unique capability, we are willing to bet on unproven ideas and also to invest in our grantees' ability to build evidence of whether their ideas work, and also to learn through iteration how their ideas can be improved. And I think this, this ability to seek out risky projects, is something that we would encourage other philanthropies to do as well. And then the third thing that we do that is a bit different is we really move with speed. We believe in getting capital as quickly as possible to organizations who are driving change. That's why we've designed our processes to be as grantee friendly as possible, asking for just enough information to help inform our decision making and make some good bets. And this, I think, is demonstrated by the fact that over our first two years, we've made over 120 grants and moved almost $35 million quickly to high potential ideas. So that's what really, I think makes this difference. Julian Alssid: Well, so Ellie picking up on that. So you have this, you've developed rapidly, then pretty big portfolio. Well, how do you develop maybe a little bit more on that? And how do you then monitor this portfolio that is in different focus areas and has different kind of time and impacts horizons? Ellie Bertani: How we develop the portfolio is very much sort of a building upon the scientific method. We lay out a series of hypotheses of what we think is important, what is driving the labor market? For example, in the United States, where do we see opportunity and growth, and where can we make bets in that space? So for example, last year, we made a lot of bets in the green jobs space, as you might imagine, when there was significant industrial policy and investments in the CHIP and IRA acts that were really fueling growth in the energy sector and other sectors. So where we think we can make a good bet and also see the potential maybe to leverage other dollars, government dollars or other foundation dollars, we think we'll get a higher return on investment, that's one example. We're also making a pretty big bet in the short form credential market, college degrees aren't for everyone. Lots of people are turning towards shorter form training programs, as you all know quite well, but there's not yet a lot of evidence for which of those programs are the best, which deliver skills that employers are really seeking, which will really drive increased income for people. And so we're actually investing in helping make that market have a clear signal of value. That is to identify which programs are actually the best. And we've made some big investments in in that work. But that's all built on this hypothesis that if we can solve that problem, it will really drive earnings for potentially millions of people here in the United States. So that's a little bit about how we develop our portfolio around certain hypotheses that we will learn over time if they're working or not. In terms of monitoring our portfolio of projects, I think again, what makes us a little bit unique is, first, we work directly with grantees to tailor grant requirements, because we see economic mobility as having lots of inputs, lots of ways to drive improvements. Some programs maybe one year long, and we'll be able to build something quickly and see results quickly. Often, technology projects are like this, you can really see quickly if they're working or not. Sun like skills training programs take multiple years to understand if they're working or not. And so we we adjust the time periods, the amounts given, etc, and try to be very flexible with our grantees, allowing them also to adjust mid project if they need to go in a new direction, and then for monitoring and evaluation. You know, most funders don't support their grantees in efforts to measure their impact. We understand that those investments are important, that it can be complex, costly and high effort to conduct robust impact measurement. And so we actually. Have a fund supporting grantees to do just this. We launched it last year. It's called our Learning for Action Fund, and in its first iteration, and invested in 12 grantees from our portfolio to build their monitoring and evaluation capacity to both improve their own program designs by capturing feedback from their participants and allowing them to iterate their programs and to build evidence for what's working. And we are hopeful that as grantees, are able to build that evidence and prove what's working that will inspire other funders beyond us also to invest in some of this great work. Kaitlin LeMoine: You know, I'm struck by how responsive the foundation is, it sounds like to the needs and kind of priorities of the different organizations that you invest in. I mean, both from, like, the tailoring of, like you said, some of, I guess, how people even, like apply for these, these funds, but also, and like, the kind of things they're looking to achieve once they've obtained the funds. But also this, this focus on monitoring impact, right? Because I think, like in this space, that can be really challenging and doesn't always have a short time horizon associated with it, depending on the initiative or the program. So I mean, I'm curious, Ellie, can can you share a couple of examples of grantees that are demonstrating impact, and then maybe we can dive into some of the challenges and learnings you're seeing as well. Ellie Bertani: Two organizations that I wanted to highlight that I think are great examples of really interesting, unique, high ROI projects that we're excited about. So the first is an organization you may know called Upwardly Global. Upwardly Global is an organization here in the United States that helps immigrants translate their skills from prior jobs or careers from their home countries to to re credential them and allow them to employ those skills here in the United States, as you probably recognize, there are a lot of barriers when someone is immigrating, and often, many immigrants end up in rather low wage jobs like house cleaner jobs or Uber drivers or things they can quickly get to sustain their families, but aren't harnessing everything they have brought with them from their prior life and upwardly global really helps people go through the process of re credentialing, demonstrating those skills, pointing them towards the right programs that will allow them to then join the workforce in a much more productive way. So they're already doing great work. Upwardly global came to us saying, we really have this vision of expanding our work to serve more and more refugee serving agencies across the United States. What we want to do is kind of some what I would call unsexy infrastructure work. We want to build a learning management system so that we can codify all the work we do and train other organizations to do it, which would dramatically expand our reach across the United States to serve more and more people. And other funders hadn't been willing to make this investment, but we saw, based on how we model and analyze grant potential return on investment, that this was going to be a really high leverage investment and really drive many more people to have higher income. So we made the bet. They implemented the system. We have seen great results as of this work continuing, we've estimated that this will contribute to increasing annual income per person of the program by about $19,000 so really high returns for the investment we made. The second one I would call out is one of our grantees in Colombia called Kuepa EduTech. So cuepa has recognized that in Colombia there's a growing demand for hospitality and services because of the growing ecotourism and tourist industry, and we invested in a pilot program to help low income students be trained in these programs, to provide personalized coaching and to iterate a program so that other funders would come along and grow it over time, we've seen great success In this program, showing that, in some cases, the graduates are now doubling their earnings from below living wage there to over $6,000 a year per person, which is significantly above living wage in Columbia. And so, you know, we estimate that for only about $1,000 we will drive more than double increases to their lifetime earnings over time. So really, again, a really high return on investment now in terms of learnings, right? So I'll give one example of a grantee that you know, we invest in risky things. So many things don't work out. We see about two thirds of our prod. Projects, if we're doing a really good job or panning out as we had hoped, about 1/3 may not be, and that's to be expected. What we really look for, though, is these grantees who are learning and iterating as they go. So we invest in generation Kenya. Generation is a multi national organization that focuses on increasing skills, country by country across the world, and in Kenya, they launched this, really at the time, very innovative project, to help Kenyans, particularly in urban areas, gain skills, to be to have technical skills, and become freelance, digital freelancers in the open marketplace, the theory being, if they could then be employed by Americans, for example, their earnings would be significantly higher than if they were working for local and local jobs that are relatively poor paying with the continuing push into AI and the rapid changes the technology space, what originally seemed like a really exciting, high potential program over the first year ran into some significant challenges with the second and third cohorts gaining employment. The first cohort did great. The second and third really faced some significant challenges, and so they were forced. The grantee came to us and said, we think we should stop the program. We think we should save the funds and reallocate them to some higher potential initiatives. And we said, Thank you. Thank you for coming to us. Thank you for raising this as an issue. Thank you for recognizing this challenge. We were happy to see them pivot the strategy and repurpose the funds quickly and recognize the challenges they were facing. So, so all this to say, you know, this is a normal course of things. When you're making a high risk investments. What we really look for is the learnings and the ability of flex and pivot. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I would say that, you know, I appreciate like, Thank you for sharing that that set of lessons learned. And I think you know having some of that story is is on your website as well. And I think it's really valuable to put that out to the community, right to say, like, here's what happens. Like, it's not always like a linear path to success. Sometimes it's actually about yes, let's repurpose or let yes, we're learning along the way, and what can we do differently? And I think showing models of how that work happens is really important, because I think, as you're saying, right, more many times, that's what occurs, especially with a lot of these social impact initiatives. It's not a linear path to success, and it's and there are so many external factors impacting these projects along the way, absolutely. I mean, just in the last few months, we can see how external factors can change all sorts of dynamics for nonprofits and philanthropies trying to make bets. So as long as the leadership team is one that is recognizing learning, we're willing to continue investing and betting on those teams. Julian Alssid: So Ellie, even in less tumultuous times, I'd say that the field has been littered with good ideas that have come and gone with grants. And I'm really interested in hearing a bit about how, how do you work with your grantees to, you know, to ensure that they're to try to give the best chance of life beyond this grant like, how do you leverage these investments in that respect? Ellie Bertani: Although we're young, we recognize that we would like to go beyond the check in terms of support to our grantees. And so with two of our three funds, currently, we have started implementing grantee cohorts and grantee support to those cohorts. So I'll give two examples of what that looks like today. We have an AI for Economic Opportunity Fund. We were one of the first foundations to invest in this space. And I say that not to toot our horn, but because we have learned a lot along the way since we started over two years ago, about what helps a grantee be successful when they're building a new technology, particularly a technology that it is itself evolving so quickly through our first cohort and our first fund, we were very fortunate to form early on a partnership with open AI, and that has really matured in the second cohort, to them offering engineering support for all of the grantees going through our second cohort, we host monthly meetings, bring all of the grantees together focused on a specific topic, each time, from topics ranging from ethical use of AI and building ethical frameworks for building and implementing AI in your own organization, all the way to highly technical...
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Kerry McKittrick: Transforming State Workforce Systems
04/29/2025
Kerry McKittrick: Transforming State Workforce Systems
Kerry McKittrick, Co-Director of The Harvard Project on Workforce, shares research conducted in partnership with the National Governors Association on how governors are reshaping workforce development to address labor force challenges. She identifies key trends including agency mergers, stakeholder engagement, dual-customer approaches, innovative funding, and investments in wraparound supports for underrepresented populations. McKittrick highlights how states focus on industry partnerships in emerging sectors and emphasizes the importance of data-informed regional strategies. She explains how successful pilot programs using governor's reserve funds can lead to permanent state policies, offering practical guidance for practitioners to adapt research insights to local contexts. Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. You know Julian, when we talk about and use the term workforce development, it can sound like we're talking about one system, but really it's an interconnected web, like set of systems. It's not just one thing. Julian Alssid: A web is a good way to put it. You've got education and training programs, employer needs, government policies, economic data, new technologies and people seeking to advance their careers. So all these different pieces, and they're all influencing each other, you can't really address one without thinking about the others. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, exactly. It requires so much collaboration. Educators need to talk to employers. Policy makers need to listen to communities. And it's not just a top down function either. It's you need to you need input from the people going through the trainings and the workers trying to navigate their careers as well. Julian Alssid: Which is why I'm excited that we're talking with Kerry McKittrick today from the Harvard Project on Workforce. Kerry is helping to make sense of the work happening across these interconnected systems. Kaitlin LeMoine: The Harvard Project on Workforce is an interdisciplinary applied research project between the Harvard Kennedy School, the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education that examines workforce development and the future of work from these various vantage points. In Kerry's role as co-director, she leads the project's policy, research, and partnership strategy, and spearheads initiatives focused on building better pathways to economic mobility. She has co-authored multiple papers focused on education, training and career navigation, and she speaks regularly about issues at the intersection of education and work. Julian Alssid: And prior to joining The Project on Workforce, Kerry was a senior manager at Jobs for the Future and served as a senior policy advisor on education workforce, civil rights and child welfare policy for Congressman Jim Langevin. She started her career in politics serving as a campaign manager for Massachusetts State Rep Ken Gordon. Thanks so much for joining us today. Kerry. Kerry McKittrick: Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the podcast and excited to chat. Kaitlin LeMoine: We're excited to connect and chat with you today as well, Kerry. Thanks so much for joining us here. So as we jump in today, can you please tell us a bit more about your background and your role at The Project on Workforce? Kerry McKittrick: Absolutely. So I come from a political policy background, and it was actually through that work, through working with a congressman from Rhode Island, Jim Langevin, who really was interested in career and technical education, that my eyes were kind of opened to the workforce development and career and technical education world. And you know, I found it really interesting, because unlike many policy areas, it's pretty bipartisan. We were able to find some great agreements across Democratic sides and Republican sides and between employers and educators. Everyone sort of agreed that this type of approach was extremely necessary to both fill what was called at the time, you know, the skills gap, but also expand equity and so, you know, I did that work in Washington, got a little bit tired, as you may imagine. My, you know, my, my heart goes out to all the folks still doing this work. It's really amazing in Washington. But wanted to kind of dig deeper into the broader ecosystem. And as you were saying, really understand all of the different players and their roles and their unique levers for driving economic mobility. So I was fortunate to work at Jobs for the Future and now at The Project on Workforce. I'm thrilled to sit at the intersection of all of these players and try to make research accessible. So often I feel like research is on one side and practitioners are kind of on the other, and so it's important to ground the practice conversation in the evidence. And really, our mission is to build better pathways to economic mobility for workers and learners who haven't been served well by our systems in the past, and so we advance research on, you know, education and workforce transitions. We focus on the role of community colleges and regional economic development, the, I would say, role of career navigation supportsin economic advancement and workforce policy and education policy about the state and federal levels. Julian Alssid: So Kerry, so you do indeed sit in the in the middle of it all, and which is, which is great, and your research coming out of the center has been out of the project has been quite, quite amazing. As we seek to remain kind of current on the, you know, on the future of work and learning, what are some of the trends you're seeing, and tell us about some of your most research and related findings. Kerry McKittrick: I think that's a great question, because things are shifting pretty rapidly beneath our feet. And, you know, it's, it's a complex, complicated time to be doing this work. I think one of the things we're focused on at the project is really shifting workforce policy at the state level. And you know, we recently released a report focused on the role of governors in shaping workforce development systems, and we focused on governors because they have a unique position, both under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act from the federal level, as well as over the states agencies which we know workforce touches everything from education systems to economic development systems to child care and transportation, all of these issues are really interconnected, and governors have a unique ability to bridge those gaps, and so we wanted to understand, because there is a lack of research on this topic and on what states are doing at the workforce level. Wanted to understand what governors were focused on, what were their priorities, what are some of their strategies and processes that they're deploying as they try to address low labor force participation. And I call that out, because when we were interviewing governor's workforce advisors to do this research, 60% discussed low labor force participation as a key driving factor that was contributing to their workforce development strategy. And so I can go a little bit deeper, but I'll highlight five trends that we saw at the state level. The first is that organizational structures are shifting across states. So we're seeing, in a lot of cases, agencies being merged, whether that's education and workforce agencies or workforce and economic development, we're seeing new stakeholder driven engagement, stakeholder driven approaches to WIOA planning. So we asked about, you know, some of the Workforce Opportunity Act, I think the listeners know we owe is the acronym for that. But in many cases, you know, these are resource intensive processes, but states are really engaging with stakeholders and understanding both, both with employers, with industry associations, to really understand the challenges that they're facing. And then the third piece was this dual customer approach to workforce development, so serving both employers and individuals, both job seekers and job holders. And so I think you know, balancing that, that support between quality jobs and job demand, is something that came up in our interview, 75% of folks mentioned this is the tension they were addressing. And then the last two trends are really trying to address some of the challenges with WIOA funding, federal funding in general, coming up with creative approaches, using governor's reserve funds in innovative ways. And then the last is, you know, really investing in targeted training towards youth, towards underrepresented populations, like justice involved folks, and investing in wraparound supports. So 60% of the folks we talked to mentioned childcare as a really important component of a workforce development strategy, particularly in the wake of COVID, folks, we're seeing, you know, so many caregivers leaving the workforce. And right now, the challenge in many states is how to bring people back, and how to adopt this sort of whole of life, whole of government perspective, to workforce development. Julian Alssid: So that's, that's a lot. It's a very, very you're what you're seeing. So it's very comprehensive, very systemic. It's, it's, it's great to know that states are moving in these directions. Are there priorities that are standing out among the kind of array of shifts you're seeing that cut across states, yeah. Kerry McKittrick: Yeah, that's a great point. I would say the industry partnerships really focusing on key sectors at the time that we were doing these interviews, which was during 2024 from April through December, folks were really focused on clean energy. They were focused on semiconductor manufacturing. A lot of these industries that actually were being targeted by the Biden administration for industrial policy. So we're seeing that states are really investing in industry as partners, in some cases, providing incentives for folks to hire underserved populations. In other cases, building, you know, kind of customized training programs. In other cases, this is a extremely, I think, promising practice, providing business navigators, so a point of contact for a business to help navigate the workforce system, which is not easy to do. So I think there are a lot of exciting, promising practices out there, and focusing on this drill customer approach is certainly something we're seeing become more of a trend. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, that makes so much sense. I'm wondering. Kerry, going back to one of the first things you said around the priorities you had mentioned, or the five trends, rather, you had mentioned agencies that are merging. And I was just curious to hear a little bit more about that. What are some of you know, kind of, what are you seeing merge, and what are the reasons for it, for those mergers to be occurring? Kerry McKittrick: So in some states, there's been efforts to merge education departments and workforce development departments. And in part, this makes it slightly easier to braid funding. So there are a lot of, you know, obstacles to braiding Perkins or education funding and workforce funding. But because workforce funds are so low, and we could have an hours on conversation about that, there's, you know, really a need to kind of be creative and berating funds. So that's kind of one piece. The other reason we saw was trying to build workforce pipelines that start at the youth level. So starting in K-12, with career and technical education, moving through community colleges up to workforce and community colleges starting to serve a real kind of integral role as upskilling institutions for their communities. So an effort to build these pipelines, one in four of the states we talked to mentioned youth apprenticeships as a priority. So merging these agencies helps folks to really improve the coordination across the board. And then I would say the other piece, the other emerging that we were seeing was, and this wasn't across the board, right? This was just, you know, several states was economic development or commerce with workforce, and this allowed for more business services to be integrated with workforce services, and a few of those that I just mentioned, but we're seeing, you know, one of the trends that I've observed is really the use of workforce policy as business engagement policy. Because businesses, you know, it's, it's far more than just, perhaps the tax incentive for moving to a specific area. It's really incentivizing workforce support and workforce investment, because this is what businesses need to and it's also helping states grow. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, well, and it's interesting to think, you know, to kind of hear these are the different ways that really, these different players are almost de siloing their efforts, right? Like, like you're saying about building that pipeline, what does it look like to build a an education and economic development pipeline, kind of like, K on up, right? Like, let's, let's start at the very beginning, and and all work together, kind of throughout and across these systems. So that's that's exciting to to hear you're seeing as, like, kind of an emerging trend in this space. Kerry McKittrick: Exactly. And I think another thing I'd add to that is career exploration becoming a bigger trend, especially at the youth level, and understanding that, you know, many people might not know what a career in semiconductor manufacturing is, I think I still don't. So for young people you know, to really have the opportunity to explore, to figure out, you know, this is something that could leverage my talents. This could be something I want to do. Is an effective and kind of exciting way to go, I would say, you know, one of the other things I would add around this career navigation and career support piece is the need for more career coaches. So in addition to the child's care, the child care trend, half of states mentioned career navigation or career coaching as a priority, both at the youth level but also at the adult level. But there's an acknowledgement that there's a massive shortage of coaches, and then the funding for for these support services is also pretty low. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah. I mean, I think we've seen in our work, like, it's almost like, there are all these new there's there's new industry, sub-industries within industries, there are new jobs that it's like, what are these jobs? Right? Like you hear it, but then it's actually like, what do you. Do day-to-day. It seems, as you're saying, it just feels like there's so much work to be done around like further defining these new and emerging roles that you know maybe haven't been around that long, or have experienced really significant shifts in recent years. Julian Alssid: So it sounds like it's kind of you're seeing different flavors or different accommodations around the country, and the way governors are tackling this and and I'm interested you're one of the things we've seen in the past with with some of the reforms you know, that involve collaboration among education, workforce and economic development actors, is that they kind of come and go with leaders and administrations. So what do you see states doing to kind of bake this work? You talked about some, you know, merging of agencies and that sort of thing. But even on, like, the highest sort of coordination level, like how who's who's leading this work for states. Kerry McKittrick: In part, because, you know, we did see some of the merging of agencies as a key lever that was implemented with new administrations. So it was something that governors could do right away. I think, you know, we did hear in our interviews that different transitions across administrations was difficult, particularly given, you know, usual funding silos. But you know, one thing that I think is interesting, one of the things we drilled down on was the use of Governor's reserve funds. So these are the governor set aside funds under the Workforce, Innovation Opportunity Act, and in some cases, so this, you know, is something from year to year that that could change. You know, states have their plans, but governors ideally have some flexibility and some discretion over where these funds go. In some cases, you know, folks actually said, Oh, well, it's been decided by the administration before us. It's it's hard for us to use this as a priority. In other cases, you know, it was used to backfill administration costs. But what I want to highlight here, which I think is interesting is that there was a case in there are certain cases in which people are using these funds to test ideas that are then that that, once they prove the efficacy, can then be signed into law and funded at the state levels. So I want to, and I think that's a really interesting way of continuing it post, you know, post a certain administration. So an example of this is Washington state. So the governor launched an initiative called economic security for all, which provided, using the governor's reserve funds, which provided wraparound supports and financial assistance for folks just above the WIOA threshold, income threshold. It did that for four years. Studied it found massive wage gains and had huge success. And because of that, the state signed it into law and added state appropriations to fund it. So this was able to kind of continue past the administration, which I think is a really promising use for those funds when they're available. I mean, again, you know, the small funding levels continue to be a challenge, especially for small states, who still have to maintain the data systems right, who still have to administer a lot of these, you know, these practices, but don't have as much funding as a larger state does, just based on the formula. Kaitlin LeMoine: So building on that, that last comment, certainly, you know this, the small dollars, I guess we would say, is maybe one of the challenges here, but based on on, you know, your research and findings, what do you see as some of the more the other challenges to address that states are addressing or working to address around the effective use of WIOA dollars and other workforce funding dollars as well. Kerry McKittrick: Yeah, I think, you know, lack of good data and information is a real challenge. Folks are, you know, investing in data systems, there's a great you know, data, quality data, workforce quality fund through workforce innovation, and many states are investing in state longitudinal data systems. So there's progress there, but this is still a place where we could use a lot of investment and a lot of improvement. We've done some analysis of state WIOA websites, this was a few years ago, and found that many of them, the most of them, didn't have clear outcomes data on earnings or completion rate or employment after a training program. So not only does this, you know, harm an individual who's trying to use WIOA services to upskill, but it also is makes it difficult for states that are trying to direct resources or allocate resources strategically. So I think we need a lot more investment in data systems so we can understand what works and provide information for, you know, job seekers, so they can make the decisions that are right for them. Julian Alssid: So Kerry, you know, I know you're you say you're a regular listener, and we do appreciate that. And as...
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Dana Stephenson & Dave Savory: Scaling Experiential Learning
04/15/2025
Dana Stephenson & Dave Savory: Scaling Experiential Learning
Dana Stephenson and Dave Savory, co-founders of Riipen, discuss their journey creating a platform that connects students with project-based experiential learning opportunities. The conversation explores how work-integrated learning can bridge the gap between education and employment through flexible experiences that complement traditional internship models and help students gain valuable experience and transition more successfully into the workforce. Stephenson and Savory share insights on the evolution of experiential learning from limited co-op programs to a more accessible continuum of opportunities that help overcome barriers for both students and employers. The discussion also examines emerging trends, including the growth of dedicated experiential learning roles at institutions and development of regional learning ecosystems. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Julian Alssid: Kaitlin, it feels like every day we're hearing more about the challenges facing new college graduates entering the workforce. Kaitlin LeMoine: It's true. Julian, some hiring managers say recent grads are unprepared for the world of work, and employers are increasingly seeking candidates with work experience, even for entry level positions. It's a pretty tough landscape to navigate out there Julian Alssid: Yeah, and that's where work based learning becomes so critical. More and more jobs require experience so so we have to build experiential learning into learners academic programs, but developing effective experiential learning programs at scale can be incredibly challenging for both employers and educators Kaitlin LeMoine: Which is why we're so excited to have Dana Stephenson and Dave Savory of Riipen with us today. Ripen is tackling this issue head on by providing a work integrated learning platform and ecosystem. Julian Alssid: Dana is Riipen’s, Co founder and CEO, and he launched Riipen with a vision to end underemployment by ensuring every learner can access authentic, project based experiential learning opportunities. And Dave is Riipens, co founder and VP of experiential learning, with over 15 years of experience and entrepreneurship and business development. He brings us to this important work. Kaitlin LeMoine: Dana and Dave, welcome to Work Forces. We're looking forward to learning more about how Riipen is, making work based learning accessible at scale. Dana Stephenson: Thanks, Kaitlin, thanks, Julian, great to be here. So as we dive in today, can you please tell us more about your respective backgrounds and your current roles at Riipen, and from there, we'd love to hear more about the problems that you're looking to address through Riipen. Dave Savory: Sure. Yeah, thanks great to be here. Thanks for having us on. My name is Dave Savory. I'm one of the co founders of Riipen, and lead our experiential learning team. Really, in my day to day role, I focus on working really deeply with partners across a pretty diverse range of industries, in higher ed workforce, intermediary groups, government as well as funding partners. So really thinking through and excited to invest in really new models that can remove barriers and create more access to experiential learning programs, and so excited to share a little bit of that work today. Dana Stephenson: Yeah, Dana Stevenson, Co founder and CEO of Riipen. We're building the world's fastest growing and largest work-based learning marketplace, connecting to students to companies through short term skills specific projects where students get experienced professional connections and find the jobs they love and employers gain fresh insights from the next generation of leaders and decision-makers and build and diversify their talent pipeline for upcoming roles in their in their organization. And we were an incredibly mission driven company. And I think, you know, the mission for us is really all about entering under employment globally. It's an exciting story of sort of where that came actually. The story really, really kicks off where Dave and I met back in business school, back in back to 2012. Dave Savory: Yeah, we actually, well, we actually met in 2010 very serendipitously. We were in an orientation of our business school program at University of Victoria, we randomly sat next to each other and and instantly had a lot of mutual kind of values and alignments. And the following year, we actually had a course together where a faculty member came in and kind of ripped up the Harvard Business Review case and and brought in a CEO of a local mid sized company in the Victoria area, and basically said, hey, everyone this, instead of doing a case of a textbook, everyone's going to break up into groups and we're going to do a real project for credit on this company's kind of strategic crossroads that they were, that they were at, and Dana and I were in the same group, and we had quite a bit of work experience before entering our undergrad experience, and we just thought this was amazing in terms of, like, how to better engage with the learning and really apply the learning. And we had the CEO came in with a few team members. They presented their organization. We had a few kind of check in meetings with them throughout the semester, and at the end of the semester, the team came back, and they kind of did a Shark Tank kind of experience for every group, presenting their recommendations. And we just came out of that experience with just like so much more enthusiasm around like, Hey, why can't more of our experience, our courses that we're doing, who all that all have relevant kind of real world applied projects that are built into them. Why can't most of why can't more of them be with real employers that are going to help us build our network, develop our skills, grow our portfolio and our resume of experience, and that was really kind of our light bulb moment for why we started to go down the path of building record. Julian Alssid: Yeah, that's so cool. So Dana, how has the experiential learning landscape evolved since you started? Dana Stephenson: Right? A ton. Dave's, you know, the story we just described takes us back to 2010, 2012 we were part of the University of Victoria. So Riipens, a Canadian company born out of the University of Victoria as a student project for students. But one of the main reasons why we focused on on this project-based experience model is that in Canada, maybe people audience may or may not know. But in Canada, Northeastern, the co op model that Northeastern and Drexel and universities in Cincinnati and the US are so well known for it among others. In Canada, Co Op is huge. Almost every student, every institution offers a Co Op program, highly sought after, really well funded, really one of the most amazing experiences that we've had. So when, when we first got into this space in Canada, experiential learning, work, integrated learning, was really all about the co op model, but in the programs that we're offering Co Op, by no surprise, just like we're seeing in the US right now, I think Northeastern is now harder to get into than Dartmouth, given some of the stats that we're seeing, unsurprisingly, in Canada, the programs that we're offering Co Op were highly sought after getting a lot a lot of a lot of enrollment. The challenge is, at the time 2 million students across Canada, only about 200,000 students were getting access to a co op, so a huge supply and demand problem. And we started thinking to ourselves that there's got to be really a better way. There's got to be a more flexible approach to help reach students earlier on and throughout their education pathway. Dave mentioned we had a lot of experience when we got into this, when we were early on going through our education pathway. So we had no problem getting our Co Op, but we were shocked to find out how many students were in their their third year and had no work experience. So I think where we see things evolve is that traditionally, when people think about work based learning in the higher ed context. They've been thinking about the more traditional Co Op model. They've been thinking about the more traditional internship model. But the evolution is now what we're really excited about is that more folks are really starting to see this on a full continuum. Learners have all faced different barriers. They might be in different geographic locations. They might have other jobs that might have to hold on, hold on to to help pay for their higher education degree or program, they might have loved ones that are taken care of, a whole bunch of different barriers. And so the beauty of having an entire continuum is you can meet the students where they are. We can have a whole bunch of different types of approaches, going from lower intensity, shorter duration opportunities that can fit within a course or fit in a co-curricular setting, all the way up to higher intensity, longer duration experiences like a full blown internship, Co Op or apprenticeship and everything in between. And that's part of the, probably one of the most exciting evolutions that we've been seeing over the last little bit. Dave Savory: Yeah, and I just add to that, it's been interesting to kind of see just the evolution and the nature of how a lot of these experiences, like when we first started, a lot of the experiences that we were supporting, of course, we're an online platform, but a lot of the the educators and the employers that we are working with were doing in person kind of collaborations. And then obviously, as the as the pandemic happened, there was a massive push to remote and virtual collaborations between employers and students, which obviously has amazing benefits in terms of breaking down barriers for learners who are not in parts of the country that have access to a lot of employment or industry opportunities. And now we're kind of seeing a bit of a push back towards some sort of hybrid model where we're very focused on, how do we how do we take the best from the remote kind of virtual model, but then how do we actually layer in kind of a local or regional ecosystem element to it, so that learners are actually getting experiences with organizations that are relevantly close to them. And so we're seeing a really nice, just kind of trend of how some of these regional and and statewide ecosystems are starting to blossom. Kaitlin LeMoine: So you've presented kind of all the it sounds like there's a full suite and range of offerings that you try to provide to both, I would imagine, kind of, it's kind of a three sided marketplace, right? So, I guess for employers, institutions and learners, you're looking to provide kind of a range of opportunities, work based, learning opportunities, or positions or projects. How do you go about doing that? Like, can we get a little bit into the nuts and bolts of like, of, you know, we're thinking about thesecurrent trends. How is your How are you building your company in response to those trends? Dana Stephenson: I will say one point of clarification. So we do offer a whole suite, but we're very vertically deep on the project based experience. And what's excited with the project based experience is that it can be 10 hours long completed over two weeks. It can be individual or group, or it can be 250 hours long can be completed over two semesters and everything in between. And that's really what gives it the flexibility, and really ensures that you can have these high quality experiences where students are focused on developing skills rather than some of the experiences that you do sometimes see out there. We all know that some internships are better than others, and you can really ensure that you're focusing on career relevant skills as part of that project and solving a real business challenge in your community or around the world. So we don't do traditional internships. We don't do traditional Co Op programs, just to be clear on that. But what's really exciting is most of our partners, actually, the vast majority of our partners, realize that the fastest way left in a world of really challenging supply and demand in the internship and Co Op space. One of the fastest ways to grow your internship and Co Op supply is to actually do more project based experiences that attracts more employers. They engage as a stepping stone. They convert those into Co Op and internship employers. And of course, it prepares your students to go land those so we're extremely complimentary, but we are very much focused on the on the project based. So how do we do that? We've got an entire you name it. We really are a marketplace on one side of the marketplace. We attract employers. We work with our partners to help them activate their networks of alumni, activate their networks of even Co Op and internship employers who want to, who want a wider variety and wider spectrum of things that they can do to engage students. We have our own channel partners with business associations and chambers and all sorts of organizations where we have a one to many approach to reach employers. And then, of course, we do our own outreach. We provide a platform that just makes it really easy for companies to come on and start to input all their ideas, all their challenges, all the goals that they're trying to achieve. And it starts to pump out a whole bunch of different project ideas that they can put into our ecosystem and make those available to our academic institutions. So typically, we've got anywhere from 3000 to 5000 live projects in the marketplace waiting to be matched to an educator to provide to their students at any given time. We completely oversubscribed that side. So we've actually flipped the supply and demand challenge, and the employers are now, rather than students competing for jobs in this marketplace, companies compete to work with students. The other side of it is we have our partner institutions, and they come on and it's really all the whole system here is very educator driven, so the educators get to be learned very early on. That if we can put the educators in the driver's seat and allow them to create the experience that aligns with their learning objectives, and then we can use the platform to help them communicate in that experience in a way that helps the employers and the educators be speaking the same language. Then we can make these really meaningful matches and get these projects that align with the business and talent needs but also align with the learning sections of the program embedded directly to the curriculum. So we that's sort of like half the battle right there. We just really build this marketplace offer the opportunities for these to connect at the right project, the right educator for the right students at the right time. And that helps with you know, the larger we grow, the more we scale up, the easier that becomes, the more valuable that becomes for everyone who's participating in our in our in our network. And then we have a whole suite of tools. So once you actually launch these project based experiences. We've learned from our partners that, how do I manage my students? How do I help make sure that my students are communicating well to the employers, having meaningful conversations? How do I track them through? How do I survey them before, during and after? How do I create opportunities for reflection on the skills that they're developing as part of these projects? All of that is built into the platform so that our partners can manage it. They can track it, they can measure it, and they can really see how much these interventions, these project based experiences, are improving students, retention, students, improving students, student success, student completion rates, and, of course, ultimately, student employment outcomes. Dave Savory: Just build on that by really focusing on the project based model, we're really tapping into a pool of employers, primarily small and medium sized employers that aren't traditionally engaging in more formal kind of apprenticeships or internship or Co Op model, because they are a big lift and they're quite resource intensive for smaller organizations to to really support well. And so by working with employers who are kind of thinking through more, smaller, flexible, project based experiences, we're able to to engage an audience that isn't participating in some of those traditional models. And that's really helped us to grow that side of the ecosystem very well. Julian Alssid: It's quite an undertaking. I mean, it sounds like there's a lot of moving parts. And I'm interested to hear a little bit about I'm interested to hear more about how you actually build this. Dave, is this like, Do you have a team of folks who are developing these projects? How do you, you know, what's the level of involvement on the part of the employers and the other partners? And then I really want to hear about challenges. What keeps you guys up at night? Dave Savory: Well, I mean, we do have a great team on both sides of the ecosystem, supporting educators and our academic partners, as well as our foyer partners. And on the employer side, we're really focusing on, we almost recruit and engage employers in a just in time, way based on kind of the needs and demands that we're seeing from our educators and our academic partners. We and we've learned over time that when they actually see a tangible opportunity at a institution that they recognize and it's a call to action of a real program that's accepting applications that helps small, medium sized businesses, any any business really be like, yes, I want to do that. Or maybe that's not a good fit, but I want to post my project into the ecosystem. And so the way matchmaking happens is it goes both ways, so employers are able to apply to an educators program, and vice versa. A lot of great a lot of our educators are actually really good at going into the employer side of the ecosystem, searching for projects that are aligned with their courses, and actually reaching out and being proactive to employers. And so we see success kind of both ways. We've also really been investing and leveraging AI in the Riipen system to just remove friction points for just saving time and helping employers, obviously, creating content and thinking of project ideas is, is it can be a challenge. How do I write a project that's a really good fit for for an educator, that would be a good project for their class? And we've always had really great templates built out, but really, in the last year and a half, two years, we've built into the platform the ability for employers to go in and just type out ideas that they're interested in doing and use our project AI tools to create a project scope that's really well defined and is designed in a way that can be embedded into into a course. And then we have kind of a an assessment of when they're looking to apply to courses, if their project is a good fit, green, yellow or red, and if it's if it's a great fit, that really increases the match rates, but it also helps employers think through, okay, well, what do I need to do to add into this project, or change the project scope to make sure it is aligned with what an educator, what an academic partner, is looking for? One of the one of the major...
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Matt Sigelman: Navigating the Skills Landscape of the Future
03/31/2025
Matt Sigelman: Navigating the Skills Landscape of the Future
Matt Sigelman, President of the Burning Glass Institute, discusses the crucial role of real-time labor market data in guiding workforce development and helping stakeholders navigate the evolving skills landscape. Sigelman highlights the rapid evolution of skills, noting the decreasing 'half-life' of skills and the growing importance of lifelong learning. The episode explores how workforce systems can adapt to these changes, including the need for better training infrastructure and a focus on career progression. Sigelman also examines the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the future of work and the importance of complementing AI with human skills to ensure a more equitable and prosperous future. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. So Julian, for years, we've been helping clients navigate the messy intersection of work and learning, and using and interpreting labor market data has been essential to help inform and guide the direction and decision making of various stakeholders, ranging from business and industry to higher ed and training providers. Julian Alssid: It's true Kaitlin, but early on, data tools were limited government data lags, which made it hard to keep up with pace of change, and the tools available were also challenging to use or interpret, which which made it difficult to adopt the use of this data across whole teams and organizations. Often, data analysis was housed under, you know, one person, or in a small analytics shop, which further like limited ongoing use by the individuals charged with educating and training and hiring. And to compound this all further, students and workers were even further removed from labor market data and related trends. Kaitlin LeMoine: And that's why the work of our guest today is so critical. Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, has dedicated his career to unlocking new avenues for mobility, opportunity and equity through skills. He and his team created the field of real time labor market data, a breakthrough innovation which has transformed how we understand and navigate the world of work. Julian Alssid: Matt's work has cracked the code of an increasingly dynamic labor market tracking demand for 10s of 1000s of skills across 30 countries before before launching the Burning Glass Institute, he was CEO and then Chairman of Lightcast for over 20 years, and worked at McKinsey & Company and Capital One. Matt also currently serves as a senior advisor at the Harvard Project on the workforce, and is founder of the elementary school mainline classical Academy. Is it? He writes widely on the job market, and it's consulted frequently by public officials and the global media. Kaitlin LeMoine: Matt, welcome to Work Forces. We're so excited to have you with us today. Matt Sigelman: It's great to be together. Thanks so much for having me. Kaitlin LeMoine: Great. Well, so as we jump into the conversation today, can you please tell us a bit about your background and your current role at the Burning Glass Institute. Matt Sigelman: As you pointed out, I spent 20 years before starting the Burning Glass Institute, building what's now come to be called Lightcast. What a lot of people don't realize is that, like cast started not as a data company, but as a job matching company. We built a engine for first being able to read people's resumes, and then to be able to what they call resume parsing, and then to be able to match them to jobs. And it was a successful little business and we wound up doing a lot of work in state and local workforce systems, providing them the the matching engines that were used to be able to support clients and connecting them with work. And this was around kind of the start of the Great Recession, when suddenly a lot of workforce agencies found themselves inundated with people, many of whom weren't traditional kinds of workforce system customers. People who are professionals or from a wide array of occupations and, you know, we had this great engine and, and what we realized, though, is that it could only work well if it could connect people with jobs. There had to be jobs for them to be capable, to be connected to and what, of course, your listeners who work in workforce systems know is that employers haven't always been so forthcoming in connecting and putting their jobs in front of workforce systems. And so what we essentially had was this Ferrari engine flight plucked down inside of a Yugo. Right, you know, it searched across the 100 jobs that happened to be listed on, on what effectively was an online bulletin board in, you know, in a workforce center. And so what occurred to us is that we were solving the wrong problem. We were solving a one on one matching problem. That is to say, how do I match Matt with a specific job? But so much of the problem that we have in workforce development, economic development, in policy, but also in the world, of education and employers? Well, is a planning problem. It's not a one on one matching. It's a problem. It's it's a how do it's a it's a population genetics problem, right? Like, how do you connect this group of people with these kinds of jobs? Because that's when you can start to plan. And so we started scratching our heads and said, Why is that not happening? And what we realized is the same reason why our matching engine was constrained. The fact that there weren't a lot of jobs in one place was the same reason that a lot of that planning wasn't happening. And so we said, Well, gee, this is this is strange right now. Pretty much most job postings. And I think this was largely true, then it's certainly a lot more true 17 years later today, that pretty much most job postings across whether you're talking about very entry level jobs, whether you're talking about highly skilled professional jobs, are posted online. And so instead of having to rely on employers to come to you, you could actually go and just scrape their jobs. And so we we built a whole system of spiders to crawl the web and bring back what ultimately became millions of job postings every day. But our ambition, again, was, was not so much to create a bigger database for a matching service. Our ambition really quickly became to be able to say, what do those jobs say? How can they help us plan more effectively, so that we're not leaving people, leaving training, leaving policy at the mercy of the spot market, where it's like, okay, what jobs happen to be available today? But instead to be able to think ahead and say, Hey, what's the training that we're gonna need to be what are the programs that we're gonna need to invest in? So, what we did is we started to develop all these coding engines to be able to make sense and interpret, make sense of and interpret all the jobs that we're bringing back. And that was sort of the birth of what people have come to refer to as the real time labor market industry. And it's, it's evolved greatly since then, and I'm proud of the work that Lightcast and others are doing, to continue to advance those data. I left that three years ago, and I left it because as powerful as the data are, I came to realize that a lot of what's missing is the ability, is, the trend is, is the translation and transformation layers? How do we use these data to affect fundamental transformations? And a lot of that really isn't necessarily about the data themselves. It's not about software, but it's about working together with stakeholders in the field and solving things very experimentally, because a lot of these big problems, the big, thorny problems that we're all trying to solve, well, inherently, they haven't been solved yet. So the Institute is a fully independent nonprofit data laboratory to advance research and practice at the intersection of the of the future of work and the future of learning, where our goal is to undertake the kinds of experiments that advance economic mobility, that build community prosperity and that ensure that we're, we're seeing better outcomes for workers and learners. Julian Alssid: It's great Matt to hear you tell the story, and you know kind of I've, I've known you and really followed you through this, most all of this process, and I'm glad that you're now at the intersection of work and learning and trying to help solve these, these thorny problems. What? What are some of the trends that you're seeing now? And you know, at that intersection and in particular areas of research that you're really excited about and are kind of looking to further unpack. Matt Sigelman: So when I think about the intersection of work and learning, what's shaping the imperative there and shaping the greatest sets of transformations is the level of dynamism and skills. We're used to thinking about a labor market that's denominated by jobs and a lot of the prognostication that we see is about jobs going away, new jobs being born. What we see instead is that the greatest changes are happening at the layer of skills. What are the skills that it takes to land a job? What are the skills that get accrued within a job, and what's the dynamism that's reshaping those skills that's really important, because the skills affect not only what it takes to get a job, but they affect how you get your next job. You think about a job transition, you're essentially taking the skills that you just learned, and you're moving from job to job. And what we're seeing is a tremendous rate of skill change. People often talk about a half life of skills. Listeners won't be surprised to hear that that half life is quickening and quickening. Well, quickly, we did some work a few years ago with our colleagues at BCG, where we found that the average job has seen 37% of its skills replaced in just the prior five years, and that was before generative AI. So here's the thing about it, though, when we think about that pace of skill change, we really sort of assume it's about technology change, and there's certainly no small amount of that, but the greater set of changes are actually about skills blending from across domains. Think about a field like marketing. You know, we all know people in marketing, they tend to be very nice people because they went into marketing because they know how to talk to people well. So you have right brain people, and all of a sudden marketing is becoming a data driven sport. So you have right brain people who need to be able to use left brain skills, not hard to find marketing people, but try finding a marketing person with SQL skills, and the job becomes much harder to fill. It comes, you know, starts to command big salary premiums. So we're seeing that kind of phenomenon around the market. Here's why I talk about that as as the key imperative shaping the intersection of work and learning, because what it says is that a educational model of once and done learning. You go to high school, maybe you go to college, and then you sort of never look back and go a step into your career. A model like that that was already challenged is increasingly broken or perhaps risible at minimum. I think you could say it's inadequate. Maybe that was a more polite way of saying it so. What it says is that there's 165 million US workers in the workforce, and the vast majority of them are in a position where they need to be able to acquire new skills, and they need to be able to acquire new skills on the fly. And we need an infrastructure for that. The logical infrastructure that we have things like our workforce system is tremendously under invested. Think about the scope of Workforce Investment monies that actually get allocated towards skill training, talking about a few 100 million dollars out of a couple billion of total WIOA funds a year. You think about our community colleges, which are slightly better funded, but the vast majority of, or at least significant majority of community college enrollments right now are into we're called degree transfer programs and not to workforce training. And so we really are leaving people to navigate their transitions without much guidance and without the resources to acquire the learning that enables them to move up, that gives them a greater chance of making sure that each of those transition is an opportunity for greater economic mobility. The average US worker right now will see 12 career transitions over the course of her career, and each of those transitions is an opportunity to either move up or to stay put or perhaps even fall back. And right now, we are not helping people systematically to discover what are the skills that will help them move up? What are the skills that are in demand that will allow them to command a premium? What are the skills that will prepare them for the future? And even if we help them discover those skills, we don't provide them with an infrastructure to acquire them. So you know that says to me that there's a whole big space around around lifelong learning. It has implications for higher ed, because right now, higher ed has largely surrendered that space to online players, and I think there's a big opportunity for colleges and universities in a time that they're seeing enrollments thin. It also has implications for how we think about non degree credentials and what it takes to make them successful. Kaitlin LeMoine: I think that what you've said about kind of this moment of both the reality that the skills are changing very, very quickly, right? And what's needed as far as the half life of, kind of like, what's most up to date, as far as job relevant skills is shifting more and more quickly, kind of at the same moment as perhaps we're all needing to rethink, what does it look like to keep up to speed. I guess I'm wondering, like, who's whose job is this to figure this out, right? Because it feels like it's both on the it's, it maybe lives with the individual. It might live with employers. It certainly could live with higher ed and training institutions, but only if learners are going to them. So kind of, how do we think about, you know, how we all work to solve this challenge? It's a really, really big one that you're raising here. Matt Sigelman: So I'm so glad you raised this, this question. There's right now no shortage of dysfunction in the market. For the most part, what we have is a system in which the responsibility for navigation rests with individuals themselves, with individual workers and learners. And that's a problem because individual workers lack information, they lack counseling, and they lack liquidity, both financial liquidity and time liquidity. They lack the financial liquidity to be able to invest in training and the time liquidity to be able to have the time to do it when... Kaitlin LeMoine: Or even be aware that they need to do it right. Matt Sigelman: Exactly. And so if you sort of think about where there would be logic in this. There'd be a lot of logic in employers investing. There'd be a lot of logic in the public investing in this. But both are encumbered right now by issues of cost, time and risk. We've got employers who, whether logically or not, wind up getting obsessed with what economists call free rider problems, right? You know, I've got a workforce that's likely to turn over very quickly, and it's true that, you know, in a lot of roles, retention is historically low and and so you know, why should I, as an employer, invest in training somebody who's likely to be leaving now, there's, there's all sorts of good logic for why they should, but, but regardless, you can understand the perception of how it's hard to for an employer to get a return on investment when the time duration of their return is is likely to be so low. But it doesn't change the fact that employers, the ones who are in the best position to signal to their employer, to their employees, right? You know, you would want an employer to say, Hey, Matt, I'm struggling to fill these jobs up here, and I think you could fill them, I want to pay you more. Here's the learning that I want you to take on. Here's the training I'm going to invest in you to get. The public has significant stake in this as well as we think about, you know, kind of our modern Sputnik moments in our global contest for economic competitiveness, as we we try to navigate an increasingly fraught geopolitical environment, the ability to be able to have a highly skilled workforce working in the kind of sectors that we think are going to be most important means that we need to have the opportunities to invest. But here too, I think, you know, we're, we're struggling with issues of, of cost on the one side, of planning on the other, which is, which is a time question, how do we predict where those changes can be and what the sequence of those changes going to be? And so, as a result, what we have, and by the way, educators, likewise, are either asleep at the switch in the sense that they're not offering the kinds of programs that are oriented towards selling degrees. And they are also where they are trying to promote things. Are trying to promote their programs. They're self interested. Not surprisingly, I think here's where we can change this dysfunction. And been lucky to be collaborating with a group of of 30 people in in a project at Stanford right now being led by by Mitchell Stevens, where we're really trying to say, what would what the new economics of learning be, if you were trying to think about moving from an educated society where education happens at the start of a career to a learning society? Where learning happens throughout a career. I think you can imagine sets of structures that allow us to both reduce risk through more effective information sharing, through better signaling, but also to share risk. You can imagine financial structures, for example, where if employer invests in an employee and training employee and the employee leaves that the employer gets a tax credit, regardless of whether the employee is still at the firm, proportionate to the amount somebody's income rises, which, by the way, is something you could fund out of the greater tax revenues that you get when people are earning more. So there's structures that we could put in place that would allow us to reduce risk, having better Labor Market Information Systems, having better mechanisms for employers to share data on the training that they're investing into their workers. Having better assessments of credentials, are all mechanisms that we can put in place, and some of which, you know, we're trying to advance at the institute. Julian Alssid: I almost feel like we haven't even gotten to AI yet. So speaking of which, you know, as AI is sort of rapidly, you know, permeating all. How do you see, how do you see it impacting today and the future of work and learning, you know, short and long term, and, and, and, you know, and kind of the construct you're laying out for us. Matt Sigelman: So there's a couple of effects that we've been we've been studying one that I've been working on, together with, with Mike Fenlon, who was formerly the the Chief Human Resources Officer at PwC, and with Joe Fuller, professor at Harvard Business School, and a colleague on the Harvard Project on the Workforce. And what we've been looking at is how AI is going to reshape learning curves. It turns out, what we found from...
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Jean Eddy: Impacts of Career Exploration on K-12 Learners
03/18/2025
Jean Eddy: Impacts of Career Exploration on K-12 Learners
Jean Eddy, President & CEO of American Student Assistance (ASA), discusses how middle and high school students can develop career awareness and gain meaningful workplace experiences before college. Drawing on research showing middle school as the optimal window for career exploration, Eddy details ASA's digital platform approach, which reaches 15 million students through engaging, mobile-based tools that help them discover interests and connect to potential career paths. She emphasizes the critical "testing and trying" phase where students need hands-on experiences, highlighting ASA's grant-making initiatives that fund intermediary organizations bridging gaps between schools and employers. The conversation explores scaling these efforts through policy engagement and community buy-in, with Eddy advocating for making career exploration an integral part of education rather than a disconnected add-on for teachers while offering practical collaboration strategies for all stakeholders to help students find paths that "make their hearts sing." Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. We've spent much of our time on this podcast exploring learning and career pathways, especially for college students and adults, and while those conversations are important, we also know that it helps learners when they begin a process of career exploration much earlier on in their academic journeys. By the time someone gets to college, it can often be too late for foundational career exploration. We need to help K-12 learners develop an awareness and curiosity of various career options, get them age appropriate experience and help them link their academic interests to the world of work. Julian Alssid: That's right, Kaitlin, and it's something we both know firsthand. We both started our careers in innovative high schools, where we each designed project based and experiential learning opportunities intentionally integrated with internships and real world experiences. We so, you know, we understand the complexities of this work, particularly figuring out the right level of exposure to workplace skills and experiences for young people, you know, how do we best help them explore, gain experience, build social capital and discover their likes and dislikes? Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes, it is about developing the skills and awareness learners need to navigate the world of work and thinking about practical implementation. It's about working with employers who can meaningfully support this process, and about providing educators with the time and creative space to make these integrated learning experiences happen. Julian Alssid: This is a complex topic to unpack, and that's why we're so pleased to have Jean Eddie with us today as President & CEO of American student assistance, or ASA, she's leading the charge in changing how kids learn about careers and prepare for their futures. Jean is an accomplished leader with over 30 years of experience in higher ed, and has held leadership positions at Rhode Island School of Design, Brandeis University, and Northeastern University. She's a nationally recognized speaker and subject matter expert, cited frequently in major publications and a contributor to forbes.com Jean is deeply committed to student success and is the author of crisis proofing today's learners, and co host of The One Question Podcast with Michael Horn, who was a recent guest on Work Forces. Jean, we're looking forward to discussing ASA's innovative approaches to career readiness for middle and high school students, and how you're reaching them in new and novel ways. Welcome to Work Forces. Jean Eddy: So happy to be here, looking forward to the conversation. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes, so are we Jean. It's such a pleasure to be with you today. So as we dive into today's conversation, can you please tell us more about your background and what led you to ASA? Jean Eddy: What is interesting is I met a colleague this morning for breakfast, quite early, and I worked with that person at one of the colleges that you mentioned. We were talking about the fact that we worked with a lot of young people who are on a college campus, and they really didn't know why they were there. And my colleague was basically saying that he oftentimes felt as though he was taking care of young people who were really not they couldn't find their own way. And I would have to say it reminded me of my own journey. I was in high school, and no one approached me about what was next. Never talked about it, never got prepared for it, etc. And if it weren't for the fact that I ended up, after leaving high school, going to a community college, I was lucky, you know, I met people who were interested in me and wanted to kind of show me some way or some path. Who knows where I'd be right now. But I guess, you know, I ended up in higher education because I was so taken with my own experience at a community college. And I worked in higher ed, as you said, for a number of years, but I worked with a lot of young people who really didn't know why they were in college, and I would say that some of them really should have taken another path, and instead, went on to college, spent an awful lot of money that they didn't need to spend, and then ended up with quite a bit of debt that they had to repay somehow, some way. So fast forward now to ASA. I became involved with ASA because ASA is a federal guarantor, and as a person who worked in higher ed I was on the board of ASA for a number of years. And why, why I was interested in ASA is because of the fact. They were really committed to helping young people. It was a very personal relationship, which with a lot of guarantors. It was not but at ASA, it was. And I stayed committed because I was so interested in how they interacted with students. When I was asked to become the CEO here, which was eight years ago now, we were talking about how we could think about working with young people before a problem arose. What we were doing was basically trying to put a band aid on something at the end of the day, rather than getting in front of the problem to see what we could do about that. So we did an awful lot of research and found out that the best time to really talk about careers was in middle school, and that seems kind of young, you know, sixth grade, seventh grade, but what we found was is that kids who are in that age bracket are really open to exploration. They aren't hardwired that they want to do this or they want to do that, and furthermore, their friends haven't made such a huge impact on them that they don't they were willing to go and find their own way. So we then did research about, how do we interact with these young people? What's the best way to do that? And we tried a number of things, but at the end of the day, what we found was we needed to kids meet kids where they are, and that's on a mobile device that's on their cell phone. So like it or not, 97% of the kids who are between 13 and 18 year old, 18 years old, have a cell phone. And so we created mobile, friendly programs that would allow young people to, first off, go out and have fun. Because to me, learning is all about fun. Let's start with that. It doesn't need to be something that's imposed and sometimes treacherous. It's rather what can be fun. So the first thing we developed was something that allowed a young person to have fun, but to basically do puzzles and games, which actually came up with kind of an indicator of things that somebody was good at, but moreover what they liked to do. And then we showed them all kinds of ways to be able to get to that in a successful career. And it's not to say at someone who's in the sixth or seventh grade is saying I'm going to be an X, but rather, I'm interested in these things. And let's see all the possibilities for if you're interested in this, what is possible. And then we went on to build more programs that allowed kids to test and try, which is really key here, testing and trying, having them figure out, maybe I like this, but is there some aspect of it that I really can't do or I don't want to do? And so when we develop these programs, testing and trying, really came in in high school, and the reason for that is by the time students leave high school. We want them to have a plan. And so it's not that again, that they have a road that's absolutely mapped out, but rather, this is the this is the path I can take to see what might come of this, to see what might come with what I love to do with what I'm good at. And can I be able to relate this to that job, that career, that pathway? Julian Alssid: Great to hear the bit about your journey and and the genesis of ASA. So. So now, what are the Could you give us an overview where you are now at ASA with the types of initiatives that you're focused on, and what are the key problems that you know you're looking to, the key challenges or problems you're looking to solve. Jean Eddy: So, you know, the initiatives that we are working on currently, you know, I mentioned the digital we have four digital programs which really bring students from the discovery phase right on through the testing and trying, you know, getting a mentor, getting an apprenticeship, understanding how to be able to get ready for to dress for success, all those kinds of things. There are many, many things kids can do there. We have about 15 million kids on our platforms at any given time. They're between 13 and 18 years old. But in addition to that, we also work with schools, school districts and states who are interested in infusing this kind of a career exploration into their into their curriculum. The biggest one I always talk about is Delaware. Delaware is the nice sized state you can get your arms around it. So we worked with a couple of other funders to basically put career exploration into middle schools in Delaware, so every kid in Delaware has an opportunity to do this kind of career exploration. But I think the biggest challenge we have is the next step is the testing and trying. Because I would have to say, I. So we need employers to be able to help us do that. But any employer will tell you, and I've talked with many, they don't have the infrastructure to be able to provide that, and sometimes they are. They are quite hesitant to get into this, because, again, they don't have the staff, they don't have the know how, and they cannot figure out how to connect with the school district with a system. So a lot of our initiatives are now working with intermediaries places who basically go in and they take care of the things that need to happen at the high school and things that need to happen with the employer, and we do a lot of funding in those respects. My favorite is the caps network. They are national, and they basically give they work with employers and they work with schools to be able to have kids have first hand experiences in how a career could actually map out in a given field. They are beyond impressive. I could talk about them all day, but there are many of them. There are also states who get involved in this, and I will pick on Rhode Island native Rhode Islander, we've worked with skills for Rhode Island for a number of years. They are great intermediaries in basically bringing employers and schools together to provide apprenticeships and internships for young people to test and try. So I think that that is, that is, I'm going to say next big Frontier, we need more opportunities to connect employers and schools in a way that makes sense, and it actually it works for everybody. Kaitlin LeMoine: That last point, you just ended on Jean right? I feel like that's where the rubber meets the road. And all of this work is like, how to make these, these relationships happen? What are you I know, you know you mentioned the intermediary work. What are some of the best practices, or like strategies that you know that are working well to bridge those gaps? Because I think that for so many you know whether, whether it's actually higher ed institutions, K 12 institutions, employers. It's about like, how do we bridge those worlds and in a scalable way? Jean Eddy: So, I think that there are a few things, getting the word out is incredibly important, thought leadership and getting people to understand or or be able to see the kinds of opportunities that are available. But moreover, the funding that is available. There are a lot of programs out there right now, and we participate in some of these funds, which basically back financially, back opportunities for employers and schools to be able to come together and do this kind of work. And one thing I didn't mention before is the amount of grant making we do, and the grant making we do has everything to do with those kinds of opportunities. Historically, we've given up between $10 and $20 million a year, and it is to fund those kind of opportunities where they have not existed before, or to grow networks that you know have started off but have not how to reach across the country, because what we're trying to do is impact kids everywhere. You know, not only in the places that I think, with the northeast, we have so many colleges and universities, we are so focused on kind of these connections, but there are parts of the country where that's not the case, and particularly in the middle of the country. You know, it's really up to us to do a better job in connecting those intermediaries who work in those places to provide opportunities for young people who otherwise are thinking, Okay, what do I do next? You know, what are my opportunities? And they're not as I would not say that there's not a rich as rich of an offering as there could be, because kids just don't know. Julian Alssid: So I get the scaling with, you know, your the digital stuff, and how that you know you've been able to reach so many young people directly, I guess my big question is, with the work, with the intermediaries, or the sort of the partnerships, how does that scale? And how do you ensure that it can live beyond the life of your grants? Like, how does this get baked in to what communities do, what educators do, what employers do, and then, how do you scale that? Jean Eddy: You know, we worked with the state of Massachusetts, and we funded a program that basically put pathways into high schools. It was one of Governor Baker's big initiatives and part of his legacy, I would have to say, the idea in doing some of these things. And we did it in Delaware as well. We did it in Rhode Island. As you start to fund these programs, you do it with the hope that you're working with policy makers who are going to encourage the state legislature to put it in the budget and have it move forward. And that has happened in every single one of these cases, I would have to say you have to have buy in, not only from the intermediary and the school and the employer, but you also need buy in with policy makers, because if they don't believe this. Yes, and they don't see, I'm going to say a road map for a state prospering. It's not going to go anyplace. But again, in the state of Massachusetts, we have an enormous shortage in the trades, construction, tech, skill trades, and we worked with the workforce council here to try and develop programs that would allow us to be able to, I'm going to say, start the pipeline for the jobs that we cannot fill and and that, I think, is really it's a problem that we have across the country. We have so many unfilled jobs right now, and I do believe that half the reason why we have that is because young people are not aware of those jobs, and we're not doing the best, the best work we could possibly do, in making sure they know it, but moreover, that they could try those things and find that they could fall in love with something that they didn't even know was existing. Julian Alssid: Interestingly, we have been working in Massachusetts on the very topic, actually, with the community college and focused on manufacturing. And it's incredible the opportunities that are going wanting because kids and their families know nothing about these roles and the paths associated. Jean Eddy: You know, just this morning, I was listening, I think it was on NPR, they were talking about the fact that there are wait lists for kids in technical high schools, and that they are trying to now impose a lottery system to let young people in, just that is such a telling update on on what is happening in this state. But moreover, in this country, we should be thinking about, how do we integrate the aspects of those vocational high schools into all of our high schools to give kids an opportunity. And I'm not saying that there aren't high schools who do that, because there are, but it usually requires either a principal or a super superintendent who has that drive and that feeling in their gut that this is what has to happen, and then they make it happen. We need more of that. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, and that combination of both of the leadership, and then, as you mentioned earlier, Gene, the financial backing as well, right to, like, especially for some of the more technical programs that require a lot of equipment and, like, lab space, right? I mean, like, the infrastructure required in some cases is is more significant than others. But like, that's another huge factor in this whole effort. One thing that I find really fascinating about the different digital solutions that ASA has built is it seems like it's a pretty low lift for schools to implement and for learners to engage with I'm curious, how do what's the split? I guess, that you see across like learners who engage with these tools on their own as individual users, versus who are introduced through a classroom like experience like, how do learners come to these materials? Maybe individually? How do they find that? Jean Eddy: So I would say, by and large, young people come to us directly. We have, obviously, connections with teachers, with superintendents, etc. And many will use our products as a way to have a hybrid experience. As far as career exploration is concerned, they are using it for that purpose. So they're basically saying, Go out to asa.org, look at this, look at that, etc. But by and large, most of it is coming from kids who come directly to us. And I think I when we first started talking, I talked about the fact that I wanted kids to have fun. So what we basically do, I'm going to say, we invade the time that young people are using their phones, which is on average, five hours a day, which is frightening to me, frankly. But we approach them and it's something that they can take it or leave it. So we go through Tiktok, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. We throw out these things. Invite kids to come in. They either do it or they don't. Most of the time, we find they do it. We have a high level of engagement, but it's got everything to do with that. They're seeing it as this is curious, this is fun, and then suddenly we're opening up another world to them, and then kids stay and so we have four platforms, and it's amazing to me that they keep going. And of course, again, it's all about fun. So I think that that is really the key to this, and what is really, really important, particularly with with young people in this, in this generation of young people, they want agency. They want...
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Scott Carlson & Ned Laff on Hacking College
03/04/2025
Scott Carlson & Ned Laff on Hacking College
Description Scott Carlson and Ned Laff, authors of "Hacking College," discuss how to craft a higher education experience that intentionally links student learning to future work and career success. They emphasize the necessity of a proactive and personalized approach to higher education, tapping into students' passions and hidden intellectualism. Carlson and Laff champion a field of study approach, empowering students to actively design their undergraduate degrees, unearth hidden job markets, and leverage faculty expertise. They underscore the significance of cultural and social capital, urging institutions to adapt and support this student-centric model. The conversation illuminates the ways that higher education administrators and faculty, and students themselves, can personalize the learning experience to ensure higher ed graduates are well-equipped to navigate diverse career opportunities. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. So Julian, I've noticed a real shift in our conversations lately, both with clients and on the podcast, we seem to be delving deeper into the complexities of the school-to-work transition, especially for young adults and for working adults. Julian Alssid: It's true. Kaitlin, and it really highlights the increasing complexity of that transition. The job market is constantly evolving, and it can be tough for students to figure out where they fit in, especially with so many opportunities hidden from public view. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a tall order for educators and institutions too. For example, faculty are being asked to wear many hats and skills like career advising can sometimes feel separate from their day to day roles and require new sets of tools and related training. Julian Alssid: Right? It's not just about helping students find a job, but about guiding them through a process of self discovery, exploration and network building and helping them understand their own interests and strengths and how those connect to real world opportunities. Kaitlin LeMoine: And that's where I think our guests today, Scott Carlson and Ned Laff, have some really valuable insights. They've literally written the book on this. It's called "Hacking College", and we're talking to them on the book's release date. Julian Alssid: Yes, and congratulations, guys. The book offers a framework for faculty and staff to help students take a more proactive and personalized approach to their college experience with a real focus on future careers and life goals. Kaitlin LeMoine: Though we'll ask Scott and Ned, to give their own background, Scott's a Senior Writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he's been writing about the trends shaping higher education for over 25 years. As his LinkedIn profile states, he writes about where education is headed, how it serves or doesn't serve students and the public, and how the sector can stay relevant and resilient. Julian Alssid: And Ned has over 35 years of experience in higher ed, helping students design successful undergraduate experiences. He's held leadership roles at numerous colleges and universities focused on academic advising, curriculum development and student engagement. Kaitlin LeMoine: Scott and Ned, welcome to Work Forces. Congratulations on the publication of this book, and we're excited to dive in with you today to learn more about Hacking College. Ned Laff: Thank you so much. Scott Carlson: Thanks for having us on. Julian Alssid: So to get the conversation started, love to hear a bit more about your respective backgrounds and how you came together to write this book. Scott Carlson: Well, as Kaitlin had said, I was at The Chronicle for about 25 years. I've you know, in the years leading up to the pandemic, I was writing a lot about inequality and the path from college to work. I wrote a couple of Chronicle reports about the future of work and how students wind up getting jobs. And in writing some of this, these reports, and writing some of these stories, the follow up stories in The Chronicle, I had been getting a lot of notes from one Ned Laff who had been contacting me and had been working in this area for some time. And this is, in fact, how we got to know each other and got to meet each other, because Ned was just writing me over and over again about, oh, there's a better way. There's a better way to do this. I'll let him take the story from there. Ned Laff: Yeah, I have the work that I had been doing in higher ed. It's hard to call it something like advising. It's, it's in this middle, middle ground. I got into this when I was a grad student at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where I was working in a program called Individual Plans of Study, where students could design their own academic major, provided it couldn't be done in any of the colleges at the University of Illinois Urbana. And what we began to find out working is that students would be coming in and we would help them figure out how they could do essentially, the heart of an individual plan of study, but underneath the rubric of a major. And that started to raise questions in my mind about what is the nature of a college curriculum from the eyes of a student. What is the relationship of a college curriculum to the world of work? If there is this giant thing called the hidden job market, which is not advertised in career services, you don't see it on, you don't see it on. Indeed. You don't see it anywhere. And what does this mean in terms of student engagement, and how students can tap what they're genuinely interested in, what we call hidden intellectualism, and how they actually better engage learning and and the university they're at. And I would send Scott these. I'm like, probably about 100 emails a week, just nagging them. I got something here. I got something here. Just give me five minutes, though. Kaitlin LeMoine: You share about this in this, in the book, a little bit. We'd love to hear about how the book title came to be. And can you share a bit about the major challenges you hope to tackle when writing this book? Scott Carlson: Well, I think when I was writing some of that stuff for the Chronicle about the path from college to work, I was sort of following along the kind of narrative that everyone else sort of follows. And it's, you know, it's sort of about skills. What do you do with liberal arts education? How do you get students to land internships and all of that. And you know, really, one of the points that we that we make in hacking college is that a lot of that just sort of comes about by luck. For a lot of students, they just sort of happen to run into the right person who shows them how to play the game, or they come from a lot of social and cultural capital that sort of paves the way to where they want to go. And part of what we're trying to do with hacking college is to describe, kind of, the principles of how people wind up creating valuable undergraduate degrees. We're kind of looking at the whole issue of what is the empty college degree. You know, the empty college degree being sort of this degree that is a quote, unquote useful major, and then a bunch of other stuff in the degree that doesn't really knit together. And a lot of students graduate with that kind of degree. You know, we think this is like a huge part of what drives the national conversation about underemployment and of the value of college right now, and that emptiness being sort of the main problem there. And so with Hacking College, we're trying to tackle this, this question like, how do you actually get to something that's valuable? The term hacking comes from the notion that colleges sort of set up a bunch of rules around, you know, how do you get through? How do you, what do you major in? How do you, how do you fill up the rest of the undergraduate degree? And we're using the metaphor of hacking we're talking about like, how do you, how do you use these different structures that you find in college and then knit them together in a conscious way? How do you, how do you create opportunities and create a program that plays off the strengths that you already bring to college? This is a big part of the hacking metaphor there, coming out of the work of Bruce Schneier, who talks about how hacking is across society. People hack the tax code. People hack regulations, government regulations. People hack their lives in all sorts of ways. And of course, the wealthy hack college in hiring expensive college consultants, in, you know, in lining up opportunities for their children in all sorts of ways. How can we do this for students who don't bring these kinds of resources to the undergraduate experience? Julian Alssid: So Ned, you so in the book, I think you used the term earlier, you described approaching this undergraduate experience as a field of study. Ned Laff: Yes. Julian Alssid: What does that mean? What exactly do you mean? And how does approaching college with that lens impact their learner experience? Ned Laff: The interesting thing about using field of study is, I asked students once, can you tell me the difference between your college faculty and your high school faculty, and they couldn't and it was a wonderful experience, because what it meant was basically 90% of what faculty have to offer, what a university has to offer, is invisible. So when you look at faculty, faculty are field of study specialists. They aren't just, I'm a professor of English or I'm a professor of biology, they are I'm a professor of environmental biology, and I'm looking at the migration patterns of whales. And that is looking at it is defining a problem which we call in the book wicked problems, which demand a multi disciplinary approach. And how you approach those wicked problems depends on how you define it. So it's not unusual to hear students come out and say, I just graduated with my degree. I'm at Northwestern University. I actually heard this the other day at the gym. I'm at Northwestern University. I'm graduating, and I have no idea what I'm doing with my degree. I don't know how it adds up, because no one had ever asked them a question like this. I'm going to go into accounting. I have no idea what. Talking about, can you explain that to me? And as soon as you ask for that explanation, whole bunches of things open up. And among those things that open up are all this possibility in what Scott and I call the hidden job market. So the other part of field of study is that it brings an outward looking perspective into how students think inwardly about the college. When they begin to do this, what they realize is there's three basic components to an undergraduate education. When you look at most colleges, right, Gen Ed, the major, and what are you going to do with the rest of the hours, which is almost a third or more of your hours? Sometimes it could add up to 50 hours, because some courses in the gen ed count for the major. Well, when you look at a degree audit, it's except for the basic required courses. It's blank spaces to be filled in. How you fill that in is either going to lead to a profound field, the study for you, where you're using the that thing that you're interested in, your hidden, what we call hidden intellectualism, to guide the way you start looking at the learning opportunities on campus and filling these pieces in so they integrate and they fit together. So Gen Ed links with elective courses, which link with how you select what you want to take from this thing called the major department, and how you begin to identify faculty by their fields of specialty. So for instance, take psychology. There's developmental psychologists, there's social psychologists, there are psychologists that focus on Labor and Industrial Relations. There are cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, all of those, if, depending on how you're going to look at the problem you want to study, all of those represent a different way of organizing the learning opportunities on campus. How you organize those learning opportunities that starts building out a field of study. But the other thing that's important in doing this is finding out who is doing that thing you want to do, because all of a sudden you walk out into the world, right? And this world, by the way, could be faculty doing their research and they're discovering things that, wow, if I was to do it all over again, I would be doing this for my course selection instead of that, because this is what I'm encountering right now, and students can bring that information back into how they begin to design what their curriculum or their course of study is, and that's the difference. It's an active design process, not from an advisor or a faculty member talking about degree requirements, but from a student designing the pieces of their curriculum. Julian Alssid: Just going back for a minute. I mean, this makes all the great sense and and I think anyone you know, so many of us can hearken back to that faculty or administrator that kind of helped us help the lights go off. But I guess I do wonder, and I don't know, maybe I'll love this one to you, Scott, this requires a bit of a mind shift for a lot of faculty. I mean, I don't think you know, they signed on to be the Career Counselor, the social networking expert, along with the, you know, the content expert and expert instructor. So A, what's your view about that? And B, how are we going to get from here to where you guys think we need to go? Scott Carlson: I mean, I think what you're asking is sort of what I'm picking up from what you're asking is, you know, an implement, an implementation sort of factor here, like, how does this actually happen on a college campus, right? And so kind of part, you know, what we envision, you know, we wrote Hacking College in this very conversational style that allows anyone to read it and anyone to sort of adopt the practices there. Because, you know, on one hand, people you know, they sort of asked us, do you want after this, this book came out of a story that I wrote for The Chronicle called the crusade against terrible advising, right? And after the article came out, you know, Johns Hopkins Press and others had asked, Do you want to turn this into a book? Do you want to write a book about advising? And we really didn't want to write a book about advising. We wanted to write about these structures that cause students to fall off the path. And in writing the book, we wanted to write it in this accessible style, because we sort of felt that everyone on a campus should be able to read this and then work with the students that they, in particular, have in their orbit. That's how you're going to sort of increase, increase the touches that that students have with people on campus, right? We can't just sort of lay this all on advisors, or lay this all on faculty advisors, and in part of the part of implementing this, part of what we're getting at is that what the colleges can do is they can, they can sort of adopt this as a mind frame at the colleges where everyone is sort of speaking this field of study, language and instructing students how to how to go about this, how to talk to people, how to find these contacts that are going to help instruct them in how to design their undergraduate degree. Now, these can be faculty members, but we're hopeful that when the students do encounter the faculty members, when they are working with them. They're working with the faculty members that share this kind of passion, or this hidden intellectualism, or this area of interest, this place where they're going to have a head start on the conversation, because they're already into what the faculty are talking about. And those faculty members, members then will be motivated to work with those students, because those students are in the area that they're interested in. I mean, a big part of the social capital that we talk about in hacking college comes through cultural capital. You know, the conversation about social capital is everywhere in higher ed right now. It's about who you know, right? But a big point that we're making in hacking college is that what drives the social capital is the cultural capital. It's the stuff that you're bringing as a person to the other person in making this link across interests, hidden intellectualism, obsessions, that kind of thing. So this is, I think, a big key to sort of making these relationships work. Ned Laff: And another part of it is this is very much the student is agent. So there's a student in doing this, they're creating networks. So it's not like I'm I am dependent on a faculty member. There could be three or four faculty members. There could be somebody in student affairs that they talk to, they go out on what we call this research, investigative inquiry, and start talking to people in the areas that they're interested in, and they're bringing information back there. Then they can sit, perhaps with somebody in an advising office and say, Here, I've got all this information. Now, how do I put the how do these pieces start to come together so that I can graduate under the requirements of a major, right? But design the pieces so it gets me to where I want to go. So it's very much a process of students building out their social capital, building out their cultural capital, learning how to network with people on campus and off campus, right? These are all the skills that everyone says people need, right? But they're doing this to design their undergraduate field of study. So in the process of doing their undergraduate education, all these mystical skills of oral communication and teamwork and stuff, they're all coming together, because what's driving it is the students' hidden intellectualism and their vocational purpose. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, I mean, I really appreciated in the in the book, when you know you had a line, it's not where you go to college, but how you do college that matters. That really stuck out to me. And I think, you know, as as we're thinking about the the social and cultural capital, and you know, one point in the book, you raise this concept of the hidden jobs, and you take it in a slightly different direction than I think we sometimes hear it talked about like it's not just about what's posted on LinkedIn as a job opportunity or not, but really that other definition around like pulling back the curtain of the world of work and helping learners really get an understanding of what are all the different job opportunities and career paths available in what might be. I mean, you, I love the scenario of working in a museum, right, like, but would love to, would love just to hear you talk a little bit more about that and what that, you know, what going down that path, through those hidden jobs, can really unearth for learners. Ned Laff: You know, this is where students, all of a sudden, everything changes for them. I sent this one to Scott recently because I didn't know this existed. There is a national Egg Board. I mean, isn't that cool? It's it's a national organization, and what they deal with is eggs, the eggs you eat. So that means, when you think about it, they have to have a director, they have to have communications, they have to have organizational structure. There's all these things out here. You will never see the National...
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Frederick Wehrle: Optimizing Adult Learning with AI
02/16/2025
Frederick Wehrle: Optimizing Adult Learning with AI
Frederick Wehrle, Assistant Dean for Academic Innovation and Learning at UCLA Extension, discusses his research on using AI to optimize adult learning. Wehrle focuses on developing AI-powered instructional tools and approaching learning and course design from a neuroscience perspective. He shares practical strategies for educators and learners to keep pace with the changing needs of industry, including advice on the best ways to use AI for learning and development. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Julian Alssid: We spend a lot of time in the show, in our consulting engagements, talking about best practices for building effective, engaging programs and learning experiences for adult learners. It's a topic I find endlessly fascinating. Kaitlin LeMoine: As do I Julian, building programs grounded in the principles of andragogy, and allowing adult learners to demonstrate what they know and can do is so critical. Julian Alssid: Couldn't agree more. And I often think back to our time at Southern New Hampshire University, where we helped to build College for America that project based, competency based online program was a real breakthrough moment in higher ed. Kaitlin LeMoine: It really was. College for America was designed to reach adult learners who had many skills but had not previously earned a college degree. The program offered them a way to demonstrate mastery of competencies through projects aligned to real world deliverables that met academic requirements in an online and asynchronous format. Julian Alssid: Our guest today is doing some really fascinating work in the space of adult learning and course design, taking the notion of learning, design and optimization to a whole new level. Kaitlin LeMoine: He certainly is. We're excited to have Frederic Wehrle on the show with us today. He's the Assistant Dean for Academic Innovation and Learning at UCLA Extension. Frederick joined UCLA in 2023 after serving at UC Berkeley Extension since 2018. Before immigrating to the US, Frederick led accreditation and International Relations at business schools in Paris, France. He's held faculty and administrative positions in France and in the US, and served as an advisor and mentor to startups, nonprofit organizations and universities worldwide. Grounded in research on innate and in learned behavior, Frederick focuses on developing AI powered instructional tools and applications of those tools to adult learning. Essentially, he's approaching learning from the perspective of neuroscience and exploring how we can optimize it. Welcome to Work Forces, Frederick. Frederick Wehrle: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, and thank you so much for the very kind intro. I'm very excited to be with you. Julian Alssid: Well, and we're excited to have you here as well, Frederick, welcome to get us rolling here. Caitlin said a bit about your background, but we'd love to hear in your own words about your background and what brought you to your work. Frederick Wehrle: Most fundamentally, I would say my background is in behavioral sciences, human behavioral sciences. I specialized during my studies, actually, back in Germany, on behavioral ecology, neuroscience, anthropology and bioinformatics, and my key interest there was innate behavioral patterns and pre existing biases. So things that we are born with in terms of mental pathways, and I've been fortunate to be able to do a PhD in Paris at the Sorbonne where I was specializing in consumer behavior, which is kind of this subgroup of management and marketing sciences that actually looks how marketing and marketers are able to manipulate people, and then tries to explain how that works and give the tools to corporations and policy makers, I would say, to regulate if necessary. So when I was saying hey, I actually study, from a biology or biological perspective, how humans react without knowing that they do or act without knowing that they do, that was very interesting for the people in that field. And so that really was, let's say, my education background, I was able and lucky to become a faculty relatively early on in business schools in France, and put my my work to practice and apply a lot of this neuroscience into my teaching, and then very quickly, was asked to use it to design courses, design programs, to design entire degree programs, review the entire structure, if you want, of of schools through accreditation processes, build new types of partnerships and so on internationally. And when I got the opportunity to move to the US in 2018 there was an opportunity at UC Berkeley, and their continuing education division, extension division. I was very excited, because I've been I've been concerned with AI laying off millions of people or displacing millions of people, 10 years ago already, and I was mostly concerned because I didn't find anyone particularly at that time concerned. And I thought, with the background that I have and the theories that or the research I was pursuing, I'm effectively on to figuring out how we can make education at least three times more effective and efficient. So here in California, first at UC Berkeley and now at UCLA, this is really what I'm pursuing, and that is really figuring out how how to teach differently so that learning becomes much, much more effective. Kaitlin LeMoine: So can you tell us a little bit about what your current research is focused on and what you're learning. I mean, I'm intrigued by the concept of, you know, making education at least three times more effective, right? So, like, let's, let's dive in there. Frederick Wehrle: Despite the fact that it was over five years in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley and so on, I'm still humble. I'm only 3x ing. It not 10x ing. And yeah, they would not be happy. I couldn't pitch this to Google, probably. But the interesting perspective is that, unfortunately, let's say neuroscientists really haven't looked into how learning happens naturally through most of our lives, before the late 2000s, so about maybe 15 years ago or so, and actually started working on animals, and later figured it out with humans. And it's quite fascinating to see how that relatively recent research paints a very different picture of how we learn. For me that can be easiest understood if we think about what we're doing right now. So we're having a conversation. We're talking about things that we have some mental representation of education. Our brains are active. And in this situation, everything I'm saying, I don't have to repeat. You don't have to write it down and put it on a Quizlet card and learn it by heart and so on. Everything I say, maybe with one or two repetitions, you're able to assimilate. That's actually the proper term for this process in neuroscience, you assimilate that information into an active framework in your brain, a schema, and that active framework adapts to that new information, and so it's memorized. And so effectively, this process of learning, contrary to what still most education scientists and learning scientists believe, does not have any blockers. So the system that most education is still built around is a system of repetition. Because also in neuroscience, we were able to prove that if you have to learn something anew, completely anew, without any context and without any mental frameworks active or schemas active, you have to build those frameworks. You have to repeat, repeat, repeat, and that's how synaptic pathways are built and reinforced until they they're there, and that is usually now, if you look at the broader picture and child development or human development, that's really just how humans learn very early on in their childhood, like the famous light switch that you kids click 100 times until they figured out the principle of the light switch, right? But once you have that framework, once you like this basic pathway is built through repetition, and then, especially as you have kind of finalized building those frameworks, you're really switching most of the time, throughout your life, into this other pathway that has been discovered only more recently, which is information is just assimilated into active frameworks and those frameworks adapt unless You sit at school in a classroom that is sterile or at least out of context, and you learn from a book out of context, from a person out of context. And for me, the these things were, particularly, as I say, egregious, and became very, very clear when I was working in business schools back in France, or early on, even in my career, because in France, like in Germany, you have a system, or systems that are very popular, which is called apprenticeship models. And the most fascinating thing there is, is that you have a very large amount of students studying their entire three year bachelor program (Europe is three years for bachelor's,) or your two year master, either full time studying or in an apprenticeship where you work about 60% of the time and then you study about 40% of the time. What is fascinating about this is, all students finish on time. If I share this oftentimes here in the US, people like pause and scratch their heads and say, how's that possible? Especially like, there are institutions that really are extremely proud and adamant about saying that you really need to be full time otherwise, like you can't dedicate yourself and so on and so forth. And I think that's true. If what you're studying is sciences, where you actually spend a lot of time in sciences or even humanities and so on, but you are, like doing it, and you're preparing for university environment you want to become a researcher, then, yes, you're effectively doing an apprenticeship in in the university, but for many, many other fields, it doesn't make sense. So this is the background, if you want that I'm basing my work on. And I find it particularly fascinating to think about workforce development and to do this in continuing education, because the, let's say the good instructor and the good learning designer in this field already knows that the best and most efficient way to teach is to be able to kind of capture the students where they are, is to be able to understand who they are like with what knowledge do they come in there, and then, if it's in a life interaction likework with with what they bring to the table and their experiences, and organize in a way where they can share and practice with their experiences. So this is a very good background for me to to push that forward and formalize it a little more, to be honest, though, I must say, much more of a experimentalist than I'm a theorist. So I do spend much more of my time, or have over the last decade, experimenting, building the types of courses, running them, seeing how they work and so on, rather than spending my time writing literature reviews and contributing to a relatively set field of research, which is all based on a very different approach to education. Julian Alssid: So given your your approach as an experimentalist here, and we're, you know, Kaitlin and I are also very grounded and in this kind of bringing together, this intersection of work and learning, which we think you know clearly has to be theoretical in many respects. But ultimately, people need a job. They need to apply themselves. And flashing forward to from eight years ago, when you saw the future, what do you see as some of the greatest opportunities for using generative AI in learning and course design, and also, conversely, what are some of the biggest challenges? Because it seems to be the story of the day. Frederick Wehrle: Yes, it's the story of all our lives. So I'm actually hopeful that through the work I'm doing, also with colleagues, we're able to to provide some some way through this, I can maybe start with the challenges, because that's maybe top of mind for many people. In my experience, interestingly enough, I think the biggest challenge comes from a lot of resistance from the people that are the faculty, instructor slash expert, or also the instructional designers, the learning designers, who I think, like in many professions, don't feel very easy about the introduction of AI because it seems like it is getting at the core of what they are doing and what they're contributing. And having spent a lot of time, evidently, like overseeing these types of teams and being with a lot of colleagues, I realize it's justified in a certain way, because nobody has given many people that are not deeply into AI a framework and somewhat of a roadmap to where this all will go, and it's certainly not a goal of what this will look like at the end. So if you want as an as an experimentalist, the beauty here is that I was able to work out, and am working out with some colleagues of universities across the US a framework on how to effectively use generative AI for course content development, either in the role of a subject matter expert, so the AI can take the role of subject matter expert, and an instructional designer can actually go and build the entire baseline of a course, if you want, that then gets reviewed and analyzed by a human subject matter expert, or in the other form of an instructional designer, where subject matter expert has the help to effectively design the entire baseline of a course with generative AI. The point of us coming together is to figure out how to do this in a structured way, provide a framework how that looks like, and demonstrate how you get to a very high quality output and how much time that can save you, for example. Now, the interesting thing is, we're doing this because at that point the entire all the professions in the entire industry will say, like, okay, so we can actually get this if we do XYZ, if we follow that pathway. Now we can adopt it without having that much fear, because we see that all the jobs across the entire if you want production line are maintained. And the beauty is, once we have a little bit more time back on our clocks in all the different roles, we can now actually think of using a generative AI or just, let's say, the classroom to do other forms of education and things that we never have been able to do as much as we want to do. So if I talk to any instructional designer or learning designer, they're always unhappy about the fact that they never get to really roll out all the amazing methods of instructional design, or learning design, for all the activities they could do. Spend more times focusing on what different learning methods they could apply. Never spend enough time on the actual if you want learning structure, never spend enough time on case studies, or the assignments could be much better, much deeper, and so on and so forth. If I talk to faculty and subject matter experts, they always fall short on time in terms of sharing their research, sharing their practice, what they actually love, if they're teaching live, they really love the live interaction, right? But what they do is a lot of times it's just roll down a slide deck that they spend all that time preparing, then they're actually not really prepared to share anything else. So ultimately, the beauty there as a first step is that generative AI, by accelerating a lot of the groundwork, will be able to allow you, as an instructor, for example, to spend much more time engaging with the students. If you're able to build an entire learning experience relatively quickly. As a learning designer, then you can think about, what can we do beyond just the course production to make sure the learners have the opportunity to learn more effectively. And this is where I get particularly excited, because that's where it then comes the second part of AI. Now we can use AI to do something that is very much akin to the better way of learning, which is simulations, which is personalized content, which is activities that allow you to learn in a pseudo social environment, that is things that allow you to be much more applied, and so on and so forth. So we are. We're able to use generative AI to do groundwork, and then we're able to use generative AI with this neuroscientific background that I shared with you to create new formats of education. Kaitlin LeMoine: It does occur to me, Frederick, as you're talking, and be curious as to your thoughts on this, that really you know you, you, we began this conversation with you, talking about the process of, for adult learners, of really assimilating existing information into or new information into an existing framework. And it occurs to me that, I mean, with, with AI, even if, like you said, right, it's maybe, maybe you've been aware of it for many, many years, and maybe now people have been aware of it for a year or so, adults are, I think, developing a new framework around AI. And so, how does you know? What is that work? What does it look like to apply your own kind of research, and the research around neuroscience and like related adult learning principles to this advent of this new age that we live in. Frederick Wehrle: I think it's almost like a perfect storm on education and learning at the moment, and the pressure is as much on higher education, secondary education as it is on workforce development. I think the forces that are coming together is that leads to adult learners asking for more, asking for efficiency in learning, and are just not ready and willing to sit through content just cause, just because. Somebody put it into a framework. And it actually turns out, in my experience, that the educators themselves do not particularly enjoy producing the baseline content. They'd actually much rather spend the time and their time and energy on what is valuable. So in terms of AI and workforce development, I've two perspectives. The first one is a lot of people need and want to learn more about AI and how that will impact their their work. And the second one is the environment. And AI enables them to learn anything that they need to move ahead and go further in their in their jobs, and stay ahead in their careers, or maybe even in certain situations, change their careers. So the first one how to learn about AI, I think the most critical part there is similar to what we're trying to do with that group of partner universities, institutions, organizations have to invest into, let's say, the experimenters in innovation labs and structures that will allow their organization to paint a picture of what it will look like in the future. Otherwise, you will always have that, that very strong resistance. And for you as a person, it is very difficult any individual kind of it's very difficult to to navigate the path of insecurity. And I think right now, with AI learning, there's so much out there. How do I stay informed? There's so much FOMO, and you feel like any hour you spend on that one thing, if you're interested in this, is a hour you lose, because then you didn't focus on the other thing. So you never feel on top of the situation. So I think there is a lot of work to be done by organizations to actually invest into people that are able to provide frameworks and an outlook of what it will look like if your organization is not doing that, and you are an individual, I always recommend actually going to events if you have the opportunity, be it...
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Matt Evans: Julius Education & the Future of Workforce Tech
02/04/2025
Matt Evans: Julius Education & the Future of Workforce Tech
Matt Evans is CEO of Julius Education, a company that provides workforce technology tools to help job seekers and employers navigate fast-developing industries. Matt shares his background in emerging fields, including online learning and water technology, and his journey to Julius Education. He highlights the lack of detailed data on occupations, particularly in sectors like clean energy, where job titles are often inconsistently used. The conversation also explores the challenges and opportunities of using technology to provide granular, real-time data for effective workforce planning and engagement. Evans provides examples of successful partnerships and offers advice for building new models. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. So Julian, it's been fascinating to see how many of our recent conversations on the podcast and in our consulting projects keep coming back to the need for a dual customer approach to bridging talent gaps, one that provides employers and learners or job seekers with the tools they need to navigate fast developing industries. Julian Alssid: Absolutely, Kaitlin. It's a topic that's becoming more and more critical, especially with a rapid emergence of AI transforming the labor market and emerging sectors like advanced manufacturing, life sciences and clean energy are being particularly impacted, and we're seeing employers in those sectors struggle to find qualified candidates and job seekers often don't know what jobs exist and have the opportunities out there aligned with their own interests. Kaitlin LeMoine: Absolutely, that's right, and we've been hearing from so many of our guests about the growing mismatch between the skills that employers need and the skills that job seekers possess. This is especially true in fields that are being rapidly transformed by changing technologies and AI where the pace of change is accelerating and the skills gap is widening. Julian Alssid: Yeah, and it's not just about finding people with the right technical skills, but also about fostering those human skills like critical thinking, communication, and problem solving that are essential for success in any field. Those are the skills that will set people apart in an AI driven world. Kaitlin LeMoine: Definitely. And that's why we're so excited to have Matt Evans, CEO and co founder of Julius Education, join us today. Julius education is a workforce technology company that addresses the talent needs of fast moving industries such as energy, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing and others to help them keep pace with the rapidly changing economy using AI and machine learning, the company addresses talent gaps to make sure employers, learners and job seekers have the information they need to navigate these dynamic sectors. Julian Alssid: Before Julius, Matt was a Senior Vice President at Pearson, where he led the Online Learning Division and served a large network of university partners and adult learners. He's also a co founder of Imagine H2O A leading water Technology Accelerator. So he knows a thing or two about fostering talent in emerging fields. Kaitlin LeMoine: So without further ado, Matt, welcome to Work Forces. Matt Evans: Thank you. It's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you for joining us. Welcome and we'd love for you to jump in now and to we'd love to hear more about your background and what brought you to your role at Julius Education. Matt Evans: We are a workforce technology company. We use AI and machine learning to provide really, first of its kind, industry specific labor market intelligence and a suite of workforce tools to support fast moving industries keep up with the pace of change, as you alluded to Kaitlin. And so our work spans the industries that are really dynamic to the economy, from energy and semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, biotech, and we work with a really interesting set of partners from industry such as major employers and industry associations, to regional coalitions, to government agencies at the federal, state and and local level, who are all focused on this work in my background, as Julian you alluded to, has been in the education technology space for the past 20 years, and most Recently at Pearson at the same time, for the past 15 years or so, I've been on the board of this organization driving water technology innovation called Imagine H2O and what that experience really drove home for me was for all these critical industries, Water among them, but not exclusively. We need new technologies, we need new policies, we need new forms of capital for these industries to thrive. But there's this whole people component, which historically has not been getting the same level of attention, and so that's really was the the innovating spirit behind Julius particularly in these industries, which we alluded to Kaitlin, which are going through significant change, with new jobs coming on board, new skills required, new employers popping up, and so that really is the context for for the work that we do at. That Julius, Julian Alssid: Yeah, well, it's certainly, it's certainly timely, Matt. I guess I'd love to hear, we'd love to hear some more about the problems that Julius is trying to address. You know, kind of digging a little bit further. Matt Evans: The core problem that our partners are facing is they simply don't have the data on the occupations that they care most about. So when they're trying to answer questions like, What is the demand in my region, in my specific industry, for specific roles down the job title level, if they're trying to understand, what are the skills and credentials that employers are actually looking for. If they're trying to say what is the future going to look like across all these dimensions, they just don't have the data that they need to understand that. And so with our approach, using AI machine learning, we're able to ingest large unstructured data sets and give them a real time view in the way that their industry talks about these jobs for which data previously, there had not been any data currently available for it. So that's the kind of the core the core problem. I think the change context that Kaitlin was teeing up is certainly exacerbating a lot of this dynamic so with the ripples of technology through the industries that we've touched on that's creating real complexity for folks who are in key decision making. Seats to say, how do I align an ecosystem or my resources to drive workforce outcomes? How do I understand exactly what employers need today and also going forward for the jobs that are important to them, for other stakeholders, like learners and job seekers, they're trying to understand what is this field? What are these job titles? What are the career paths when I go to indeed.com What am I supposed to be putting in here? What are skills do I have today, and how do they transfer into this potentially exciting new industry for me? So those are some of the kind of core problems at the stakeholder level that we are, that we are seeing folks had historically been trying to get at this. This is not a new problem, even though it's been exacerbated now by accelerants and change in technology. You've been trying to get at this with legacy tools. So doing things like employer surveys is one approach to get data on the local labor market needs that is often challenging, just given response rates and also given latency of getting the data back. And these things, entries are moving so quickly that often that data is stale by the time the surveys come back. If it's kind of 12 or 18 month cycle, other approaches have been to say, hey, can we use legacy data sets that oftentimes are some version or tied somehow to Bureau of Labor Statistics, SOC data. That's a little wonky, but that that that sock code folks may be aware of on this podcast, but that's also challenging, because those are really economy wide views, and they don't work for the industries in which we are, which we're focused on, or, you know, third folks may have great data for their industry down five jobs deep, but what they're really need is something that goes 250 jobs deep for their particular industry, within energy or within semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, biotech, etc. So really, that core issue is where Julius comes in, and we are supporting our partners really, with this very detailed, industry specific depth of data, and so we just take a fundamentally different approach to to provide that for, again, for these occupations that the data just doesn't hasn't previously existed. Kaitlin LeMoine: What is your process for beginning to unearth that level of detailed data? Matt, as you said, right, there are so many legacy tools, but what does it look like to live in this space of kind of rapid change and transformation, and how do you go about remaining current in that. Matt Evans: It's almost setting up the data infrastructure is kind of the way we think about it. Because, as you're alluding to, it doesn't really do folks any good to have kind of a, just a one time snapshot about what's going on across these, these, these jobs or labor market data that they care about. It's really how does their repeatable and ongoing view into these, these data needs. And so that's where our where our own kind of proprietary data and AI classification models provide for that ongoing data infrastructure which provides a current view on an ongoing basis. So that really is kind of the foundational piece of it, which is it gives us that ongoing pulse and allows us to continue to keep up with the pace of change with these industries, not just for today, but going forward as well. Great. Kaitlin LeMoine: So I mean. Diving a little bit deeper, please tell us. What are some current projects that you're working on, either within clean energy or any other sector you'd like to discuss. And what are you learning? Matt Evans: In clean energy? There's, there's a ton of things to point to. Maybe I'll call out two or or three. One example at the state level, one of our wonderful partners is Mass CEC, which is the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, really leading the clean energy initiatives for for Massachusetts, they they're very focused on the workforce, in the workforce issues of the Commonwealth, and they've been through all the legacy tools that I was alluding to, the challenges in many of these kind of important sectors. In the clean energy economy, there's real fragmentation with how employers are talking about different roles. So they may employers may be using the same job title for for the same different job, excuse me, for different, for the same, for the same role, which is causing a lot of the lot of the complexity. So for Massachusetts, there's a priority set of occupations that they're trying to get much more precise on what's going on in labor market, one of which, for instance, is a role called an energy auditor, which is an essential role for energy efficiency and for high performance buildings, because they're the ones really helping to diagnose where there are energy inefficiencies and efficiencies within a within a minute building. It's also a critical role, because in some ways it's not just kind of the output of a lot of effort focused on energy efficiency. In some ways it's the upfront constraint to ensure this actually happening. It's a leading indicator to say, hey, if we have enough energy auditors or not, because if we don't, there's no way we can effectuate the rest of the energy efficiency strategy we need for for buildings. So it's a really, really key, key role. The challenge that we found in Massachusetts is that job is being called 40 different things by employers throughout the state that is, makes it so hard to get accurate understanding about what is employer demand for these roles, where in what county, skills certifications, all the kind of knock on on questions. So that would be kind of one really interesting example. There are other roles in that same kind of world, with with with mass CEC, like job titles, like assembler, which is can be a really important role in everything from electrical assembler, mechanical assembler, working assembling on kind of solar solar farms, but that catch all title or assembler really makes it kind of challenging to understand. Are we talking about junior level assemblers? Senior level assemblers? What kind of what segment of the clean energy economy actually talking to so you're trying to align the Massachusetts ecosystem with programming with dollars to serve employer needs. Getting much more precise about what we mean by these rules is really, really essential, and our data reveals that. So that so that would be another example of the work in Massachusetts as a learning. Julian Alssid: I can totally get the titles and the, you know, like and AI being really helpful and beginning to see through the different titles and find some common data grounding. Cutting across multiple industries, can you speak to other learnings that you that are transferable across industries. Matt Evans: One other, I think, example that that is, I think we found really interesting is we do a lot of work with employers, utilities in particular, and they're really interested in looking around a corner to understand the skills of the future and how their workforce is going to be impacted by macro trends in the energy landscape. So we've done some really interesting work with a major industry association called EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute, to develop a framework which helps lay out how the mega trends shaping the industry impact job cluster areas as well as impact down to specific occupational areas. And so, for instance, if you're looking at, say, the impact of EV adoption, well one obvious place where that's going to show up is in kind of field technicians or EV kind of focused technician roles, but it's also going to show up in other jobs which don't necessarily have EV in the job title. So skills, what is a someone who's running programs and utility in which EVs is a part? What kind of skills do they have related to EVs? What does a customer service rep need to know about EVs, as well as when they get when they get questions about that. So really thinking kind of beyond specific roles, but for the skills impact, and that kind of framework is certainly applicable to other industries, about how do you think about what those mega trends are, and then how those cascade down to specific roles? And then, obviously with the data infrastructure. You're seeing, tracking how that really is being expressed by employees, and are they closing the gap between what needed for the skills of the future by role and then? And actually, is it is actually happening? Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting challenge. I mean, I guess it has been over the years, but I feel like it stands out more so than ever before, really, that, you know, there, it's like there are all these skills that you fall, that fall into many industries, and do employers recognize that? And do learners know and employees know how to talk about that? And is there that common understanding that, oh, well, the skills I'm using in this industry also apply in this one maybe with, like, this one little area of upskilling, right? Or something like, it feels like there's a lot of room for that, and room for building understanding and clarity around that transferability. Matt Evans: And also for learners and job seekers as well. So as I think, another kind of transferable application as well, to kind of bridge both your questions. We did some work with the DOE analyzing advanced manufacturing, the intersection advanced manufacturing, semiconductor roles, and how we can bring that to life in the right kind of career navigation solutions for understand, for folks to understand the progression pathways. So we looked at 100 different roles within the sector, and 250 different career pathways to really help people understand, what are these jobs, which I may have heard about, maybe I haven't really, what are the career pathways? What does that look like over time? And interestingly enough, over 50% of the jobs and did not require a four year, four year degree. And so that story also is, I think, an important one across many of the dynamic industries in which we work, certainly there are roles which require kind of higher level degrees, for sure, but there's also a lot of career pathways which which don't and so bringing that to life for learners and job seekers, I think, is really important aspect that certainly is transferable across a lot of these a lot of these sectors. Julian Alssid: I'm interested that, looking at your website, and given your sort of intro, you're, you know, you're sort of similar to our consulting work, you know, sort of workforce development being this kind of, this intersection of work and learning. Be being multidisciplinary. It sounds like your kind of partnerships and partners and are being used by many different types of groups, from government intermediaries to, you know, employers and I'm assuming, educators and not individuals. Where are you seeing sort of the greatest pickup at this stage in terms of groups that are really looking to get on board with and bake this kind of data use into their work. Matt Evans: The folks that are, I think, particularly focused on kind of the data and consuming that data infrastructure are folks that we think are almost these kind of conveners. So they're really convening stakeholders, and they need the data to really kind of align the ecosystem around a commonly understood set of employer problems. So that convener hat we've seen is is worn by some industry association. It could be worn by a utility because oftentimes they're thinking actually more broadly than a typical employer is about their region, but certainly kind of regional, kind of coalitions are important part of of that. And then there are certain kind of government agencies who are also getting that charge, such as such as Mass Mass EC. So the kind of the the intersection really is these fast moving industries and those kind of convener types, but they may wear kind of different, different hat, depending on the particular region, the protection of the industry in which we're which we're talking but that's, that's the common thread. Julian Alssid: And just Just a follow up to that. I mean, we've seen over the years, often data tools, you know, are purchased or used by organizations, and they kind of end up dying on the vine or shelves or whatever, the digital equivalent of that would be collecting dust somewhere. How do you ensure that that doesn't happen with your client, your clients and partners? Matt Evans: It's a it's a great question. There is often, we've seen this the same the same thing, and so there's often a conversation that we continue to have with our partners on an ongoing basis and with the ecosystem of partners that they're bringing into it that needs to be had about how do we make sense of this data, and kind of, what do we do about it? I think what we've seen is the data provides not only kind of a roadmap of what's needed, but it's an accelerant of aligning the stakeholders around a...
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Naomi Boyer on Skills-Based Learning & Systems Change
01/21/2025
Naomi Boyer on Skills-Based Learning & Systems Change
Naomi Boyer, Senior Vice President of Digital Transformation at Education Design Lab, discusses the importance of skills-based learning and how to align education with workforce needs. Boyer also discusses the need for trust and transparency in the talent marketplace, and a common language and framework for discussing skills and competencies. The episode also covers the importance of collaboration between education and industry. Boyer provides examples of successful partnerships and offers advice for building new models. The episode concludes with a discussion of the importance of empowering individuals to take control of their learning journey. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. One of the biggest challenges we face in aligning education to workforce needs is a disconnect between education and industry, especially when it comes to building new learning models. Julian Alssid: So true Kaitlin and this gap became apparent as we began to shift to a knowledge based economy 30ish years ago, and addressing the gap is a big part of what attracted both of us to education and workforce development in the first place. But now it's taken center stage. Workers and students are frustrated and falling behind, and employers are way more interested in addressing the disconnect than ever before. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes, there is now a much greater emphasis on skills from skills based hiring to skills based learning. And while identifying common skills across education providers and employers is a piece of the work, we also need to drive broader systems level change. Julian Alssid: Yeah, and as we know from our own consulting work, this is no small task, and and our guest today is is working on bringing sense and clarity to systems level efforts. And you know, we're excited to welcome Naomi Boyer to the podcast today. Naomi Boyer: Thanks so much for having me excited to be here. Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much for joining us, Naomi To give a bit of background on Naomi's years in this work, she's a driving force in transforming education for the future of work. As senior vice president of digital transformation at the Education Design Lab, she leads initiatives on digital micro credentials, skills based learning, and competency frameworks, ensuring learners are equipped for success in a rapidly evolving economy. With over two decades of experience in higher education, Naomi has a proven track record of innovation in areas including distance learning, faculty development and global initiatives. She is a recognized expert in competency based education and a passionate advocate for self directed learning, and we're very excited to have her with us on the podcast today. So thank you for being here. Julian Alssid: So Kaitlin, gave a little of your background, but would love to hear your own words about your background and your role at the Education Design Lab. Naomi Boyer: Thanks so much, Julian, I so first I don't have supreme clarity. If I did, we'd all be rich and have everything figured out in our society and everything else. But part of, part of why I'm in this work is because I have a passion for transforming education and learning and really helping facilitate differences for people in people's lives, right? And so that's an ongoing journey, and I don't think it's ever anything we're going to solve, but we can certainly make it easier and help people find their path as they go along. And so I actually started my journey in special education, and I think I use those skills every bit along the way here, even as I continue my my own journey through life. And so I went from teaching special education to becoming a mom, and then went back and worked on my doctorate in a really funky area at the time, distance learning. And actually my doctorate, my specialty was in systemic change, or organizational change and systemic leadership. And then wrote my dissertation though on building online learning communities and international environments. So this is back in 2001 so at the advent of of online learning, and it was at this point in my life that that I really began realizing that I can't always decide on going from point A to point B, you got to kind of follow the journey and the rolling the rolling hills as you go along, and it'll take you to some really cool and fun places. And so through that journey, I ended up at in higher ed, as you said, for over 17 years, both at the at a university, research one university, and at a community college and vice president positions that allowed me to do strategic innovations and change and contribute to all the cool stuff. I was chief information officers for five, five of the last years of that scope, and then jumped over to education Design Lab, which you will hear me affectionately call to to speak about is the Lab versus education Design Lab. I joined them over about six years ago, and came in and working on digital, micro credentials and a bunch of other things. I can tell you a little bit about the Lab, the position I'm in now at the Lab, I'm having the opportunity of really diving into three areas that are passionate for me. You've heard me say, education, transformation, the personalization of learning, I think, is key and really a disrupter, which some of what I heard in one of your last podcasts with Michael Horn. He was talking about some of those driving forces of personal, personalization of learning, and then the individual and empowerment in the learning process and how an individual can gain control over their own processes of learning in life, and this is not something that we necessarily cultivate in our K12 or even many of our higher ed classrooms. We cultivate compliant learners. And so people understanding and learning how to take control of their own learning process becomes absolutely instrumental. And so when I joined the Lab, I was able to bring all of those three things together. And basically, I get to run amok. I'd love to run them up and and contribute. And that's why I say we don't have it all figured out. So using human centered design is the methodology of the Lab, and get to deal with the many pervasive issues have created a fractured and limited talent development continuum, and how do we think about the things in between? And so the Lab has basically three streams of work to do this, one of which is college transformation, where we work directly with community colleges and help them think about new and innovative non degree credentials that they can introduce to be responsive to the local workforce and learners. You know, we do some deep work and understanding who the new majority learner is, and we use the word new majority, majority to refer to all of those learners that higher ed was not was those who fall out of the scope of who Higher Ed was originally designed for, right? Like the 18 to 22 year old that was going to is going to go full time to university. So the new majority are those. They don't fit into that mold. And then the area that I cover, which is digital transformation, which sounds like it's all about technology, but it's about leveraging the technology for that human experience. So how do we really think about human change, access and opportunity, right? And really think about it for those who in order to improve social mobility, economic vitality, for those who need it the most, Kaitlin LeMoine: As you mentioned the last, the last focus of your work, the digital transformation piece, I appreciate your call out of like, it's not just about the technology, but can you tell us a little bit more about when you say, yes, our work is around digital transformation, what that means and what, what the problems are that you're looking to address through, through that element of your work. Naomi Boyer: There's no doubt that technology needs to be a component of thinking about scalable, accessible, innovative options for facilitating. I can go back to the beginning, where I said personalization, of learning and really rethinking the way we do things. In our current talent market, there's a disconnect between the way we have, we may be using the technology tools to apply for a job, but we're not necessarily capitalizing on those tools so that Naomi can say what I know and can do, so that my skills are captured in such a way that they become transparent. So, you know, at the Lab, we deal with a number of problems, I'll say, or issues, challenges that are in that talent continuum. And I like to say we deal with wicked issues, big, hairy issues, right? Like portability, transfer, ability, flexibility, and my work with digital transformation is really around the visibility. So how do we make each individual skills visible, not only just for everyone else, but for themselves. What are the skills that I have? How do I then document those skills? How do I see the skills I need along a career trajectory, and then how do I make those skills visible in the marketplace for others to find me, and for me to find those a match up with, with the skills that I have, right? And so whether that's through digital micro credentialing, whether that's through what we call learning and employment records, whether it's through the validation and trusting of establishing trust and what someone knows and can do, there's all of these issues around visibility, and that's how we're using the technology to allow an individual to flow through their process and fund it. But it's not about necessarily programming and technology, just about the technology. Julian Alssid: Yes, indeed. I mean, that's, yeah, that's That's great. It's all the stuff we love. Kaitlin, I mean, come on. So I'd love to hear a little bit about projects that you're most excited about currently, where, you know, where you're employing, you know, this personalization in the digital strategies. You know you'd mentioned Texas and Arizona when we talked. Earlier, but about some projects you're most excited about. Naomi Boyer: And some of the projects that that I'm going to describe right now deal also with some of those big, hairy issues I mentioned, right like so. So one of the things that we're, I'm hearing a lot from employers, is is, is trust, not necessarily trust in the way you may hear some of our colleagues who are more technically focused, talk about which is the verification of credentials, but more about the trust whether this credential represents the true skills someone has, and that's the skill validation piece of things. And I've heard from employers that it's a crowded, crowded marketplace out there right now, as far as what the credentials mean and what it looks like and how they can consume them. I've heard from my colleagues at the SHRM Foundation that that it, you know, they spend somewhere between four to six seconds HR leader sends to spend somewhere between four to six seconds on resumes and as part of that hiring process. So how can I make sense of all of these credentials and information that's coming in in this new skills based marketplace. And so that's one piece of it, the other one, and one of those problems, is that that the skills continuum from learning the skills documentation of those skills, transfer those skills, and then using those skills for each to communicate something, whether that's into a higher ed degree, into another higher ed learning experience, or into some sort of employment, those systems are broken because you have your education systems working and trying to get in play in this marketplace, you have your workforce support organizations that are are talking about skills and doing their skills, and you have your employers who are doing the same thing, and most folks are in their own silos, in their own organizational sectors, trying to figure this stuff out, but the systems are not being connected together. How do we think about connecting those systems? In fact, I have a colleague from Colorado who's involved in a project called the skills forward, work that's being doing, being done nationally. And she described the Colorado project, what's something they didn't know going into the project was and of course, she was using a metaphor, very Colorado issue of trees. And she says each organization as a group of trees. But what didn't exist were the roots in between to connect those systems, right? And so the projects I'm going to tell you, I'm going to talk to you about, are all about, how do we connect these systems, establish more trust and really allow these the conversations to happen around regions and industries, to leverage the economic change that we're trying to create. So the first one I'll talk a little bit about is in Texas right now. And in fact, they I just heard that there was new legislation that was being introduced to increase their crypto currency abilities. And you know, the Bitcoin developing Bitcoin resources. But right now, the area of Western Northern Texas, I'll say, from Dallas to Odessa is burgeoning forth with data processing centers, both traditional data processing centers and those that are more say on the crypto, Blockchain side of things. And there's a difference in those lines of industries. There's the same industry, but two tracks, because of the type of individuals that could be attracted, as far as talent that comes in the door to really work in those spaces. Right now, we're working on a project that is multifaceted. We started with the employers, did a number of salons, and heard and learned from the employers in this industry, what they needed, what their their deficits were, what was important. And then from there, we've been designing a project that will kick off in June and February with a convening, and we will have employers at the table. We will have education entities and alternative education entities, K 12, technical schools, universities, colleges at the table. We will have workforce and community based organizations at the table. And the idea is to create, is to get people, stakeholders, all in the room, having conversation and dialog, to create a flywheel around an industry and create a blueprint, trying to establish replicable blueprints that can create a connected talent ecosystem, which then attracts the industry, which is already coming to the region, because they already have like SpaceX coming to the region, and Google coming to the region, and Amazon coming to the region for these data centers. But if you want to have a successful industry movement like that, you've got to have the talent and so and because we, I know from my economic development partners that talent is one of the biggest things that you will they that is used in that space to attract i. A major industry to a region, and so we will be working over the next year and a half to create that dynamic ecosystem that can supply talent for the businesses that need it, that it will be an employer focused, business driven approach, and we will work with our education partners to help meet that pipeline, and hopefully, by the end of this entire project, we will also have those technological systems in place to make sure all of the entities are connected together and able to share the information and that skills visibility comes to the forefront. The Arizona work is all about doing for education, some of the ecosystem. Work you heard me describing in Texas, all of the higher ed entities, community colleges and universities in Arizona, are at the table having conversations about how they build their connected infrastructure so that they can minimize transition points for learners, high school into university, high school, into college, into the workforce, all these different back to college, back to university. And right now they're figuring out how they can consume credentials, much like we're trying to get employers to consume credentials in that space. They're the only that's the only project I know of that's really focused on the education side of things. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, I find it so interesting what you just said a moment ago. I mean, everything you just said was very interesting. But one thing that sticks out to me in what, and what you just raised Naomi, is this concept of employers need to see talent in the space in order to be attracted to the region, and yet, learners need to know that there are jobs available for them to go into, right? And so it's like, it's kind of, like this chicken or egg phenomenon of, like, where do you start, right? And I feel like that's that's such a big challenge in this work is figuring out how to, as you're saying, build that flywheel, but you have to ground it in some kind of a starting point, right? Like, so curious. I mean, if you have any thoughts or insights there around, like, how do you start, right? What do you need to show first in order to, like, get this work going well. Naomi Boyer: And there's actually a third element there that's even adding another wheel going in, that hamster there, which is, which is all, is all about the emergent fields, right? So there's a number of emergent industries. Historically, we've always worked from targeted occupation lists. Where's the gap, where's the need, what do we need to fill? Right? And when you're talking about emergent industries, whether that's AI like this, data processing, sustainable energy, right? We can go into automation, robotics, we can talk about all that, but they're emerging industries, and as a result, you don't necessarily have the workforce data to support that those jobs are needed, which is coming first? And how do you think about this in this particular case? How did it start? And I would say that this has probably got to be it's a huge element and insight for myself and learning this past year champion, there's a local champion who is driving the effort and basically saying, and he's, he's talking to people. He's attracting, attracting businesses. And he is a very successful businessman. He He's the, he owns Cholla Energy and Cholla Petroleum, and he's been called out in the in the literature, is the crypto cowboy, but, but he is that voice in the region that has really started the movement to get the traction, to get like, where do you start? It was with him. He's the power and the voice behind it, and then, as a result, that's created other levers to make things happen, and then there is local market data that can support that. There was already a number of data processing organizations that were beginning to work there. Julian Alssid: As you're speaking now. I mean, it's making me think, Kaitlin, of some of our work as well. I mean, a project we've been doing in my home state where I'm sitting right now, Rhode Island, with this helping to build a plan for workforce development in the life sciences industry. It's, yes, it's that chicken or egg issue with respect to economic development, but it's also like, you also don't want to train people for jobs that don't exist yet. So it's also trying to figure out, like, Well, what do we do currently, that we do well, that we can build on, that can then become the basis for the attraction and training people for future jobs. It's a real it's a very delicate dance. Naomi Boyer: You're exactly right, Julian, because it is. Because even as we're talking about data processing now, data processing isn't new, right? We've had...
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Brandon Busteed on the Power of Experiential Learning
01/07/2025
Brandon Busteed on the Power of Experiential Learning
Brandon Busteed, CEO of BrandEd, joins Work Forces to discuss the power of industry immersion in education. He shares his background as an edtech entrepreneur and executive at Kaplan and Gallup, and his journey to BrandEd, a company that partners with global brands like Sotheby's and The New York Times to offer experiential education programs built and taught jointly by industry leaders and academics. The conversation also explores the importance of hands-on learning and how better align educational experiences with the world of work. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Welcome back. We're excited to be kicking off season four of Work Forces. Julian Alssid: As we kick off this new season, we're looking forward to diving into topics that resonate with you, our listeners, and connect with our consulting work as well. Kaitlin LeMoine: One topic that's top of mind for us is how to most effectively prepare learners for the jobs and careers they enter upon graduation. We're seeing more of an emphasis on models that bridge education and work, from work based learning to apprenticeships and internships. Julian Alssid: With increasing skill demand, we know that students need more experience when they graduate, whether from high school or post secondary programs. And in our work, we're involved with initiatives that are tackling this issue from different levels, from community colleges to statewide consortia. Kaitlin LeMoine: We're looking forward to our discussion with today's guests to explore how corporations can act as a driver of high quality industry aligned education. Brandon Busteed is the CEO of BrandEd, a family owned education company that partners with global brands like Sotheby's and the New York Times to offer experiential learning courses. He's a passionate advocate for work integrated learning, and believes the future of education will seamlessly blend learning and work environments. With a background as an ed tech entrepreneur and executive at Kaplan and Gallup, Brandon brings a wealth of experience to his current role. He's a recognized thought leader in education and workforce development, having founded a successful ed tech company and authored numerous articles and publications, Brandon is also a sought after speaker and serves on the boards of several organizations dedicated to improving education and workforce outcomes. We're thrilled to have him join us today for a deep dive into the exciting intersection of learning and work. So welcome to the Work Forces podcast, Brandon. Brandon Busteed: Yeah, thanks that to me is the most exciting intersection to be in the middle of, and I know you guys in your podcast have sat at that intersection as well, so I'm glad that we had an opportunity to meet up virtually here. Thanks for having me. Julian Alssid: Well, yeah, it is great to have you Brandon. And yes, we often use the that analogy of the intersection and what a messy intersection it is, but for people like you who help help us all trying to make sense of this crazy intersection. So yes, welcome. Kaitlin gave a little bit of your background, but we'd love to hear in your own words -- about your background and your current role at BrandEd. Brandon Busteed: Yeah. So you know, as you guys noted, I started down this education path literally right out of college as an undergrad. If you had asked me my senior year in college whether I was going to be in the education space, I would have probably told you no, really wasn't on the radar. And then, you know, I started a company. I started an education company that was focused on addressing a really important issue of college binge drinking, which at the time was, you know, at the top of the list of concerns among college leaders. And so that was, you know, kind of my first run as a founder and CEO of outside the classroom and in a very specific space, trying to address dangerous drinking and other drinking related behaviors on campus. And you know, when the organization was acquired, I had an opportunity to go help Gallup build an education and workforce development division. And that really in terms of, you know, where, where I am at. BrandEd is a bit of my origin story to why BrandEd. Because you guys may recall that during that time, Gallup issued this massive study on the outcome of college graduates. It was, you know, under the heading of the Gallup-Purdue Index, and to this day, still the largest representative study that's ever been done, looking at college graduates and their outcomes in work and in well being and other dimensions. And what was so important about that study was that work-integrated learning opportunities, if a student had one during college, doubled their odds of being successful later in life, not just from a workplace engagement perspective, but in their overall well being. And so if you think about the secret ingredients of education or the secret ingredients of college, one of the big aspects is work integrated learning. And Kaitlin, as you were doing the introduction, there's a lot of different derivatives of what we would call work integrated learning, but specifically it was things like whether a student had an internship where they were able to apply what they were learning in the classroom, that connectivity was really important, long term projects that took a semester or more to complete, again, mimicking more of a real world work environment. And so I pause on that part of my Gallup experience, because as I left and went to Kaplan and was able to work in a global role at Kaplan, specific to education, I was spending a lot of time looking at the learning and work intersection that included work that we did with Amazon and their Career Choice Program for upskilling their frontline workers, and even, you know, innovative options for high school students in enabling them to have a better understanding of jobs and careers, so that they could better understand what they should major in during college, right? So, so all that led to why BrandEd you know, I've been at BrandEd for just under a year now, and in simple terms, I looked at what they were doing and to me, and I won't take any credit for it, because I said this prior to my arrival, but there's no doubt that BrandEd is doing the world's best industry immersive education. And what do I mean by that? Right? We work with iconic brands, as you mentioned, organizations like the New York Times or Sotheby's or Manchester City, and we develop just incredibly engaging and exciting educational programs that are co taught by industry experts and educational experts that give students real, hands on experiences and applications. It gives them behind the scenes access to these organizations in the industry and access, not just to one but many experts from those industries to understand the incredible diversity of jobs that one could have in the art industry or the fashion industry or the sport business industry. And so I was excited to be part of that, and have, you know, been thrilled to be coming up on almost a year here so far. Kaitlin LeMoine: So can you tell us a little bit about the history of BrandEd? How did it start? And, you know, kind of, what was the, what was the impetus for, for the organization? Brandon Busteed: Yeah, I've had a few friends joke thinking that I must have started my own company because, you know, I called it BrandEd. It's just a coincidence that it happens to be, you know, very closely aligned my name, because BrandEd has been around for a good 20 plus years, Kaitlin, and it started with, interestingly enough, the acquisition of Sotheby's Institute of Art out of Sotheby's the Auction House. So Sotheby's had started Sotheby's Institute of Art, some 55 years ago as an educational institution that would train the future leaders of the art industry. And although, from the beginning, they certainly had the idea that it would help train future leaders at Sotheby's, they were very innovative in their thinking, in that they also knew it would be the kind of place that would contribute to talent and leaders in the industry writ large. And, you know, that's a consistent theme that I've seen in all of the brand partners we work with, you know, the New York Times. We run the school of New York Times that's a pre college program for high school students. But they very much see their their role as contributing to, you know, students going into the field of journalism having a better understanding of what the different roles are within that industry. And not just for the New York Times, but for the entire industry, if you will, media and journalism. Same thing can be said for the work we do with Manchester City and with Vogue and so anyway, the starting point was that acquisition, interestingly enough, of an educational institution being run inside of a company, realizing that education wasn't their wheelhouse, it wasn't their core focus, but that it had an important role in the world, and looking to an organization like BrandEd to run it in a, you know, highly professional academic way where there was a lot of alignment to educational outcomes. Similarly, the organization acquired what was then called Conde Nast College of Fashion out of Conde Nast, it was recently rebranded Vogue College of Fashion, so that's what it is now. And then we partnered with, I'd say, an organic partnership with both the New York Times and Manchester City in developing the programs there. So it's a really interesting example of a couple that were educational institutions started inside of companies that were very forward thinking and how they viewed talent development and talent development, not just for their organization, but for the industry in general, and then others who just saw the value of, you know, partnering to do this. Because I would say, if you ask me, what some of the secret sauce of our BrandEd programs is, it's a really simple example, but it's a powerful one, and it's co teaching. You know, we, we always have examples where a school invites somebody in to give a guest lecture. That's great. It's usually a one time thing. There's not a lot of prep. That person might be really great, engaging or not so much. You know, all the programs we do, they're co designed, curated, developed and taught by the industry experts and educational experts, which you would think of as teachers or faculty. I don't think that's unique to BrandEd, I think we do it in a world class way, but that's an example, I think, of where other educational organizations can make big strides in scaling this industry immersive opportunity. It's not rocket science, you know, but that co teaching is actually just a really rare example right now. Julian Alssid: Yeah, it's so interesting. Brandon hearing you, kind of talk about the history of the companies being so kind of at the forefront, and this notion of this immersive approach. But I also think back to the study you referenced when you were a Gallup that produced that big study. And it does seem like, and I don't know if this is chicken or an egg or whatever, but that study was big, and it, you know, it would highlight this issue about the work based learning component being so impactful, it seems that this has become way more of a storyline in workforce development than it was back then. And I'm curious from where you're sitting now, and since you did that study, like, why? What's going on? In your opinion, that's made this more front and center than ever before. Brandon Busteed: Yeah, look, I think the biggest driver is just when, when the price tag of education goes up, and especially higher education, and when the number one reason why people value higher education is to get a good or better job there starts to become a more rigorous return on investment calculation being done by prospective students and their families as they evaluate it, right? And, you know, if you say, hey, the number one reason why I value this degree or I'm going to pursue it is to get a good or better job, and you don't feel like that's happening, or that you're being, you know, really sufficiently prepared for that next step. Well, that, I think, is one of the big, big drivers, right? Cost has been going up. Doubts about the work, readiness of graduates has been going up as well. And so you've got a perfect storm of, I don't believe we're doing a good job of this work, you know, preparation or career readiness thing, and it's getting more and more expensive. And, oh, by the way, there's a lot of other interesting alternatives, right? And so it's been the backdrop of that. But, yeah, look, I think that study made a meaningful contribution to the thinking of the higher ed community around Wow, this is a valuable component. We do it, but we don't do it at scale like that was the big finding Julian from my study. About a third of college graduates had a job or internship where they were able to apply what they were learning in the classroom. So it's not zero, but two thirds are missing the mark. And you know, there's fresh data just this year from the Business-Higher Ed Forum that kind of speaks to this. There were 8.2 million college students who wanted an internship last year. Only 3.6 million got one, and of those, only 2.5 million had what they called a quality experience in that internship, right? Because we all know there's internships that are really great and some that are total duds. Well, what I take from that data? First, I'm a huge fan of internships. There aren't many people that are a bigger fan of internships than me, but you also realize they don't scale. So there's no data to suggest that the number of internships in the United States has increased over the last 30 or 40 years. Clearly, demand for it is sky high. And so you say, Okay, if you can get an internship grade. But short of that, what are the other ways that we can bring this valuable experience to more students at greater scale, and that's obviously why, you know, I'm so excited about the work that we're doing at BrandEd. I think we're going to make a meaningful contribution to that. Kaitlin LeMoine: So as you're talking about your learners, Brandon, who are your learners, and how do you reach them? Brandon Busteed: We work across the board, Kaitlin with each of our brand partners. We have pre college programs for high school students, primarily 10th, 11th and 12th graders. So that's clearly a big demographic that we serve, is current high school students who are looking to augment their high school academic experience with, you know, something that is really industry immersive. And we also serve undergraduate college students with opportunities to study away or study abroad, where, instead of the traditional study abroad experience, they're doing an industry immersive program with one of our brands, and then with Vogue and Sotheby specifically, we do operate master's degree programs within both of those organizations. So at Sotheby's, you know, we're known probably most prominently for our masters in our business, you would expect an organization like Sotheby's Institute of Art to probably have a degree like that. So, you know, within those two brands, we're serving Master's Degree students, but in terms of the largest volume of students that we're serving by number, it's clearly pre college students and undergraduates who are looking to add a valuable industry immersive experience to their otherwise academic portfolio. Julian Alssid: So Brandon, as you build out these immersive experiences with these global brands, what are the major successes and challenges you faced? Brandon Busteed: Yeah, look, I mean, you know, part of it is what we've invested a lot of time and energy and years as an organization and refining the, you know, the aspects of, how do you take the best of what you can learn in a work environment with the best of what academics do in terms of curating something that you know looks like an academic, you know, syllabus or schedule that has building sequential pieces to it, reflective components. You know, think about in the workplace. You know, how little we take time to reflect or digest a project, or be like, Hey, how did that go? You know, cutting edge organizations do a good job with debriefing and certain things like that. But anyway, to your good question, a lot of it has been refining the blending of these two worlds, right? And, you know, you've, you've all heard it. You know, a lot of academics who are trained in educational pedagogy have rarely had experiences outside of academia. And you know, they went, they went to graduate school for education, you know, they have a master's degree, but you know, relatively little work experience outside of being a student and outside of working in an academic environment. And then with a lot of the subject matter experts we work with, who have real jobs and real organizations, right? They haven't been trained in educational pedagogy. They haven't thought about, well, how do I make this engaging for a high school student? And so it's really been the efforts that we've invested in training both our educational experts or faculty and our industry experts, and then getting them to work together. Because, like I said, it's not Hey, invite a guest lecture in, and they do their talk and leave like, these are things that are co designed, curated together, developed together. And so that's our biggest challenge and opportunity. We've honed in on that craft. Doing that requires real effort. You know, I can't launch a brand new program without having some pretty good lead up time in terms of the work involved in producing it, whether that's an in person or an online program. And then the other thing where, you know, we bring this to life for students, it has some natural limitation, is access to behind the scenes things right? Students who come into a Sotheby's program are visiting the Auction House. They're, you know, they're getting a behind the scenes look at the organization in ways that you know you just, you just can't replicate otherwise. So I think our our biggest opportunities, like everything else, are indeed scale, but we've developed a model that has a lot more scale than an internship model or a co op model, so, but fundamentally, there are still those limitations like I've provided. Julian Alssid: So Kaitlin asked you, we tend to think of this as a dual customer kind of business, right? Your learners, your employers, who are the faculty? Brandon Busteed: So it's any number of folks in various roles within both our partner organizations and folks within the broader like sport industry, for example. So you take the school, The New York Times, probably about half of the faculty in The New York Times are indeed staff members or former staff members from The New York Times. The other half are a combination of folks that have had journalism backgrounds for other organizations, right? Et cetera. So it's a mix of both staff from the organizations we partnered with, and then staff from the industry. But again, underneath that layer, Julian, it's an industry expert, and what we would think of as a teaching or educational expert. So we have general education faculty who are partnering with the subject matter experts to...
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Siya Raj Purohit on AI in Education
12/17/2024
Siya Raj Purohit on AI in Education
Siya Raj Purohit is an education leader, author, and investor who works on education at OpenAI and is a General Partner at Pathway Ventures, an early-stage fund investing in the future of learning and work. Siya joins us to discuss the transformative role of AI in education and work. The conversation explores significant applications of OpenAI in education, including personalized learning experiences, dynamic content engagement, and AI-assisted knowledge work. We delve into the practical aspects of implementing AI in educational settings, addressing misconceptions, and highlighting the evolving skills needed for effective AI utilization. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoin: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Can you believe it? Julian, it feels like just yesterday we were kicking off season three with Kermit Kaleba. Julian Alssid: I know time flies when you're having fun and exploring the future of work. This season has been a whirlwind of insights and inspiration, and it's the gift that keeps on giving. It's the best seminar I've taken and with no final exam. Kaitlin LeMoine: Absolutely And speaking of gifts, the richness of this podcast season comes from the recurring themes that weave throughout each episode. We've seen how these themes are shaping the thinking of our listeners and informing our own consulting work. Julian Alssid: Yeah, one of the most powerful themes has been the undeniable connection between education and the evolving needs of the labor market. And Kermit really emphasized the importance of building high quality credentialing programs and aligning education with those needs. Kaitlin LeMoine: Right. And then Sasha Thackaberry opened our eyes to the innovation and flexibility happening and Workforce Solutions, especially with technology driven upskilling. We also had insightful discussions with Michael Horn about career development in a changing job landscape, and Matt Marino on addressing healthcare talent gaps through tech. And an undercurrent throughout our conversation in Season 3, and really over the past year and a half since we started this podcast, has been the impact of artificial intelligence on education and work. Julian Alssid: Yeah, it certainly seems like all roads these days are leading to AI and technology and education, and it's clear that technology is playing a pivotal role in reshaping the entire educational landscape. Kaitlin LeMoine: Which brings us to today's guest Siya Raj Perohit is an education leader, author, and investor. She works on education at OpenAI and is a general partner at Pathway Ventures, an early stage fund investing in the future of learning and work. Siya was an early employee at Udacity and Springboard an investor at GVB Ventures and the founding edtech workforce category lead for AWS Marketplace. She's the author of Engineering America, a book on the country's job skills gap. We're thrilled to have her insights as we wrap up this season. So welcome to the workforces podcast, Siyal. Siya Raj Purohit: Hi. Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed your conversation with Michael Horn a few weeks ago. Julian Alssid: Yes, we appreciate that. So Siya, Kaitlin's given a little intro, but we'd love to have you tell us about your background and your current role with open AI. Siya Raj Purohit: So, I started working in education when I was 18 as a student in college, I quickly recognized like the job skills gap that exists, like American universities were not teaching the skills that students needed to land jobs in the industry, especially in the technology industry. So I did this research project that became the book that you mentioned, Engineering America, that was published when I was 19. So I was a sophomore, and at that point, I'm like, okay, I want to help fix this problem, because I felt so deeply about people getting locked out of their potential careers and like new socio economic classes because they weren't learning skills in the way that made sense to them. So since then, they've been trying to bridge the job skills gap in some ways, and trying to make education more accessible. So that led me to the startups, to venture capital, to AWS, and I joined Open AI, because honestly, in the 12 years I've been in education, personalized learning always seemed like the ultimate goal for the education sector. We always said that if we achieve personalized learning, we've made it. And I think with ChatGPT, we actually achieved it. Now I have a personalized tutor that I talk to every day. It knows my skills. It knows the goals I have. It knows the projects I'm working on, and it helps me become a better knowledge worker. And my aspiration on the education team at OpenAI is to help students and faculty all around the world be able to utilize that more effectively. Kaitlin LeMoine: That's really, really appreciate your background and kind of what brought you to this space. And I think it's really interesting to think about ChatGPT and AI as as a personalized learning tool or resource. As we dive into this conversation today, can you tell us some of the most significant applications of open AI and education that you're seeing and you know what's what's exciting to you at this point and what's catching your attention? Siya Raj Purohit: So just for context, ChatGPT launched two years ago, and we quickly realized that learning and teaching were some of the main use cases for ChatGPT, like that's how our users were using it. So about six months ago, we launched ChatGPT Edu. Which is our enterprise product designed for universities and school districts to be able to integrate AI in different aspects of campus life. So now students, faculty and staff, can engage in all of these dynamic conversations with the knowledge of the university campus. So from like orientation through classrooms through Career Services, they can have like different types of AI solutions that help students learn better and engage more effectively with the university's knowledge base. So that's what I'm spending a lot of time working on right now, trying to make ChatGPT Edu successful at universities. And when we think about what is working, well, ChatGPT Edu is really good at three things. One is around lecture recall, so basically anything around information retrieval. And so professors are building custom solutions in their classes, uploading their teaching recordings, their case studies, their different types of materials, and letting students engage with it by asking very precise questions. So now you can ask questions, like in a business class, you can ask, Which CEO handle layoffs well? And get the exact examples from what your professor teaches. And this has been like, a huge game changer, because now you're able to, like, converse with, like, the whole semester's worth, or whole degrees worth of content, very dynamically. Another example is like another thing we're really good at is around back and forth exercises. So a lot of negotiation professors suggest that students go back and forth with AI to practice negotiation before they come into the classroom, so they feel much more comfortable when they start practicing with like their peers. This is also true in career services. So Career Services teams are building custom gpts that let students go back and forth, practicing with the McKinsey recruiter, McKinsey partner, and just using the university's proprietary information to get better at these back and forth interactions. And finally, I think thought partnership is really important, so like a ChatGPT collaborates on different types of articles, research assignments, any type of knowledge work the students, faculty and staff are doing. The coolest example I've heard of this recently is a professor at University of Maryland told me that they uploaded their like past 20 case studies and articles they've written, and now they talk to the virtual version of themselves on GPT to create new articles to kind of think more deeply about the next iteration of their research, which is so powerful. Julian Alssid: Wow, it is. It's just incredible to hear how you described it in these very practical terms. It'd be really interesting to hear a little bit about what sort of training is needed, both for students and professors to do kind of what you're talking about. So these use cases you've described, you know, obviously you've been honing your own craft with your own assistant, your own coach. How do folks in the schools do this? Siya Raj Purohit: Looking in the next couple of years, the most important skill knowledge workers need to have is the ability to clearly articulate what they're looking for, like, what they're hoping for as an output, and then they then work backwards and be able to ask the right questions to get to that output. So I think when I think about AI literacy for like, someone who's not developing AI systems, that's all they need to be able to do well at the moment. And AI systems will get better also, so they'll have more of a sense of what you're asking for beforehand, too. But with that said, I think a lot of schools are building great content around this to help enable their faculty and their students. Wharton has this amazing channel online on YouTube about like aI literacy, and they're creating a lot of really good content there. We have built two courses to help enable this. One is with Coursera and Ethan Malik, and basically, in that course, Ethan Malik talks about AI literacy for higher ed instructors, and helps provide some custom gbts and examples to get them started on their own AI journey in their classroom. We also built a course with common sense education that's more designed for K 12 educators, and that's like to think about how teachers can use AI in the classroom to become more productive and to be able to offload some tasks such as like lesson planning and grading and make it easier for them to do that with AI. Kaitlin LeMoine: I feel like you know, over the last couple of years, as AI has unfolded, Siya and still is right as far as the impact and how different use cases in in education, and, frankly, in many industries, it's been interesting to hear conversation, you know, in comments about like, well, is this? Is AI going to take people's jobs? Is AI going to, you know, make it so that either some jobs go away or less relevant. And you know, what does it mean for learners to be learning when there are tools that can kind of more readily just give them the content? What's your thinking around what you know, what's your latest thinking around how AI is? Impacting education and how how students learn. Siya Raj Purohit: Personally, I get very surprised when educators express this, because when I think back to the educators that have had a big impact in my journey, I remember them for who they were and how they made me feel like I don't remember their lesson plans or like the quizzes that they gave us. I remember who they told me I could become, and this is true for both K 12 and in higher ed. So I honestly think that AI is gonna help curb the teacher burnout problem in many ways, and I didn't recognize this until the school district in Arizona started telling me about how it's freeing up so much time for their teachers to be able to focus on students now, because they can actually do like lesson planning, assignment building on with AI, and then they can actually engage with the students more deeply, which is so powerful. And I think that's the shift we're going to see, as we all know, in education, teachers spend so much time outside of the classroom preparing for that amazing experience they deliver in the classroom, and we want to help make that easier. So supporting those teachers and educators as knowledge workers with AI and letting them focus on helping students feel more inspired and mentored in their classrooms. Julian Alssid: Yeah, that's great, doing what really sticks for us, right? So, so see from your perspective, working with educational institutions. What are, what are some of the biggest misconceptions or challenges they face when it comes to understanding and implementing AI? Siya Raj Purohit: The biggest misconception, which like, basically, ChatGPT, of course, launched two years ago for the first year. As you may recall, a lot of school districts and universities banned ChatGPT. They were like, we don't have to deal with this yet. We're just gonna take away laptops if we have to, but we're not gonna provide this, right? But something shifted about nine or 10 months ago. My thinking is that education influencers like EthanMollick, I think, destigmatized AI in education and actually showcased the value of AI in education, and that made it a lot more acceptable for like, other educators to start kind of experimenting with it. And now across the country, we're seeing like a range of professors who are doing incredible work in their classrooms and on the campuses with AI. So I think that shift has been super interesting that's happened, and my feeling is that in the next year, it's going to accelerate a lot more. We'll have a lot more professors doing interesting things. We'll get to the main part of the adoption curve and education for AI, and have the first set of professors basically help, like, help share their knowledge with other professors in their discipline. So I've been hosting some events in our OpenAI forum, talking about, like, the future of math, or talking about the future of digital marketing education and letting professors showcase the work they're doing in those verticals with other professors in the industry. So I think that shift is happening. I think what it's going to require is to professors to, like, basically rethink a lot of their assignments. One of my favorite examples of this is there's a Wharton professor who says, what is the value of an essay, which used to be his final project for several years, as He taught his class, he says that the value of an essay is not necessarily in its output, but in the critical thinking and communication skills that lead to that output. So now he suggests his students all use ChatGPT Edu while working on the assignment, and he measures the number of prompts it takes for a student to get to an essay that they're satisfied with. Some students are so good at prompt engineering it takes like two or three prompts and they have a really good essay. And some students go back like 19 or 20 times to get to a good essay. And he uses that as a measure of their ability to articulate what they're looking for, which he thinks is a very key skill for them when they go into enterprise and have ChatGPT enterprise accessible to them as well. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, it's really interesting to think about. You know, how the use of this tool makes us be more specific about what are the skills we're really looking for learners to demonstrate, and how do we go about prompting, no pun intended, the demonstration of those skills. But and see, as you know, you're talking about the higher ed space, I'm curious as to how you're seeing this trickle down to K 12, and what does it mean for, what does this technology mean for for K 12, and how even like high school learners now need to be prepared to enter college, right? And maybe some of that, obviously, is still unfolding, but I'm just curious to hear your thoughts there. Siya Raj Purohit: So right now we our product in K 12 is only for teachers and administrators and education leaders. We don't have a youth product right now and how it's being used, basically is for teachers as knowledge workers, as far as high school students who use it independently. I think that teachers need to be able to provide more instruction on how to think about this ChatGPT can be a really good tool to basically elevate your thinking and to kind of understand. And more about what all is possible for you, and I think we need to be able to communicate that more, versus this being a tool to get through homework more easily. And so I think that conversation needs to be had, and it's similar to the conversation I think we had about 15 years ago, when search became more mainstream, about yes, you can find your answers, but you can also kind of elevate your thinking in different ways by learning so much more on the internet with search. Julian Alssid: Yeah. So Siya now, so Kaitlin pulled us into K 12, and now thinking about the other end of the spectrum, because, you know, eventually these students are going to work and and, of course, work and learning are so interconnected these days, and really interested in hearing your perspective on the impact of AI on the future of work, both short term and then long term, because I think there are two multiple use cases there. Siya Raj Purohit: So short term, it's obviously helping us be able to solve like tasks throughout our day, like I used to think of as productive, and I used to work at Amazon, but now, with that AI and OpenAI, I just produce so much more every day. And it's like, unbelievable the difference, because when I, like, I talked to ChatGPT all day, it helps me with, like, the different projects and reports I'm building. But I think the most powerful unlock for me, and this is a story I love talking about because I think more people should experience. This is the moment, what I call the moment that ChatGPT and I became friends. So three months into being a power user of the product, I asked ChatGPT one day, I'm like, do you remember that project we made from my manager last month? And ChatGPT says, Yes, Siya, I remember, and for some reason that was such a powerful moment, because we were immediately able to start collaborating on the next iteration of that project with like, the shared memory and understanding of like the final product they submitted. And that was like, so cool, because ChatGPT became this friend that remembers my projects, my work, my aspirations, and helps me deliver better every day and so and of course, memory is a feature you can turn off if you don't appreciate it, but I find it valuable because, like, it helps me so much on a day to day basis. So I think this is what's happening in the immediate term. And what really worries me is that there's a consulting firm that did a study showcasing that even the lowest performing consultants started performing like the best consultants once given Ai because they were able to use this tool to produce better product output. And so what concerns me there is that what happens to people who don't use AI, right? Like, and it's not like ChatGPT specific, like any type of AI tool to accelerate the work that they're doing. It's like super essential. So longer term, I hope that people are able to achieve more like there's a professor at Harvard Business School, Jeffrey Bussgang, who says that all founders should be AI founders at this point in their startups, and basically use this as a compliment to a lot of the CXOs that they hire early in the game. And so I think we need to be able to utilize it more to build bigger and bigger systems over time. Julian Alssid: It's so it's so interesting to me, how, as you describe it, you know, here you are doing dealing with this on a partnership building level with these big institutions, but how personal it really is for you, and how it comes from this very personal...
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Julia Freeland Fisher & Luther Jackson: The Power of Networks
12/03/2024
Julia Freeland Fisher & Luther Jackson: The Power of Networks
Career success requires more than just skills. Luther Jackson, workforce development expert and Non-Resident Fellow at Brookings Metro, and Julia Freeland Fisher, Director of Education Research at the Clayton Christensen Institute and author of Who You Know, join Work Forces to unpack the critical role of social capital in navigating today's turbulent labor market. They discuss the "network gap" and how intentional relationship-building can open doors to opportunity, especially for those from underserved communities. Tune in to learn practical strategies and discover how institutions can become catalysts for connection. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Julian Alssid: Many of our conversations are about skills and different models of skill development and how we all need to carry our skills from one job to another along our career journeys. Kaitlin LeMoine: But we also recognize that career success is not driven by skill attainment alone. One area that we're excited to dive into today is the importance of social capital along an individual's career journey, and we're excited to have our guests on today to explore this topic further. Luther Jackson is a workforce development expert based in Silicon Valley with a focus on preparing individuals from underserved communities for careers in high growth sectors. With extensive experience at the NOVA Workforce Development Board, he has led initiatives preparing individuals from historically excluded communities for well being careers in high growth industry sectors including software development and zero emission transportation. His work also emphasizes the importance of lifelong learning, professional networks and broad access to career opportunities. A non resident Fellow at Brookings Metro. Jackson also serves on several boards, including Hack the Hood and the Everett Program. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a former labor union leader and journalist. And Julia Freeland Fisher is the Director of Education Research at the Clayton Christensen Institute. The Institute's research educates policy makers and community leaders on the power of disruptive innovation in the K-12 and higher education spheres. Julia is the author of who you know, unlocking innovations that expand students networks. Her work focuses on innovations that deepen and diversify students stock of social capital by enhancing their access to and ability to navigate peer mentor and professional networks. Julia started her career at New Schools Venture Fund. She holds a BA from Princeton University and a JD from Yale Law School. Welcome to you both. We're so excited to have you on the workforces podcast today. Julia Freeland Fisher: Thank you. So excited to be here with Luther. Luther Jackson: Great to be here. Thank you. Julian Alssid: We get a twofer today, two experts for the price of one. Oh no, we don't charge for this podcast. I forgot. So to kick us off, would love to hear you talk a bit about your respective backgrounds and how you've connected in this work. And Luther, why don't you go first? Luther Jackson: Sure. Well, again, I'm delighted to be here, particularly because I'm such a big fan of the podcast. My interest in social capital started early on in my tenure at NOVA workforce development in Silicon Valley. Our director at the time, Khris Stadelman, asked me to focus on workforce trends in tech, which, of course, is Silicon Valley's hometown industry, I came to learn of job seekers who, in my mind, checked all of the boxes for career success. They had graduated with advanced degrees from prestigious universities, and they had many years of experience in software development and related tech disciplines, and yet some had been unemployed for many months. So clearly something was missing. So this started me on a quest to understand what I call the career success equation. In 2014 we at NOVA surveyed and interviewed 120 tech professionals to help inform this equation, and we basically wanted to know, how are they able to thrive in a chaotic economy when a given day, some tech companies are laying off and hiring. Based on our findings, we wrote a report called Bridge to Career Success, and subsequently identified what we call the Five Truths of Career Success, what it takes to remain relevant in a disruptive economy. And those truths are self awareness, networking, relationship management, organizational reading, and mentorship. Well, guess what? These are all related to social capital. The Five Truths became the basis of career navigation curricula we developed for job seekers in both the heart of Silicon Valley and in historically excluded communities in the Bay Area. When I left Nova last year to start a consulting career, I knew I wanted to learn more about social capital programming and how it could be applied in the workforce and education ecosystem. So I talked to a number of national leaders who basically said, before you go out there and try to reinvent the wheel, you should be Julia Freeland Fisher. She's the reigning expert on this topic. Well, you know what? They were, right? And here we are. Julian Alssid: Great. So, perfect segue. So Julia, your background and a little bit more about your connection. Julia Freeland Fisher: Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much. Luther, I mean, I have to say, being called the reigning expert is such a compliment, but it's also a testament to how boutique this topic remains so excited to be getting the message out there on this podcast. Yeah, so I think somewhat similar to Luther, but not at the same sort of level as a practitioner, I arrived at this topic of social capital feeling like we were talking about a very incomplete equation of opportunity inside of education. So I started my career in K-12 ed reform, which for a long time, and still to this day, is very anchored on test scores, post secondary enrollment, post secondary attainment as kind of the metrics of success. So we tell students, get good grades, go to college and the rest will work out. And as we all know, that's a very incomplete sort of formula, and in particular, we actually know that an estimated half of jobs and internships come through personal connections, but that truth remains kind of part of this hidden curriculum. So I think it especially becomes a challenge when we're talking about issues of equity and whether learners and job seekers have inherited networks into the industries that they want to work in, or if we're telling them, go out and hustle and find them yourselves. So that's really led me to spending the last seven, eight years digging into new models for deepening and diversifying learners and job seekers networks what our institutions, our schools and workforce programs, need to do to be more purposeful about that, and really just trying to, I think, hold our systems to account for not just providing people with skills. To your point at the beginning, at the top of the podcast, Julian, but like, skills are what employers care about. Employers don't care if you have a network, but if you're an individual job seeker, you got to have a network. And so I think we have to really recalibrate, like, how much are we building programs simply catering to employer demand rather than actually catering to what individuals need? To have optionality in as Luther described, an incredibly turbulent and hard to predict labor market. So that's what's led me this topic. Really excited to be here. And, you know, I think Luther is a testament to someone on the ground who's done the hard work of trying to understand this complex mix of currencies in job seeking, and excited to really zero in on this one of social capital. Kaitlin LeMoine: Great. So I guess building on where you just left off, Julia, can you talk to us at a high level about what you know the work you've done. Can you tell us a little bit more about the research that you've conducted and the importance of tying your work to Luthers work? Because clearly you have quite the connection and a great partnership, and we'd love to learn more about that. Julia Freeland Fisher: I see this as like a supply and demand problem. So what are the supply of programs and tools that deepen, diversify people's networks, arm them with the skills and confidence to go out and mobilize their own network. So that's really on the program side, and then on the demand side. How are institutional leaders and arguably philanthropy and investors paying attention to social capital and actually putting capital into financial capital into efforts to build it, you know, and what we've done over the years is really tight and try and document among programs. And I'm using programs loosely here. We could talk about a local nonprofit, a large, national nonprofit, anyone really focused on helping students and job seekers advance in their careers. Among programs that treat social capital as a programmatic outcome. What are they doing? And when I say, let me just double click on programmatic outcome, that means they are measuring their participants social capital gains alongside things like skills and credentials. So we identified, back in 2019 about 20 programs nationally that were doing that we dug in on what are the designs that they are pursuing? What is the data they're collecting to track whether their participants are, in fact, growing their networks in the course of their intervention, and even, what are they doing with their sort of alumni networks to ensure that relationships outlast interventions? One of the things I think we can all think of as individuals on this podcast and hopefully your listeners as well, is that, in an ideal world, your network is a renewable resource. It's not like you call up a friend or acquaintance once and it's one and done. New things come up in your life and you shoot them a text or an email. Luther as what I would consider a sort of medium to weak tie, right? We don't talk on a daily basis, but there's something in sociology called the strength of weak ties, which is that you're more likely to find new opportunities through your weak tie network. Guess why I'm on this podcast, because Luther invited me, right? And so, so thinking about really like, how are programs set up so that relationships outlast the interventions that they're doing with their participants. You can go to whoyouknow.org to find a bunch of examples of those program models, but that's really been the core of our work on the supply side, just trying to get under the hood of like, if you're designing for this, what does it actually look like? What do the ratios need to look like in a staff to student or staff to job seeker ratio sense, all of that kind of choreography. And then quickly, just on the demand side. You know, in an ideal world, every college president, head of workforce board, head of a nonprofit, would be prioritizing social capital as programmatic outcome, and that is simply not happening. That's partly because there's not a payer for it, right? Employers will pay for upskilling all day, but they're not going to pay, like I said, for networks. So I spent a lot of time trying to particularly influence philanthropy on this front to say, if you guys are putting patient capital into new models, new pathways to careers, you've got to help people design for social capital. And so I run a network of funders focused on on that. Kaitlin LeMoine: So Luther, transitioning over to you, please share your perspective on some of what Julia just shared, and how you see this playing out from a programmatic standpoint. Luther Jackson: Well, I'm both optimistic and a little pessimistic. So I'm optimistic because I've heard Julia speak before. Julia, I heard your recording from from a conference, and I sat there kind of spell bound saying, This is it. I mean, it makes so much sense. It's what we know. But I'm pessimistic, because, as Julia said, that a lot of folks are not taking this up as important in our systems. And you know, if you ask any workforce leader, any education leader, how you got your first job, how you got your current job, they would, of course, say professional networks, but but yet, it's not ubiquitous, and that's what it needs to be. And I again, I think that this is essential for all learners, job seekers and incumbent workers, and particularly as regional economies nationwide become more disrupted. You know, we used to say that the fast changing Silicon Valley economy is coming attractions for the rest of America, and clearly, most people out there crave stability. And I think a lot of the national economic angst that we're seeing these days comes from this loss of once stable Industries, a sense of loss and lack of access to good jobs that their parents and grandparents had, and as Julia says, networking is a constant. It's not something that you do when you need a job. This should just be part of your life. So we know what's important. We have the tools. Let's get about doing it. Julian Alssid: Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting hearing you both talk about this, and in light of, you know, the work Kaitlin and I are doing and looking to close, you know, hiring gaps and skills gaps and, yeah, I mean, I agree with you, Julia, that, you know, there's kind of no buyer for this, in a sense. But isn't, aren't they just being short sighted? I mean, if employers aren't getting the talent they're they're not hiring the ever diverse people out there who are the ones who are going to have to replace, the boomers who are going away, the educators are not getting, you know, the enrollments they need. I mean, and yet we know what the skills are for so many of the jobs, and there's skills training. So what's wrong with this picture? And you know, isn't it more than philanthropy? I mean, obviously there's no buyer to pay for it, but, and I get the notion of the funders group, but shouldn't the employers and higher ed people be kind of realizing that this is core to what they need as well? Julia Freeland Fisher: Yeah. I mean, I love the push Julian, and I would defer to you to our host, to comment even more on the employer front, because it's where I've spent less time. I mean, let me start with the higher ed side of this equation. If higher education were to shift to an outcomes based market, what many of us in the field have been calling for for basically decades, in an outcomes based market, networks will matter more. So that would be an incentive structure where, I think suddenly you'd see community colleges, colleges, universities paying way more attention to their alumni networks, which are currently vastly under capitalized. 90% of graduates say their alumni network was helpful in their in their professional lives, which is bonkers, right? Because if you look at the shiny pamphlet and why you're shelling out all these tuition dollars, you're ostensibly buying a network, but that's not actually playing out in the kind of ROI formula, necessarily. So that on higher ed I can get there more easily Julian, because I think it's sort of within the realm of possibility that that those policies kind of advance over time. When it comes to employers, I have major concerns. Yes, it's short sighted, Julian, and I think some would say, well, look at our CSR mentoring program like they're doing things kind of on the margins around talent development, particularly early in the pipeline, right? But not necessarily with this idea of a diverse network for the mentees in those programs. What I'm actually really worried about, I recently wrote an article about this, is that in the age of AI, I think this is about to get way worse. We're going to see the real elimination of what Ryan Craig calls the first rung of the career ladder, entry level jobs, and so the incentives to invest in young talent are actually moving in the wrong direction, because all of the things that we have relied on young talent, or early talent to do, or entry level talent to do is suddenly going to be replaced in large part, by AI and so I would love, Julian, to see these sort of employers looking out on the horizon, I just think we need a completely different infrastructure connecting education and work to get there, because I think in the current incentive structure, you don't see employers stepping in to play that role. You see them wanting articulation agreements with very particular programs to ensure they have hand picked individuals. But that's not the same thing as the scale play that we really need on both sides of the market frankly. Luther Jackson: Yeah, I do have a little good news on the employer front. So I'm familiar with the Biocom California Institute, which is part of the industry association for Life Sciences. They have a career readiness program for first generation college students, and these students already have technical expertise. They're biology majors, they're bio chem majors. They need professional networks and mentors, so they're very intentional about setting up these programs now, again, this is now kind of on a pilot basis, but still, I think that that's hopeful. The other thing I would say about AI is, and I could say this, I guess, being in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's a lot of hubris, obviously, around AI that we've sort of, you know, that AI could solve all of our problems, and what it doesn't fix is the whole idea of serendipity and being at the right place at the right time. And you can't really quantify that. But again, I could tell you lots of stories in my life, including how I got at NOVA, where I showed up at the right place at the right time. Julian Alssid: Great points Luther and Julia just, just to get back to the employer piece, I'm not even thinking of employers that are looking particularly far out, because, yes, AI is coming, and a lot of these jobs we're talking about are going away, but today, there are plenty of jobs in areas like biotech and advanced manufacturing where they're hurting for talent. And it would seem to me, this would be a really logical step to look at how they can help people network their way on in. Julia Freeland Fisher: To make more people a known quantity to the employer and vice versa. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's absolutely rational. I think what I have seen in my research is that we just have a real dearth. And we could talk for hours about this, so I won't belabor the point, but we have a real dearth of brokers in our society. People that are are those high touch matchmakers that are actually helping both parties come together? I mean, if you want any proof that that's the case, you don't even have to look in this in our industry. Just look at the loneliness epidemic, right? That is a lagging indicator on the fact that we don't have infrastructure dedicated to social connection at scale. And so, yeah, I think to not be totally negative, I think this is where there's new tools and models emerging that I think are doing amazing work. Career Spring is a nonprofit platform for any first generation student can log on and talk to an industry expert, and Career Spring, it's a nonprofit that has done all of the kind of vetting of people willing to have those conversations, so they're really scaling conversations that would otherwise be out of reach,...
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Michael Horn on Navigating the Evolving World of Work
11/19/2024
Michael Horn on Navigating the Evolving World of Work
Michael Horn, co-author of "Job Moves: Nine Steps for Making Progress in Your Career," joins us to discuss the changing landscape of job searching and career development. He introduces the "jobs to be done" theory, emphasizing the importance of understanding individual motivations and seeking progress in work and life. The conversation explores the distinction between career progression and career progress, highlighting the need for personalized approaches. Horn offers practical advice for job seekers, employers, and educators including reflective career planning for individuals and strategies for attracting and retaining talent, such as conducting "entry interviews" and creating more effective job descriptions. This episode provides valuable insights and actionable steps for job seekers and employers as they navigate the evolving world of work. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the show. Today, we're diving deep into a topic that's been on our minds lately, how the changing world of work is impacting job seekers, and what it means for those of us who support them. Julian: You know Kaitlin, it used to be that career paths were pretty straightforward. You'd go to school, get a job in a specific field, and kind of climb the ladder, but now things are so much more dynamic, and job seekers really need to be the drivers of their own careers. Absolutely. Kaitlin: Absolutely Julian, and that's where our guest today comes in. Michael Horn, along with co-authors Ethan Bernstein from the Harvard Business School and innovator and entrepreneur Bob Moesta has been researching and testing a new approach to job searching, one that recognizes the need for flexibility, adaptability and a deep understanding of personal motivations. They've captured their learnings in the forthcoming book, job moves nine steps for making progress in your career, which is being released in November of 2024. Julian: I'm really excited to hear about this new approach. I think it's going to be incredibly valuable for our listeners, those leaders in education, workforce development and and business who are guiding the next generation of workers. Kaitlin: So let's get right to it. Please join us in welcoming Michael Horn to Work Forces. Michael: Thanks so much. It's great to be with you guys. Julian: Great to be with you as well, Michael. And before we dive into the conversation, we want to share some more about your background. So in addition to your forthcoming book, Job Moves, In addition to forthcoming Job Moves, Michael is the author of several books including From Reopen to Reinvent: (Re)creating School for Every Child; the award-winning Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns; Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools; Choosing College; and Goodnight Box, a children’s story. He is the co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a non-profit think tank, and teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Michael co hosts the top education podcasts Future U and Class Disrupted and is a regular contributor to Forbes.com and writes the Substack newsletter, The Future of Education. Michael also serves as an executive editor at Education Next, and his work has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, and NBC. Michael serves on boards and advisory boards of a range of education organizations, including Imagine Worldwide, Minerva University, and Guild Education. He was selected as a 2014 Eisenhower Fellow to study innovation in education in Vietnam and Korea, and Tech&Learning magazine named him to its list of the 100 most important people in the creation and advancement of the use of technology in education. Michael holds a BA in history from Yale University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Michael: Yeah, I'm thrilled to be here, too. Don't hold the bio against me, I guess, but it's been, it's been a fun ride getting do a lot of things with a lot of you know. You both know a lot of these organizations. There's some great companies out there, great nonprofits doing some really cool work. So it's been fun to be affiliated and connected with them in different ways. Kaitlin: Absolutely. Well. And we really appreciate you taking the time to join us today, Michael, and as we get started, though we just gave your bio, we would love to have you tell us more about your background and in your own words and your most recent work. Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I got my start in this world of education and helping people improve their opportunity to live a purposeful life at the foremost of their potential. By accident, I was a student at the Harvard Business School, took Clay Christensen's class on disruptive innovation changed the way I saw the world. And he, one day, literally said, want to write a book with me about public education. And I signed up for it, and it changed my life. We started the Clayton Christensen Institute. And, you know, initially was a K-12 focus, over time, became a higher education focus, because I realized a lot of the problems in K-12 education were pretty hard to solve because they were dependent on higher education, and higher education had a lot of challenges, as you both know from the work that you've done in that arena. And then you look up again and you realize, well, higher education is struggling because the workforce has some challenges, right, and it's dependent on there. So you start working there, and I think that describes a lot of my journey. If I'm being serious about my purpose, which is helping all individuals build their passion and live lives of purpose, then working right across that spectrum is important. And Ethan and Bob, they both were mentored by Clay Christensen as well. Bob Moesta founded the jobs to be done theory with clay. They worked on that in the mid 1990s and Ethan, he's a professor now at the Harvard Business School, but he was a student of Clay's at the Harvard Business School, and Clay was one of his dissertation advisors, actually. So the three of us sort of were united by that, and then started having conversations among the three of us, which led us to this book, all in very different paths to it, but, but it's been, it's been a really cool collaboration. Julian: I didn't realize that you would all that you all have that connection with clay. That's, that's really cool. So, so what are the problems that you're solving for in Job Moves which, which is, is geared to job seekers. Michael: You know, the big thing, I would say, is that we observed, and not just in the data, right? You see the millions of people quitting during the Great Resignation, and then roughly at least 50% of them said, Actually, we regret that job switch that we just made, we're not landing in places. We see a billion people worldwide every year switching jobs. Hundreds of millions of them are disappointed. We know from Gallup and Pew and others that two thirds of employees are disengaged at work. Up to 60% of them are quiet quitting. And the reality is we looked at it, and frankly, we looked at it in our own lives, working with individuals, just all the advice to help people make progress in their career just wasn't working. And so the big thing we said is, how do we help people make progress? Because they are telling us that they are trying to use their careers and jobs and as they move through the labor market at increasing rates. Now every four years on average, and Gen Z seems to move even faster than that. They're using this to make progress in their careers and lives. But just the evidence is pretty clear, most of them are not succeeding, and so how do we help them make meaningful progress so they can, you know, have the outcomes that they want in their lives, with their families, in their communities, and on the job. Kaitlin: I loved that that notion in your book, Michael, about people seek progress in their lives and their work is part of it, right? I think that that notion just rings so true as we're as we're getting into this conversation you mentioned earlier on, the jobs to be done framework, in line of thinking, can you explain that a little bit to our audience around what is what? What is the jobs to be done theory? Michael: The jobs to be done theory originated, as I said, in the 1990s when Bob actually brought to clay a puzzle, which was, we have more data in the world. And even today, we have even more than that about, you know, which demographic is likely to buy a certain product or service, but it doesn't seem to be helping anyone. And their conclusion, as they looked at it was, it was all correlational noise, right? It doesn't actually explain the causal reason why someone says, today's the day I'm going to switch behavior, or I'm going to make a purchase, or I'm going to buy this service. And you know, as you all know from your work at Southern New Hampshire, today is the day I'm going to say, Okay, I'm going to stop doing what I was doing. Or I'm going to, you know, continue to work and enroll at Southern New Hampshire University. Like those are big switches. And what we realized is, it's rarely the product or service itself that they're desiring. It's more that they're trying to make progress in a struggling circumstance in their lives, and they hire something to help them make progress, right? So it sounds simple in some ways, but it's basically like people don't want quarter inch drills. They want the whole, the outcome, in a certain situation where that would be useful to them, whether it's hanging a painting in an art gallery or, in my case, you know, punching a hole through the wall to pull some Ethernet cable through that you know no one's ever going to stare at. And if you understand the circumstance and what progress looks like, then you can much more effectively design things that help them accomplish what we call those jobs to be done in their lives. So it's very demand side focus, as we say, it really wants to understand what does progress mean for that individual, and how can we better design experiences to help them unlock that progress. Julian: Picking up on that notion of progress then, in the book, you highlight career progression versus career progress. And so can we? Can we dig in a bit deeper there? Michael: Most people say, well, career progression, I get it. We're moving up the corporate ladder, the career ladder. You start as entry level, you move to mid level, you start to have a team reporting to you, director, right? You sort of we have these frameworks in our mind. But the reality is that as people's lives, as evidenced by the jobs that they do or don't take often and almost never, mirrors these days that career progression right? And it's because we make decisions out of an effort to make progress in our lives for all sorts of reasons, right? You know, sometimes, you know, when I stepped down as the executive director at the Clayton Christensen Institute, it was because I think we've talked about this Julian, you know, I had twins who are one year, and I was like, you know, I want to have a more flexible life. I don't want to have a team reporting to me. I want to be there more on more present. I'm going to step aside from this job on the paper like that didn't make any sense from a career progression point of view, but from a progress in my life perspective, understanding all the forces acting on me, it made perfect sense. And so that's really what we're trying to unpack here is that for some people, yes, they are on the career progression career ladder, and it is synonymous with what progress means to them. But for most of us, and I would say well over 75% of us, our sense of progress is not the same as progression, and progress is really what we call a demand side phenomenon as viewed from the individual employee, whereas progression is viewed from the perspective of org charts and companies and things of that nature. Kaitlin: Yeah, I love that notion of tying back to the job seeker and the individual and their life circumstances, and allowing the room for, as your book outlines, for people to really sit back and say, Wait a minute. So what happened in my last job? Move right? And that reflective component, I think that's a really interesting piece of this book, is like pushing people to really say, well, what, what did I do last time? And why? I'm interested to hear a little bit more about what made you start at that point. Michae: Well so I'll tell you, and I'll give you the actual full origin story, which was in 2009, Clay Christensen said to Ethan Bernstein, you need to come to my class today. There's this guy named Bob who's going to do this thing that you need to come see. So Ethan shows up, not having any idea what he was in for, and he watches Bob do an interview about when someone purchased some random product or service. I don't, I don't know what it was. And basically the interview is about something you've already switched on. And the reason for that is we say, as you know, in the book, we say bitchin ain't switchin. And we complain all the time, but like, we actually want to know when someone makes the big choice to change behavior, to change what you're doing. What were the forces that were acting on them that caused them to make that switch? And so essentially, the interview, it uses criminal forensics techniques, and we basically use it to create a mini documentary of the last time someone switched behaviors in whatever area we're interested in studying. So Ethan watches Bob do this, and he goes, oh my God. I just earlier this morning, was counseling someone who was asking for job advice, career advice in my office, and I had that person in there for like an hour and a half, and I realized when I watched Bob do the interview that my advice was completely worthless because it was completely decoupled from their situation, their struggles, their sense of progress. If I had just interviewed them like Bob, just interviewed someone there, I would have learned so much and could have given so much better advice. And so honestly, that was the origin of the collaboration between Ethan and Bob, and Ethan created an entire class around it, and so as a result of that, we've been able to, as you know, study literally over 1,000 individuals changing jobs to build this data set around why did and it starts with, why did you last change? Really, to unearth those forces, and once you understand how they work in your life, then you can start to pull them forward and recognize the patterns going forward about what might be causing you to seek something new right now. Julian: So just to kind of now, put a little spin on this, given Michael, given that our audience is composed of many of the people who are educating and hiring individuals, what are some of the key concepts that are relevant to them? I mean, I was, you know, we really was struck by the whole concept, for example, that you lay out of like employees hiring their employers. What does that mean for those of us who are hiring and training and educating? Michael: Exactly? And I'm sorry I buried the lead when you asked about the jobs to be done there as well. Because Originally we wanted to call this book, Hire Your Next Job, because the big switch here, right is that we as individuals have agency in our lives, and you actually hire your next job. And the publisher said we hate that title, because no one thinks about the job market that way, and we're like, oh, but you do? You do hire your next job, and this is the big switch we want them to make. And so the big argument in the book, right? For individuals, and I'll get to the employer side in a moment, but for individuals, is if you understand that you actually hire your next job, meaning you choose, do I want to work here for the money that they're going to pay me for the title that they're going to give me for the responsibilities, et cetera, et cetera, right? That's a choice you make. And so yes, employers are hiring you, but you are also hiring your employer and the job you take. And there is a two way street there that we too often don't recognize, and when you do, it empowers you. Now for employers, the implication there is, hey, actually, even though people haven't thought about it this way, if you look at behavior over the last couple decades, it is increasingly clear that more and more people feel empowered to hire their next job because they're leaving, they're quitting, they're changing careers, right? We employers talk about this all the time. We would invest more in our workforce, except they're only here two years, and then they jump to something different, or what if they go to a competitor? Et cetera, et cetera. And so our big argument to employers is we actually have the root causes in our data set of over 1,000 job switchers of what causes them to say, today's the day I'm going to change my job. We know why employees quit in sharper detail, I would argue, than we've ever seen before. And so if you can understand the progress that individuals are making when they decide to hire your job, how do you create a workplace that people want to rehire each and every single day, as measured in their engagement, their productivity, right, their excitement for being in the job. And so out of that, and I will be super honest here, we have three conclusions of what we think this means for employers, of how they can do it differently. And we've really tested the heck out of this in the individual side. We have not tested the heck out of this on the employer side. And so, like, what I hope is employers read it and be like, Those are three good ideas to start, and here's two more. Or here's how I would perfect this, or here's how I would shape it. Because I think there's a world of things. Is my guess that employers would do differently with a real understanding of why people are hiring their companies in the first place, why they are firing them ultimately, and how do we become places that they want to rehire each and every single day? Julian: I think I may be seeing your next book. Michael: Or maybe we'll all collaborate together. Julian: Sure! Kaitlin: So yeah, I mean thinking we’d love to hear you talk a little bit more about what those recommend, what those preliminary recommendations are, Michael, recognizing that, as you said, maybe they not as well tested, but especially as we're thinking about talent development and retention, and what does it look like to as you said, have employees rehire their jobs every day, and have their jobs kind of shift and mold with them in their lives as they progress. What? What are what you know? What are your preliminary ideas? What are some moves that employers can start to make to respond to that reality? Michael: The first one I would say is, you know, we know what exit interviews are when people it's their last day on the job, but if there's someone you really wanted to retain, an exit interview is way too late. Number one, you can't do anything with the data. Number two, the data is probably false, because no one really wants to be in an exit interview. They just want to get the heck out. So what we say is interview them on the way in about why they hired you. So the...
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Matt Merino on Healthcare, Tech & Talent
11/12/2024
Matt Merino on Healthcare, Tech & Talent
Matt Merino, CEO of Education Management Solutions (EMS), speaks about the innovative ways technology can be used to address talent gaps. Matt discusses the challenges and opportunities of leveraging technology to improve training, onboarding, and ongoing development for healthcare professionals. While Matt's focus is healthcare, his insights on leveraging technology to innovate and scale learning solutions offer valuable takeaways for leaders across all industries. He also shares his perspective on the importance of continuous evaluation and the need to start developing talent pipelines earlier on in a learner’s journey. Tune in to learn more about how technology can be used to create a more efficient and effective healthcare system. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Julian: One of the themes that keeps coming up on the podcast and in our consulting work is the need to pair work experience with learning. Kaitlin: That's right, Julian, there are many innovative approaches emerging to address industry skill and hiring gaps, whether through apprenticeships, work and learn models or tech enabled simulations. We're excited to have a guest on the podcast today who is a leading expert in these tech enabled options with a focus on healthcare. Julian: Absolutely, healthcare is a particularly ripe topic for discussion, given the challenges of regulation and providing hands on clinical experience. And so to introduce today's guest, Matt Marino is CEO of education management solutions, or EMS. Prior to his role at EMS, Matt served as the chief experience officer at Orbis Education, a program development and management company working with universities and healthcare systems to expand educational programs in nursing and therapies. During his many years in higher education, Matt led teams involved with the initial launch of online and hybrid programs for Arizona State University Online, the University of Miami, George Washington University, and Southern New Hampshire University. And before his career in higher education, Matt was a member of the United States Army Special Operations community, serving in over a dozen different countries. During his time in service, he was ordered over a dozen medals, including the Bronze Star in 2004. Thank you for joining us on the podcast today. Matt. Matt Merino: Thanks for having me, and thank you for that extended introduction. I appreciate it. It makes me uh, reminds myself just how mature I'm getting. So I appreciate it. Julian: Oh, and we had to edit that one down so you have even more to tell. Kaitlin: Indeed with that being said, Matt, we did give that bio, but please, we'd like to hear a little bit more in your own words about what led you to education management solutions and more about your background. Matt: Thanks for having me once again. For me, Education Management Solutions (EMS) is just another continuation on the path of what I've tried to do throughout my my career, and that's finding places that I believe can have impact on what I consider to be critical issues that affect people, regardless of things like socio economic status or location or race. Something that that has mass impact to all of us. So with EMS, this was just another opportunity to step into an organization that I thought had incredible potential to really drive at some of the deepest challenges we face and what is the most, in my view, indiscriminatory fact of life, and that is our health and our end of life at some point. So that's what brought me here. I've always lived in the higher ed world just because, uh, it speaks to me from a purpose standpoint. I came from a family of educators. I realized at a very young age that I was never going to have the patience required to be an educator myself. So next best up, let's, let's find a way to work in industries that can assist educators or assist workforce and people moving forward with their lives. Julian: So what are the problems that EMS is addressing, Matt. Matt: The problems that we face, that we're really going after now are trying to leverage technology solutions to assist with what I consider the big challenges we're facing in healthcare. One is we just don't have enough people. These shortages in critical roles are really a combination of two things. It's how many, obviously, clinicians are being able to be produced. But we're just in a situation where we have an aging population, demands in health care, and the needs in health care continue to go up. So we have a shortage of people. We have more people needing care. Solving it with a purely a people perspective, that's a long term solution. It takes time for the education process, through certification, being able to get all the way through and being able to work in an actual clinical setting. I do believe that what we're doing is we're trying to attack the shortage, the onboarding and then the delivery of care in a way that we're trying to do it on a continuum with not only higher education, but directly with providers. But we're trying to give them technology solutions that allow for the most rapid onboarding for new clinicians, gets them at the top of practice, and makes it so that they really do have tools that can take away anything that isn't working with patients directly. Is probably the best way to say it. Julian: So tell us a little bit about the tools that you've developed at EMS and how they work and exactly which level of clinicians are you targeting. Matt: Yeah. So very interesting. You know, our roots started in the world of simulation solutions for nursing schools, medical schools helping to to train doctors and nurses using those simulation capabilities that are all been used either to replace clinical experience or prep for clinical experience. So that's the roots of the organization. We see simulation has moved absolutely into the provider space, and is gaining traction there right now. On our end, though, something we were really excited about in the past year introducing was two other pieces to this, and the first one was taking all of that simulation, which traditionally has been done in a very large facility with dedicated real estate and rooms, so a high capital expense, in creating those same capabilities in a mobile solution that can be wheeled around in a 25 pound case as a way to not only reduce the cost, but reduce the requirement related to space needed and whatnot. The second thing we did is we've invested heavily in competency, education, management and tracking, which is really related to how do doctors, it goes all the way down to medical assisting. It can be used for technologists, anyone who works in a clinical capacity in the workforce. This is designed so that organizations can have a way to not only evaluate where their clinical competencies are for their specific role, and that role could be the same job title, perhaps, of nurse, but they could work in one of 30 specialty areas. So really knowing where their competencies fit based on what's required for the role they're in, and most importantly along the way, is instead of trying to do a one size fits all for training and developing clinicians throughout their time with an organization, the tool gives the insight, the calculations, the data, the visibility, so that they can now plan out more of a custom and more efficient and effective ongoing clinical training model within the systems. It helps with standardization. It also helps with just a broad overview. So when those times come and you see this all the time, where they've got to flip different clinicians to fill in for different shifts in different areas, who's best suited for that, so that the quality of care remains right where the expectation. Kaitlin: So Matt, as you're talking about these different solutions, it sounds like they're very focused on the end user being the learner. Is there also a side of this that focuses on the needs of HR teams? Or how? What is the link there? Matt: Yeah, so, so one of the things that we're really focused on with this, and it's a great point, is visibility all the way throughout an organization. So there is the HR component. And oftentimes what we see in the clinical setting is that we'll integrate an HRIS into the system, since ours is strictly focused on clinical skills. But what it does do, it has all these different permissions sets so an administrator could see the entire system, and perhaps someone working just at, let's say, one hospital in a set of 30, could see just their hospital, maybe a floor manager can see just their floor, and a shift manager may just be able to see that shift. So we're going to give views all the way through, to give all the business intelligence that's needed for the organization, regardless of level. And you know, the other side of it that we do that I think, is really important. It gets overlooked a lot of times. I am an eternal optimist, believing that whatever people choose to do with their career, they want to be good at it. They want to be successful. So the learner or clinician, in this case, can see where they're at based on expectation, and it can even give a plan of here's areas to focus on, and recommendations on what could be done next. You know so often times when, when we're going through evaluations or being evaluated, the most important piece that sometimes gets the least amount of attention is just that I have the awareness of where I'm at and what could be done next, as opposed to, oh, well, here's your final report, and you're deficient here, here and here. If I can see that ongoing and see improvement over time, that's really what we're chasing for, for the individual user, to be able to see. Kaitlin: Matt, you know, I think we, having spent a number of years designing competency based education, I'm curious to know when we, when you're talking about competencies, who's defining them? Are they coming as like predefined in your system? Are you working with individual employers to define those, to define competencies? What's your process? Matt: I love that question because it's really important. So I think of competencies right as kind of the end all be up at the roll up of a bunch of different things. And what that leads to is that you often we'll see the same title used for a competency, but what our partner organizations feel makes up all of those sub competencies and skills that roll up into it there is variance between them. So oftentimes, we will come with a framework that says, here are some of the examples of what we've seen from like organizations, without giving away who they are. But I think what our partners appreciate is the flexibility, because even sometimes with the same competencies, not only are there different areas that roll up into them depending on who you're working with, but there's different value based on them. So you will see a different value, and we don't want to make it so that each competency is weighted the same. We want to give you the ability to be flexible with that, because we do understand that, you know, we could have a world where someone needs has 15 different competencies that they need to be successful at, or they want to measure or be considered knowledgeable, and that doesn't mean that all 15 of those carry the same value or the same weight from the organizational perspective. So we try to give that flexibility in the system. Kaitlin; Really interesting. And I feel, yes: It's like, depending on what role you're in, depending on where you're being employed, exactly the emphasis on those skills might be different. So I appreciate there's like, a level of variability within the different competencies as you're talking about, I guess, like how they roll up. I appreciate that. Matt: In a perfect world for us, right? We'd live in a world where everyone valued in every Health Core organization the exact same skill and competency in the same way. But that's never going to be the case. So as opposed for our viewpoint, instead of trying to force someone into, quote, unquote, our ideal. Let's listen to them and see what they consider the ideal for their organization and help them get there. Julian: Matt, at this stage, what are the what are the greatest challenges you see with taking this, this work, to scale? Matt: Boy, I think there's a lot of challenges right now. I think the first one is when you're working in an area that has so many pressures on it. And I would say healthcare is absolutely that there is pressure coming from all different angles right now. Sometimes you're just battling to get through the next week, the next month, the next quarter. And really where, where this is focused on is a long term solution that you'll see impacts, but the impacts just get greater and greater with the solution, the longer you're using it. So it's not a magic bullet. And sometimes when organizations are struggling, they're looking for magic bullets. I'd say there's one. I think that it is a mindset also that no different than other areas in workforce that we have to get to that, and it's hard to admit, for some people, is that we all get educated. And I learned it. I was excellent at it. I have that skill now, but over time, if you don't use it all the time, it starts to degrade a little bit and like, if we would put a third year business calculus problem in front of me right now, I'm pretty sure I couldn't answer one of them, but, you know, 25 years ago, I was pretty good at doing those types of things. So I think having that mindset of continuous not only improvement, but continuous evaluation, so that it can't be an event, right? How we evaluate people shouldn't be an event. It should be just part of what we do every day. So there, and I think that also is a bit of a mindset shift in an environment in any industry that has regulation and whatnot, it's documentation. We're going through this regulatory event, and we're done, and now we're done with this, and let's move on. I really think we have to get to a world where we quit thinking of things and events and just thinking of as things we do all the time. And the final thing that we have to really do is that we have to understand that in these very specific verticals like healthcare, you have brilliant minds that are there to be clinicians. They're not there to be technologists. They're not there to be people that come from other areas, and this is something we work on. We do this. We're not just there to sell people the solution and walk away. You've got to give them resource to help it get set up and educated. Because the term competency in itself has been–had liberties taken against it over the past few years, to say the least. So I think there's an education at standpoint of what really is competency, because it goes way beyond just doing a checklist and looking at skills. So I think you've got to provide resource and education and partnership with these organizations as you get them on the path. Kaitlin: Well, right? And then it's interesting to think about the complexities of implementation of these tools, right? So then it's not just about, oh, here's your tech tool. Implement it, it. There's so much more there. Matt: I think so many have lived through that, right? Like they've lived through the world of someone's going to come in and they're going to sell me this and and they'll show you what the end product looks like, and you're like, Oh, this is amazing, but there's a bunch we have to do along the way. So when we do it, we don't really sell it as per se or offer it as and here's a piece of software that'll do this. It's more of, yes, it's going to be a piece of software, but let's work with you, with some of our resource our experts who have done this, to help you get everything organized how, and then we can build off that as we go, and then get it to the point over the first six months where then we really, as we're sitting right next to you, putting the system together, we're training you how to maintain it yourself. So so it's a bit different approach from that aspect, and a lot of technology organizations go but that's why I like the word a technology solution, and not just software. Kaitlin: Right. It's a higher touch model where your focus much higher touch. So, Matt, just to drive us to the concrete for a second. Could you give us an example or two of like, when you mentioned, you know, the mobile solution for a simulation like, what are some of the content areas like that are addressed, like, can you give us an example? Matt: So, so there's many healthcare organizations that have annual trainings that are required for clinicians, and if you're a large organization, or let's, let's take a large healthcare system that maybe has 180 different clinical environments, and those can be hospitals, maybe clinics, but everyone has to go through this training. Well, they have a couple options. One older model that's still heavily in use is, let's bring everybody to one place and train them, or send trainers around location by location to do it. The old satellite model that's incredibly expensive and time consuming. Another model has been that we've all seen in my military days. Saw this all the time, the train, the trainer. So let's take a group that we're going to turn into to people who's going to deliver this block of instruction. Let's bring them one place get that, and then let's send them out there to all the different locations. And we know there's individuals, there's changes that goes on, and the consistency sometimes lacks there. So that is an exact use case we were dealing with, without revealing my partner's name, 180 locations, trying to figure out, how are we going to deliver consistent training? So they took our mobile solution being able to put those at the sites. It goes beyond just being able to observe the training, because it is integrated with team and Zoom, or WebEx or whatever your preferred methodology is, so you can have synchronous, one person, delivering, evaluating a time. But it also comes loaded with these mobile solutions with a tablet with our software on it that allows you to record it. It allows you to make annotations while you're doing it. It allows you to set up checklists ahead of time so that you can have a consistent evaluation and you can debrief it, which is very popular, where people are going to record it, then afterwards they're going to watch it together and go through here's what went well. Here were the opportunities and more that it can be saved and then automated and rolled up into one system. So that's where it becomes different, that instead of people having to transfer data or enter it one by one. Once that's stored and saved, it can go right into to the bigger system. So it creates an efficiency with managing it. So there's an example on the on the mobile training side, right? Kaitlin: So it sounds like it both decreases the concerns around variability and also allows for maybe more responsiveness as training needs change and evolve. Matt: I would say, not only responsiveness, accuracy, which I think is a huge challenge right now, every organization struggles with that is, if you're a large organization, consistency and evaluation of the training and development you're...
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Pardis Mahdavi on Driving Innovation in Higher Ed
10/22/2024
Pardis Mahdavi on Driving Innovation in Higher Ed
Pardis Mahdavi, a professor of medical anthropology, founder of Entheon Journeys, and former university president, discusses how higher education can evolve to meet modern workforce demands through technological innovation and cultural transformation. She examines the growing disconnect between student needs and traditional higher education approaches, emphasizing how educational technology can enhance learning outcomes and promote equity. Mahdavi draws from her extensive leadership experience across diverse institutions to outline practical strategies for creating sustainable innovation in higher education. She argues that embracing technological enhancement in education is crucial for maintaining higher education's relevance, supporting social mobility, and strengthening democracy. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Julian: It feels like the last few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity between the kickoff of a new academic year coupled with our own rebranding Kaitlin. Kaitlin: Oh, I know it Julian, there's been so much activity, and it's exciting to see our podcast and consulting efforts now housed under the Work Forces umbrella. There are so many overlapping themes across our podcast discussions and consulting work that it really just feels right to have everything live in one place. One theme that has emerged over time, and really it's come up time and again, is how higher education keeps pace and remains agile in a fast moving, ever changing economic landscape. So I'm looking forward to our discussion today to dig deeper on this topic. Julian: I'm thrilled to return to the topic of higher ed, and today we have a higher ed leader who is at the forefront of innovation, Pardis Mahdavi is a professor of anthropology at the University of La Verne. Prior to this role, she served as president at the University of La Verne, provost and executive vice president at the University of Montana, as well as dean at Arizona State University and the University of Denver, after serving in multiple roles at Pomona College. Her research interests include gendered labor, human trafficking, migration, human rights, and public health in the context of changing global and political structures, and she's a widely published author. Pardis is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Young Presidents Organization, and has been a fellow at the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Council on Learned Societies, Google Ideas and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She also serves as a board member for the Lumina Foundation, our sponsor, and the Human Trafficking Legal Center. Welcome to Work Forces. Pardis. Pardis Mahdavi: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I am thrilled and honored to be here today. Kaitlin: Well, we're thrilled you could join us, and so as we get started today, Pardis, we'd love to learn more about your background and the story of your career path in higher education. Pardis: You know, interestingly enough, my story actually starts when I was a pretty young girl. I'm Iranian-American, as my name suggests, and my parents came here during the revolution. I was initially born. I'm a child of the Revolution, so maybe I'm dating myself, but I was born here. My parents, you know, they came here during the Revolution. So I was born here in Minnesota, and we lived in Minnesota until I was about six years old. And one day I came home from school and there was a sign posted in front of my house, and it said, “Burn this house. Terrorists live here,” which, of course, my Iranian-American mind, my six year old mind, could not get my head around. I thought, you know, my dad is a doctor. My mom is a health provider. We are, you know, and but it would this was, you know, Minnesota and, you know, during Iran, you know, or On contrary, on hostage crisis. And so really, growing up at a time of antipathy towards Iranians, right in this country. And so my father made the very difficult decision to pack everything up once again and move from Minnesota to California. But my father said something to me in that move, and that's really what drives me, you know, in higher ed he said, “you know,” Pardis, “people can take everything from you, they can take your belongings, they can take your home, they can even take your country, but the one thing nobody can ever take from you is your education.” And that's really what drove me to understand the value of access to education, because no matter where you go, it was having that education that always opened up doors and opportunities. And, you know, for an immigrant family to be able to do all the things that we were able to do, it was education that allowed us to do that. And so that really propelled me to want to be, you know, part of making sure that everybody can access what can never be taken away from them. So that was really sort of my journey into higher education. School became my job. And I really, you know, it propelled me to becoming, you know, a leader in higher education, because I saw, you know, the value, the power and the importance of being able to access higher education. I also understood the role of education in upholding and supporting democracy. You know, coming from a place like Iran, I actually went back, you know, between 2002 and 2007. I taught there, and really felt the weight of trying to be a part of higher ed in a place which is so heavily regulated. I thought, gosh, you know, there's so much we take for granted in this country and the power of American higher education in upholding democracy is one that we can't lose. And so, you know, over my career trajectory, I watched as the perception of higher education for Americans has gone down. You know, as we sit here today, more than half of Americans believe college is not a good use of time. And you know, we're facing the possibility that for the first time in American history, the generation that's coming up, my kids, generation will be less educated than the generations that came before it. That is not a trend that we're bucking in the right direction. That, to me, is a national security crisis, a crisis of democracy that keeps me up at night. And so really, what I've always wanted to do is figure out ways of making higher education better and being able to both meet the needs of students and meet the needs of the democracy which you know, of which workforce is a huge part of all of that. Julian: So in your journey in higher ed, in addition to, you know, per your very impressive resume, you've, you've worked with many different kinds of higher ed institutions, and I guess I'm really interested in understanding, you know, kind of your take on the state of higher ed With respect to that national security and democracy and workforce development issue. And then segue to really, what is the problem that you are now looking to solve for as you've stepped away from being a higher ed president? Pardis: Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think for a long time, you know, the conversation Higher Ed was about access, right? It was, how can we get as many people to be able to access as possible? And then we talked a lot about attainment. How can we make sure people are finishing, that they're not stopping out, you know? And now we're talking a lot about narrating the importance and the value of higher education. And I think one of the things I've observed, and as you mentioned, I've been at top 10 small liberal arts college. I've been at America's largest university, ASU. I've been at the land grant, Montana. I was president of a Hispanic Serving Institution, private in Los Angeles. And one of the common themes I see is that there is this absolute disconnect between what students are demanding from the higher education experience, right? So you've got students saying, hey, you know, we want to be trained with, you know, technologically enhanced learning coming out of the pandemic. We see students are more risk averse than ever before. We see that lecture is dead, no more chalk and talk. And we see students asking for engaged and experiential learning, very clearly, asking for these things and saying, help us connect the dots. Help us to develop. You know, we're working so hard developing that pipeline from K 12 into college. Now we've got to help develop that pipeline, connecting those dots from college to career, right? What does that look like, and how do you start to render that legible? Not to say that there isn't a role for liberal arts, but it's, it's a larger picture. And students are asking for, you know, legibility. They're asking for curricula that have both horizontality and verticality to it. They're very clear on what they're asking for. And on the other end, workforce is very clear on what they're asking for, right? They're asking for students who are able to be critical thinkers, problem solvers, effective communicators, having certain skills. And yet you've got kind of higher ed sitting right here, not necessarily making the changes or being responsive to the needs of, you know, and again, we wouldn't ever narrate students as customers, but, but to the needs of the people who were trying to serve. We're trying to serve students, and we're trying to serve the democracy. And so the question is, how can we best do that? We've seen in the last decade or more, the emergence of Ed Tech as a field, right? Educational Technologies, technologically enhanced learning things like virtual reality, we know that they are incredibly effective for learning outcomes, right? I think about, you know, at Arizona State dreamscape learn as a VR modality that was deployed for gen ed classes like Biology 101, and the results were staggering. Students were retaining much more of the material. Students who were neurodivergent or from diverse backgrounds, English as a second language, they were all doing much better. So the data are clear that technologically enhanced learning modalities both help meet students meet and also help students develop a skill set that they can translate to workforce. And yet, higher ed is sort of sitting here in this moment of oh my gosh, there's these different needs being articulated. There's a whole slew of possible solutions. And I think that what's happening is that it's becoming increasingly difficult for us in higher ed to have the conversations that we need, need to have, because it's become so politicized, it's become so fractured. And, you know, we've lost the focus on service and on serving our role and and we've lost that mission focus of sort of serving students and serving the democracy. Kaitlin: Yeah, we are in the middle of a very complex landscape, and I'm curious to hear more about your thoughts about you know, what are the waves forward, right? Like at a time of so many kind of competing, I wouldn't say priorities, but competing needs, or maybe different levers that are being pulled. And you know, how do we serve both the needs of students and the needs of industry? And make sure you know higher ed is fulfilling its mission. And higher ed, of course, very broadly defined, right? It looks very different in different places. Pardis: 100%. Kaitlin: But what do you see as some ways forward in this, in this complex space. Pardis: And again, you know, you don't want to say something is a magic bullet, let alone do you want to say technology is a silver bullet that's going to solve everything, right? But I do think that, you know, in higher ed, we're in this, we're finally starting to feel the very real tensions between an ecosystem that has, even though you have the protections of tenure, has been a bit risk averse, right? And I think one of the reasons that Arizona State has been so successful in innovation is that there is a very high tolerance for failure. There's a high there's an ecosystem where there's a high tolerance for failure, so that, you know, experimentation is kind of, you know, sort of the coin of the realm, right? Experimenting. When I was a president, I had a high tolerance for failure, high fidelity to data. You know, you do your homework, and then you start to experiment. And, you know, we're in this moment where there has been a flourishing of Ed Tech. There has been a flourishing of technologies like, I mean, just at the very basic level, ChatGPT, right? And, you know, learning how to teach with these technologies really requires us to have some hard conversations about what is the infrastructure that's necessary in higher ed to create a sustainable architecture where technology can enhance learning and allow us to meet the needs of students and employers. And so that's what I'm doing now. My colleagues and I, you know, we've started our own consulting project, EES Associates, and what we're trying to do is actually help leaders in higher education figure out, first, what are the technologies that, as you mentioned, Kaitlin, you know, universities are different. It's not a one size fits all, right. And so something that's going to work for Arizona State, you know, something like Dreamscape Learn, which is, you know, scalable, big, you know, that's going to meet that population of over 100,000 students is not going to fit for Pomona College, right, which has less than 2,000 students. But that's not to say that Pomona College can't benefit from technologically enhanced learning, right? And so actually, places like Pomona are great places to have those conversations about technologies like ChatGPT and, you know, what are the ethics? How do we think about it? How can we study it and then use it as a problem solve? You know, people, other people have used this, you know, analogy, sort of like when the calculator was invented. At first, math teachers were like, how are we ever going to teach math? And now, of course, we can't imagine teaching math without calculators. You know, someday we won't be able to imagine teaching many subjects without ChatGPT, but we still have to learn and harness and so, you know, there is a place for different institutions to plug in. And so what we do is we try to figure out, okay, what's the best technology to meet your needs, and also, what is your unique skill set as a college or university or an EdTech group, what is your unique skill set where you can serve this larger mission of kind of cracking this code of, what do we do to continue to make higher education relevant for workforce, relevant for student needs, ultimately relevant for social Mobility? Right? Because social mobility is really what all of this is about. So we help match what the right technologies are with the right institutions. And then I think even more importantly, we help to make those technologies sustainable. Because sitting in the seats that I've sat in, Dean, Provost, President, we all know that sometimes we go with a one off and we spend lots of money and say, Okay, we're going to use this software, or we're going to use this and this is going to be our magic bullet, but we don't make it sustainable. We don't make it a sustainable part of our ecosystem. And so it's just becomes an add on, or it just becomes something that is a point of frustration, either for the leadership or for the faculty who are like, how am I, you know, because we don't build the ecosystem to support it. So for example, we say, you know, this, the pandemic was a great example. We're like, Okay, everybody has to now teach online. Now, the institutions that succeeded at that were the institutions, again, like ASU, that had an infrastructure that said, Look, teaching online isn't just about turning your camera on, there is an art to it, and we have a team of instructional designers who are going to help you, right? We have a team of people who have this expertise, and we're going to leverage that. So I think, you know, we're at this moment now where we can, where we have technologies. It's really about building that bridge and figuring out how to harmonize what Higher Ed does really well with what Ed Tech does well. And then figuring out what the sweet spot is to serve the needs of students and the democracy, broadly speaking, workforce being one component of that. Julian: It's very it's very exciting Pardis, and for sure, the technology does offer all these new tools that we've never had before to make these connections and really begin to bring the people what they're clamoring for. I guess I'm interested to hear a little bit about, well, I love that you're thinking about your practice in terms of, you know, kind of focusing on, you know, the superpowers of each of your partner institutions who can drive this. I mean, you were talking about presidents, Provosts. I mean, where, like, where would you begin? I mean, obviously, coming up as a senior leader, I guess, is the top, but I'm interested to hear you riff on that a little bit. Pardis: Yeah. I mean, and thanks for allowing me to kind of think into that with you. You know, I think one of the pitfalls that often happens is that these, these initiatives and efforts are often driven by the IT office, right? That the tech office thing, you know, or offices outside of Academic Affairs, and so then it's just seen as a well, that's an IT issue, that's not us or, you know, how do we fit it in? I think where you see the most success is when it's both top down and bottom up, right? And I think it's where you see the most success is where you have leadership that says, Yes, I want to innovate, right? I want to do this, and I want the buy in, you know, from all parts of the house, because if it just becomes one more thing that, you know, a provost has to make the faculty do. I mean, that's not going to work. And if it's just one more thing, we pile on the plate of a faculty, you know, I was that faculty member at one point. You know, when I was at Pomona, at one point, I was chairing two departments, teaching a full load, directing an institute, and I had, you know, three young kids at the time. I mean, it just was not sustainable, right? So you can't and so I think about, you know, the 2016 version of me of Pardis. And I think if my dean or president was like, Okay, well now you have to teach with this technology. I mean, I would have just exploded, right or imploded, but if my dean or my president had come to me and said, you know, we have this offering. We have this team of instructional designers, and actually, you know, for me, the biggest kind of aha moment for me was having gone from being at Pomona, where there was zero online teaching, and I couldn't I was like, Oh my God, that's a huge lift to then actually teaching online at ASU, I suddenly realized, oh my gosh, so much of my time was freed up. I remember I had this semester where I was fully teaching online, right? And, you know, you can be anywhere in the world. So, and, you know, my PhD is in anthropology, I suddenly realized I could be doing field like it actually opened up time, you know. And I, I could be grading, you know, at 10 o'clock at night when my kids went to sleep, or I could be recording, I remember I was recording a lecture at like 11pm when my kids went to sleep. It meant that I could be home with them during the day. You know, it actually opened up more time and possibility. But no one had narrated it to me like that before, you...
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Bob Lerman: The Power of Apprenticeships
10/08/2024
Bob Lerman: The Power of Apprenticeships
Bob Lerman, an Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute and leading researcher on and advocate for apprenticeships, discusses the role of apprenticeships in workforce development and economic mobility. He defines apprenticeships as a combination of on-the-job learning and classroom instruction, leading to occupational expertise. Lerman emphasizes the importance of work-based learning and the need for a major effort to promote apprenticeships among employers. He believes that a robust apprenticeship system can significantly contribute to a positive change in the U.S. workforce. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Welcome back. I'm really looking forward to this conversation today. Julian apprenticeships are becoming increasingly front and center as a pathway to economic mobility in the US, even more so since our springtime discussion with John Colborn from Apprenticeships for America. So it really feels like the right time to take a deeper dive into this topic. Julian: Yes, I completely agree, and I am particularly excited to get the perspective of today's guest. He's someone I've known for decades who has been beating the drum on the importance of apprenticeship since I met him, and that drumbeat is getting louder by the day. Kaitlin: It really is. And without further ado, let's introduce our guest, Bob Lehrman. Bob is an Institute Fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at Urban Institute, and the leading US researcher on apprenticeship. He's a member of the board of the International Network on Innovation Apprenticeship, head of Urban Institute's Apprenticeship Group, and established the American Institute for Innovative Apprenticeship. Bob has published widely on apprenticeship, currently heads the evaluation of the American Apprenticeship Initiative and is Chairman of the Board of Apprenticeships for America. He is also a Professor of Economics at American University and a Research Fellow at Iza in Bonn, Germany. We really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today, Bob, Bob Lehrman: Well, thank you for having me. Julian: Yes, Bob, really appreciate you taking the time and you always, always forget to talk with you. And please tell us about your background and history with the apprenticeship movement. Bob: I studied youth unemployment when I was in graduate school. My dissertation was on youth unemployment, and I had a long interest in young people entering the workforce, but we always saw that the unemployment rates were pretty high. And later, I worked at the Department of Labor for a few years on welfare reform, but also youth issues. Of course, at the Labor Department, there are a lot of programs that were aimed at young people who were having difficulty in the labor market, but subsequently I came to feel that those programs were really marginal to the overall system. That I co-authored a piece that was part of The Forgotten, Half the idea that a lot of people who don't go and complete a four year degree weren't doing nearly as well, and the government spent so much more on BA level people, so I was looking for some things that would help mainstream young people enter the labor force, and that's when I started learning more about the European systems, especially Germany and Switzerland. That culminated in some work that I did in the late 1980s with an article called The Compelling case for Youth Apprenticeship in 1990 and part of the movement that came about from commissions and research and just a general recognition that we needed a better system to help young people enter careers. We were successful, in a way, because George H.W. Bush proposed the National Youth Apprenticeship Act of 1992 and Bill Clinton liked apprenticeship, who followed him, but the new bill that came out of the Clinton administration barely mentioned apprenticeship. It was called the School-to-Work Opportunities Act, and it really involved very thin interventions for the many instead of intensive and thick interventions for the group I was concerned about, and ultimately that project sort of faded out. There was a sunset provision in the legislation, and it wasn't renewed. But I kept at it because I didn't see a better way than apprenticeship. I will say one other thing, which is, having worked in a factory, I came to believe that… I came to the realization that a lot of what we might call unskilled work, and machine operators didn't have to be unskilled. That the best machine operators were really valuable, and they were far more valuable than just someone who got a few weeks of training. And so I had embedded in me this idea that skill can be applied to all kinds of occupations and mastery is something much more significant than just being able to get through the job. Kaitlin: That additional context is is very eye opening, right as far as how you come to this work, Bob, and the applied nature of it for you as well. And you know, as you're talking about your background with this work, one thing that sticks out to me is there are so many, there are so many movements in education, and some that are much more long standing than others. And I'm just curious to I'm wondering, as you're providing this background, you know, what has it been like to stick with this, with apprenticeships as this movement for the over the long term and like and you know what has made you really stay with it all these years, and especially now that it's become so front and center? Bob: Yeah, well, it's, it hasn't been easy. There's not a lot hasn't been a lot of funding for it, but and people used to wonder when in a Washington meeting I would bring up apprenticeship again, I didn't see anything better. And then a few things inspired me to continue to push hard. One was the expansion of apprenticeship in the UK, where they had allowed the program to atrophy and go down to about 150,000 and then within six, seven years, they went up to 800,000 and the Prime Minister would talk about apprenticeship, and it became something on the tube trains that they would advertise for apprentices. And I got to know some of the people involved in that effort, and then some friends in South Carolina started to do better in terms of reaching out to companies. And I went down to see how they did it. And that was inspiring. That was starting in around 2008 or nine through 2013-14, and also I didn't hurt that I was asked to write some chapters here and there, and so that pushed me to do more thinking and to do more writing about apprenticeships. Kaitlin: Can you please define what we mean by apprenticeships? Because I think there's a lot you know, we hear registered we hear non registered. Can could you spend a little bit of time there just around definition of terms? Bob: Apprenticeship is a process by which an individual learns both on the job, contributes to production while being on the job, and gains and learns theoretical concepts off the job, all leading to occupational expertise, or at least full competence in a rewarding occupation, in the desirable occupation. So it's this combination of learning by doing actual work and then learning off the job. The actual work is very important and often left out because people say work based learning, but work itself is relevant, and work is what helps an employer recoup some of the benefits. Work is also relevant to learning and doing real work gives people a sense of accomplishment. Let's remember young people when they're very young. They like to do things. They like to make things. They like to get around things. They don't like to just sit and I mean, yes, sitting and reading is good, but in addition to that, they like to do things. And I think by the time a person is 17, 18, 19, having them be in a pure classroom setting for their whole learning process, I think doesn't work for a lot of people. It may work for a minority of people, and God bless them. Let them do that. We don't have to have the same process for everybody. I have a phrase, sameness is not equality. If people learn in different ways, then pushing sameness is going to be disequalizing. Apprenticeship is fundamentally about learning, but learning through practice. Now in the US, we have a system called registered apprenticeship, and state and federal offices of apprenticeship, about half the half the ways of registering are with the federal government. Half the states and in 28 states or so states have offices, state apprenticeship agencies. And organizations, employers, that want to create a registered program have to gain approval. There's some paperwork involved laying out what the occupation is. It has to be called an apprenticeable occupation, which I believe could be almost any occupation. But in the terms of the government, it's an apprenticeship that has already an occupation, that's already been apprenticed in one way or another. Depending on whether you go to a state or the federal government, there's an approval process for a program to be registered. The term sponsor is the group that applies for the registration. And a sponsor might be one employer, several employers could be some outside organization, such as a community college or even a high school, and sometimes it's a joint employer union program. So that's the way the registered system works. But of course, we have a lot of companies doing elaborate training for an occupation that could be called an unregistered apprenticeship. Julian: So Bob, it sort of feels like everywhere we go in our consulting work and in many of our conversations on this podcast, apprenticeships keep keep coming up. So what's different now? Bob: What's different is, you're right. People are all talking about it, and there are lots of individual programs, initiatives, states, getting more oriented toward it, and that's a great thing, and that keeps me going. The mission is to scale the system, to make it be a mainstream option for all kinds of young people. And we have a long way to go to get there. Also the federal government increased its investment, but relative to other countries and relative to what we need to do, it's still fairly small from a national perspective. So what's different is, I think people understand it better than we did in the early 1990s. I think there is less pushback about the college for all movement that as college costs have, you know, just spectacularly increased and the union side of it is a little more mixed. I think, in that period, they really felt they owned apprenticeship and were very nervous about letting it widen. It wasn't going to be easy to widen, but anyway, they were concerned about it. Think that is a more mixed picture now. But what's the same is that we still are dwarfed by what I call the academic only approach, and the funding for that academic only approach is massively greater, I'm not looking to get that kind of funding, but a fraction of that, I think, would go a long way, and we still have to achieve that. One thing I do believe, which is quite different, is that people understand w.hy we want to do it. They understand least, much of the understanding is that you want to help young people learn by doing and get into rewarding careers. And that's a change. There are disputes about how to do it, but the why seems to be more widespread, by the way, way back in the late 80s, early 90s. You know, if I talked to a taxi driver and told him what I was doing and saying, some people think it's too early to start. In late high school, he said, Oh, that's too late. He should start. And through those years, people would, you know, informally say to me, yeah, that's a good idea. Keep at it, Bob. Kaitlin: There are a lot of different threads for us to pull upon from what you just said, Bob, and I think maybe where we can go first is what you're saying about some of the initiatives, where that you're that you're excited about, or where you're seeing promise. We'd love to hear that. You know what? What is showing the most promise, from your standpoint? Bob: I'm working with state senator Rosapepe of Maryland, who got passed into law the notion that by 2031, 45% of Maryland high school graduates will have done the high school component of a registered apprenticeship. And he's very hands on in looking at, you know, what occupations and how to make apprenticeship a route to those occupations. We're seeing Indiana start a big effort. You know, other states, California said that the governor has a goal of 500,000 and so there's a lot of push toward that. We've also, as I say, learned more. We're learning more from Labor Department projects that have provided funding for intermediaries and others to do apprenticeship. And out of that has come a network of organizations that have gained some experience in what I call the selling and organizing function with employers. So that's going on. And I think, in a way, that effort, although I think we should do things differently. Now, that effort was good in getting things started, getting some organizational expertise, but now the big question will come, can we scale and what do we need to do that, and how to make it, as I say, into a mainstream option. Julian: Which is a perfect segue to the next thread that I'd like to pull on, which is, well, you know, you alluded to this a bit, a bit you mentioned this earlier, but if you could elaborate about really now, what are the greatest challenges to establishing apprenticeships at scale? Bob: The challenge, as I say, is how to do it, and I strongly believe that people underestimate the issue of how to get an employer to adopt apprenticeship. That's an investment that the government could help with in a big way. Once an employer starts doing apprenticeship, they start seeing the benefits, not all, and they don't always have openings that apprentices can enter, but if we don't have a major effort to sort of sell and organize that's going to be the biggest barrier. I think once we get employers, the scale of employers on board, you know, like, once they build that, the people will come, I think once the offers are out there, once employers are demanding from school systems to collaborate and saying, If you don't, we'll find another way to do the off-job learning, that's going to continue to drive the outcomes. I think President Biden put out an executive order for the federal government to look into doing more apprenticeships years ago, when I looked at it and did a search on the Office of Personnel Management, a big handbook, the word apprenticeship was mentioned only once, and that was for Labor Department hiring of apprenticeship training representatives. So there have been many efforts to engage with the Office of Personnel Management to do, to do more. Maybe this executive order will help. I think we're trying to get more states interested in using apprenticeship for state employment. I think that should be a somewhat easier lift, but it's still the case that you need to persuade the employers, as I say, they might be public or private employers, and we're seeing lots of shoots around that are starting to bear a little fruit. And I'm still in this business, because I'm gonna do everything I can to help it grow. Julian: What about challenges at the policy level, particularly nationally, but you're also talking a bit about states, like, how do we get those policymakers to really move beyond the grant funded approach? Bob: Yeah, that's a great question. It opens up the issue of registered versus unregistered apprenticeships. It happens that in New York there are about the same number of apprentices as in Indiana. What is that telling us that's in terms of registered apprenticeship. That's telling us that the state apprenticeship agency in New York has been traditionally very restrictive. Pennsylvania has also got a pretty restrictive agency. They have all inappropriate criteria for making a program registered. And bear in mind, this is all voluntary. Employers do not have to do apprenticeship. They can actually call anything they do apprenticeship in the UK, apprentice. The word apprenticeship is copyrighted, and the government owns the copyright, so you can't just call anything an apprenticeship, but there are some very good programs that are not registered, and we don't have that many incentives, and we do have some barriers for registration. That's why the we at Apprenticeships for America believe in the role of intermediaries to help the employers start the programs register the programs we'd like to see registration, because, in a way, that's the only way we can have some broad based funding as well, because you do have to have some approval, some test of whether this apprenticeship is a real one if you're going to provide, for example, funding for the off job learning, so that that is a barrier for many companies. And you know, we're hoping that this intermediary approach, where not only can they try to persuade companies, but try to create what we call group sponsors, where the employer only has to sign one page of an employee player acceptance agreement to join a program, and that those can be significant. Again, I would say if, if we, if we had some real funding. And interestingly enough, yesterday, there was a Washington Post editorial promoting a big funding increase in apprenticeship. Talking about apprenticeship. Heather Long of the Post wrote that article, if we got in the range of three to $8 billion which is, you know, a significant increase, but small compared to a lot of other programs. I mean, after all, Job Corps alone is like 1.6 or 7 billion, and the evaluations are not all that positive about it. I think if we can persuade some shifting of funding, some new funding, perhaps that will help drive the city. System and will help promote the program and maybe overcome some of the obstacles. Kaitlin: So transitioning us a bit based on your lessons learned over you know, more recently and over the years, what are practical steps our audience can take to become forces in the apprenticeship space, especially as it gains momentum, yeah, Bob: If they're employers and they don't have a program, contact Apprenticeships for America will set you up with some people who can help you start one. You know, I think be supportive of any legislation and of policies that can promote apprenticeship. I like to say that when you asked me about my motivation, I I wasn't giving you the complete answer, because the complete answer, and this may be pie in the sky, but the complete answer is that a really robust apprenticeship system can change America, and it can change America because you will have a lot more people proud of what they do, gain a sense of occupational identity, feel more mature early on in life, which I believe, will have all sorts of side benefits, like enhancing marriages and increasing the marriage rate. Just have a greater sense of belonging, a greater sense of feeling that they're contributing to whatever is being done. There was an old phrase called the community of practice, that they'll feel a part of a community of practice, just like lawyers and doctors do, welders do. We don't recognize it, but they do, and when you get to that level of expertise. It's just a great feeling of competence. Moreover, I think many of them through this process will feel that they're learning how to learn. And we have the...
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Sasha Thackaberry Voinovich on Upskilling Driven by Tech
09/24/2024
Sasha Thackaberry Voinovich on Upskilling Driven by Tech
Sasha Thackaberry Voinovich, President of SkillsWave, an education benefit company, discusses the challenges and opportunities in bridging the gap between educational institutions and the workforce. She emphasizes the need for faster adaptation in curriculum development and teaching methods to meet the evolving demands of the job market. Sasha also highlights the importance of lifelong learning and upskilling, especially in the face of rapid technological advancements. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Julian; In today's conversation, we circle back to where it all started for us. We met today's guest way back during our time at Southern New Hampshire University. Like so many people who worked at SNHU, as we call it, Sasha Thackaberry Voinovich has applied that experience to build new online learning programs and models. Kaitlin: Yes, Julian, it's great to see a familiar face on today's podcast, and we're looking forward to learning more about Sasha's latest work and her approach to leading a new enterprise. In her latest incarnation, Sasha's serving as President of SkillsWave, an education benefit company that recently spun off from D2L. SkillsWave connects employers with education partners to fill skills gaps and develop talent into a competitive advantage. Previously, Sasha held leadership roles in online learning with Pearson, Louisiana State University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Cuyahoga Community College. She's on the Quality Matters board. Has published articles in numerous higher ed publications, and was a co-recipient of the 2013 MOOC award for excellence through the Open Education Consortium, Sasha holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance from the University of Akron and an MAT and PhD in higher education administration from Kent State University. Welcome to the conversation, Sasha. Sasha Thackaberry Voinovich: Thank you for having me. This is going to be fun. I always I feel like we have a SNHU alumni network, right? Julian: We really do. Kaitlin: It does feel that way. It's great to see you today, Sasha, and we're looking forward to diving into this conversation with you. Can you please expanding upon the bio that Julian just talked us through? Can you please tell us a bit more about your background and how you approach your work? Sasha: I actually, like many of us accidentally ended up in the field of ed tech. So if you go back far enough, I was a K 12 teacher, and then got sort of into curriculum development and then educational technology. I really leaned into instructional design earlier in my career. So I think I approach everything sort of from a backwards design perspective. What is the goal at the end of the day? And then how do we measure the success of that goal? And then what do we need to do to get to that goal? So that's sort of an approach that I've had for a while. I never wanted to be president of anything. I've always wanted to be in a position where I could make change, right? So I've considered myself to be sort of change maker, and it sort of led to this position. I feel like I've been preparing for this position that I didn't know I wanted for a really long time. I've always considered every place you work, you have this opportunity to grow and learn and change things and evolve things. And I think the biggest part of the last decade of my career has been learning how to be a more effective leader, which is actually a very similar skill set to being an educator, if you do it right. And the other thing I've been developing, I would say, and myself, is patience also over the last decade. Dispositionally, that's important for a leader, and it is not something that comes easily to me. Kaitlin: No, absolutely. Thank you. Yeah, it's great to learn more about, you know, kind of where you started and what drives you to this point. So thank you. Julian: Yeah, no, absolutely. And so, Sasha, what are the problems that you've sought to solve at D2L, now at skills wave, and we're particularly interested in the bridging of conversations across educational institutions in the workforce. Sasha: Yep, and there is definitely a bridge that needs to be, I think, in some cases, even built and then subsequently crossed there has been well, you all, you all know this very well. This isn't a new conversation, right? We've been having this conversation for a really long time about, how do we make sure that educational institutions and training providers really are preparing people for the workforce, for entering the workforce, and for changing careers. I think changing careers can be really, really challenging, and there isn't always an alignment between the timetable that it takes to evolve curriculum or teaching methods and strategies and what the world of work needs, and that change is accelerating more so than ever before. There's also sort of political forces at play and generational differences that have really put a lot of daylight onto the relevancy of higher education, but there's still really compelling data that degrees make a huge difference in the lives of individuals and their families in terms of their ability to change their economic circumstances. I think a lot of folks have been in this space that this needs to be a both and, yet it's been very hard to do that. I think structurally, a lot of educational institutions are not well set up to be able to move fast, but we also know they can move fast if they have to right. Everybody, everybody moved really, really fast when we had a pandemic. So that was encouraging to me. It's been a little less encouraging since then to see that some of the institutions are very, very focused on physical presence, again, because the world of work is not entirely based on physical presence anymore, but this from the skill based perspective, continually learning new skills is absolutely going to be essential for individuals and the competitive advantage for businesses, and they know it, which is why they're really investing in this space. But nobody's cracked the code on how to...how do educational institutions respond faster to the needs of businesses? How do we make sure that individuals learn faster and in different ways and different things, right? AI is not the enemy. It is, even though I do still occasionally fear Skynet. So be no nice to be nice to the robots. But I do think that there is we're gonna have to interact and work with technology very differently, and it is going to require everyone, even those who don't, work in the technology field or technology-adjacent field, it's going to require everybody to have more technological skills than ever before to be successful in non technology jobs. Kaitlin: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think as we as we go in that direction, Sasha, could you tell us a little bit more about what SkillsWave as a company? Sasha: What we are is a solution, essentially, for businesses who are looking to upskill their employees and make sure their skills are both relevant and preparing them for what's next. And then we partner with education providers to do that, both higher ed institutions and also training providers and associations. And then what we do is we surface that learning in a really compelling way, creating pathways for learners to make sure that they can get exactly the skills that they need in sort of the format that works for them, right? Because these are all, these are all working learners. Their learning has to fit into their lives. So a lot of obviously asynchronous online learning, a lot of shorter form upskilling that happens, and then we, we focus very deeply on the ROI for the business, right? So are you attracting more growth minded, more skilled workers who are interested in taking advantage of education benefits? Are you retaining those at higher rates? Are you advancing those so what are your internal promotional pathways? Or also that matrix of, are you filling sideways, those skill gaps and harder to hire areas? Because some of, even though, even though the employment market is definitely softening somewhat, the essential skills, piece of this is not. It is hard to find the right skilled people for a lot of jobs right now. It's been, it's been an interesting journey. The thing that was newer to me is I never worked at an educational technology company before, right? And so I've learned so much about the platform and the data structure behind it, which is really fascinating. We use these live APIs to make sure the skills that we're bringing in are really the ones that are needed, are associated with the right careers, aligned to the right courses and certificates and degrees and pathways. So it's been a really exciting journey, and I think what we're doing is really at the forefront. And I believe every company is going to offer education as a benefit, not a reimbursement model, but they're going to, literally, they have to, like companies need to invest in. Learning if they want to have that edge. Julian: Sasha, what are some of the challenges and successes you're seeing in your work? Sasha: I would say successes is that everyone is interested in doing this. This is absolutely we are skating to where the puck is going to be. In my mind, that's a that's a double funny, because our company is Canadian, and I know absolutely nothing about hockey, so I would say… Julian: Give Sasha more money, please, Canadians. Sasha: Yeah. So we've learned a lot that this is a high demand area. I think it's much harder to do the translation piece right, and also the evolution of what higher education needs to do to have that immediate relevancy for companies, that's that's a deeper challenge. And so we've had great luck in partnering with institutions that are more ready for that evolution have become evolving already, understand the needs of adult learners differently. Are able to support adult learners differently, and you both know this from SNHU, like the importance of that advising for retention and really looking deep at how you support people for whom education is not their primary endeavor, right? Their work and their families are so that's a different level of challenge. And it's, it feels like we have the opportunity to help transform this space which is really exciting. It's scary. Sometimes it's challenging, but it's also super exciting that you get to sort of be part of building the future. Kaitlin: Absolutely well. And you mentioned Sasha, the, you know, the speed at which everything is moving, one, I mean, from rapid tech advancements to a rapid upskilling needs and you know, and really not even knowing, maybe in some cases, like, what are the skills that our employees are going to need in the next year or two? How do you, how do you think about working within that landscape? Like, what are, you know, do you have any principles that you follow, or, you know, I don't know a framework through which you think about. Sasha: Oh, wow. I don't think, I don't think I'm quite that advanced there. How ‘bout we just call it approaches? I actually think this is where the unique human component comes in. Think this is where there's a certain amount of, you know, skill set, data and keywords associated with data and skills taxonomies. There's a certain amount of that, that is that cannot go and complete that circle, right? I think this is where, in fact, we're learning that we need to work with the technology differently and also the humans differently, because the algorithms and the results of what's coming out of AI are it's only as good as the conversations you before it, during it, after it, how it's implemented, how there's a difference between what's written in the job description that you're pulling the data from, and what the individual actually does on a day to day basis. Because sometimes that changes really, really fast, right? What you call a project manager at a company, if the company is larger, they could have a dozen job descriptions for a project manager, and some of that could be specific domain related knowledge, but there is a certain amount of methodology that you would want to be universal, and how you articulate that and what level of proficiency you need someone to be able to perform at sometimes those are very legitimate conversations that need to happen, and L&D departments are some. Some are incredibly advanced at this. Some just don't have the capacity to do all of it themselves, like they have the skill sets themselves, but they have, you know, a person doing L&D for an entire manufacturing division, right? So sometimes we're capacity building in that, in that respect, but that whole like that, working from a human perspective, I think, has never been more important. And I think a necessary component of that is, what are those durable skills? How do we need to communicate with each other? How do we, how do we work in teams together, in a very different way, where we are more technology supported than ever before. I don't care if, like, you're working in a warehouse, or you're, you know, setting up a construction site, or you're working for a software company, you are using technology differently, and that requires both different skill sets, but moving and learning faster than ever before. Kaitlin: Yeah, it's that absolutely and it also makes me think about, you know, as we think about when you're talking about, like an L&D leader in a company, you know, how do they also take into account, from an adult learner perspective, all the skills that we all already have, right? Like, one of those other unique elements of working with adult learners is they already have a ton of skills. They're bringing existing domain knowledge and skills to the table, and how do you recognize that or unearth that as part of their lived experience and part of what they draw with them to their next role and build that into their L&D plan? It's just you know, another level of complexity. Sasha: And How do you even know, right? Like, you know as a manager, you're not sitting there reviewing everyone's resumes who already works there. That's not something right now. And when someone does raise their hand, I still remember this from when I was at SNHU, so I led the course production team there, and, you know, we did a massive implementation of Brightspace. You all remember this? And there was a young lady who was, he hadn't been there very long, and she just came up to me, she raised her hand, she came up to me, and she was like, you know, I have a degree in UX design, and I think there are some things that we could do, you know, to improve the experience in the courses. And I thought, hmm. And this was considered, like, almost a decade ago, right? Like eight, nine years ago, before everyone had UX all over place and experts in that space. And I was like, well, that's interesting. Well, let's see what some options are, right? And then two years later, when I left, we had a mini UX team, and SNHU now has the much, much bigger UX team on the learning side as well, like this is where I would never have known she had that skill set if she hadn't just walked up to me and told me. So how do we surface those experiences for L&D leaders, for managers to make sure that We can, we can fully leverage the talent we even already have, right? I think that's a really good point. Julian: So Sasha, can you speak to share an example or two of current or recent partners that you think are doing this very well? Sasha: One of our clients is a rather large retailer, and they actually did a whole analysis of sort of what talent they currently had, what skills were they projecting were going to be needed in the next couple of years, down to what specific positions were they having problems filling now, but were they projecting having more challenges in the future? And then that was all information that they really use to inform their selections of what to put into their marketplace, which is, is our platform essentially provides the ability to register for things based on skill sets or careers and even down to a specific skill that someone wants to develop, and so they very intentionally curated their learning opportunities and even structured their policies in a very intelligent way that enabled people to develop the skills that were most important to them, but also most important overall to the employees. So, you know, the French is a very important part of the culture in Canada, obviously, because of Quebec, but also just in terms of, you know, doing business, it is one of the national languages. And so learning French as a Second Language for people who aren't native French speakers is really important. And that was one of the skill sets they wanted to extend to all employees, even though not in Quebec themselves. So that was something that was really important. I would say that, from the sourcing perspective, another one of our clients had very specific needs in the energy sector, and so that's where we can go to our education partners and say, Hey, what do you have available in this specific space, which is also one of the reasons that we play in in very specific we call them ICPs, ideal customer profiles, and we focus on certain industries, and we intentionally do not do other industries. There are, there are industries, specifically healthcare. There are other companies in this space that really do that. They do that very well. They do that all day long. The market itself doesn't need another player in that space, and it's complex, it's highly regulated. There's clinical sites, all sorts of complications. So we're really leaning into the types of businesses where we're going to be most aligned and most successful, which is, you know, retail energy manufacturing, high tech manufacturing, construction management. There's a lot of. Yes, and interestingly, professional services, for some reason, we have a lot of interest from financial firms, which is sort of just happened organically. But those are, it's like this nexus of supply and demand and motivation all centered around the skills. That's like the skills is sort of the core part. It is the DNA of everything we do. Kaitlin: Sasha, one question that we like to ask everyone who comes on this podcast, given that it's called workforces, is based on your lessons learned. We'd love to hear practical steps that our audience can take away to become forces in implementing programs or products that are at the intersection of higher ed and industry. So if you have a couple of, like, practical steps, or, you know, things that you would recommend that are tried and true or or emerging for you, that would be great. Sasha: The first thing would be, look at the data. And I would start with sort of demand based signals in the marketplace. Some of those are very like, are almost data sets you can just grab, like, right, like, you can just grab data from Lightcast or a number of places that follows job data. And then you can, you can also grab data on who is enrolling and what type of program, what programs are being developed at colleges and universities. That data is available. But I think enrollment data is really important, because you have to look at the demand on all sides of this equation. Colleges and universities want to develop programs in certain areas. They may not be looking at all of...
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Brad Turner-Little: Retooling the Nation’s Workforce System
09/10/2024
Brad Turner-Little: Retooling the Nation’s Workforce System
Brad Turner-Little, President and CEO of the National Association of Workforce Boards (NAWB), shares his vision for NAWB and his commitment to building a workforce system that empowers individuals and strengthens communities. He discusses the challenges and opportunities facing workforce boards in the current landscape, emphasizing the need for innovation, adaptability, and strong leadership. Brad also highlights the importance of collaboration between business, education, and community partners in driving economic vitality and creating pathways to opportunity for all. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin: Workforces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Well, Julian, I can't believe we're well on our way with season three. Julian: I know the season is really flying by and there are so many innovative initiatives and voices to highlight. Kaitlin: No kidding. And it's amazing to see the themes that are emerging through these conversations. One theme that we're exploring this season and looking forward to discussing further today is really around rethinking and retooling the organizations that drive workforce, education and talent development. Julian: Yeah, we have a lot to unpack here, and we have just the guests to do it. Today, we're excited to connect with Brad Turner Little, who leads one of the nation's most important workforce development organizations, the National Association of Workforce Boards. Brad is Nob's president and CEO. He's been a strong voice and leader in the field of workforce development and the nonprofit sector. Prior to taking on this role, he honed his expertise and leadership skills in various key positions at Goodwill Industries International and Easterseals, most recently as Vice President of Strategy and Network Experience at Goodwill. Brad graduated Wake Forest University and holds a Master of Divinity degree in Christian Social Ministry from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and resides in Damascus, Maryland. It is great to have you on the pod, Brad, particularly as you're closing in on your first year as head of knob. I feel like we're getting you at kind of a, you know, an important milestone moment. Welcome. Brad Turner-Little: So go Deeks for my Wake Forest alumni who may be listening. And once a Hornet, always a Hornet, part of the swarm for Damascus High School. If there's anybody by chance that may be connected to Damascus, Maryland, who might be listening as well. So, so. They'll always be a part of the swarm and go dekes. But it's really, I'm excited to be here. The conversations that you guys have been having via Work Forces, I think are really, really critical. Just very recently, I heard this yesterday, I was in a conversation with Secretary Su at the Department of Labor, where she was talking about the one and a half conversations around the impact of AI and how that's impacting workers and how to not just create safety and security and protections for workers as impacts are evolving, but to think more broadly about the ways that AI and be it generative AI or other more historical artificial intelligence are impacting the way that work happens. And one of the things that I brought up in that conversation is this is to your point, I think, in terms of, Kaitlin, as you were mentioning, the retooling. Right, the retooling of workforce, the retooling of education, those sorts of things, right, is the need for investment in our nation's workforce infrastructure, just like we are investing in the physical infrastructure in that we need to be thinking about how AI and other technologies can transform the way that the public workforce system does its business and not just how job matching occurs and skill matching, but like really think hard about redoing the financial models of the public workforce system to stretch resources further, to better steward them, yes. But there's an opportunity in the moment, I think, to view the nation's public workforce system, local workforce boards, the three, you know, there's nearly 600 state and local workforce boards across the country and all the territories. There's about 3,000 America's job centers that all are sort of branded a little bit different in each state, but to really invest in the backbone of those things so that they can support the evolution of economies that are happening in regions all across the country. As different industries are transforming, that's requiring different skills and competencies for workers. There needs to be an investment in the public workforce system in order to support its ability to effectively serve businesses and all of our neighbors across the country. It's a very timely topic for you guys to be thinking about and having conversations around because there's a retooling sort of theoretical construct. I know Julian, you and I have had conversations about this in the past, right? There's a theoretical esoteric conversation about that. And then there's a very practical conversation about on the ground, what does transformation actually need to entail? What do we need to be investing in? How do we need to think about the execution of supporting businesses and talent coming together in fundamentally different ways that leverage lessons that we're seeing and learning from other parts of the economy into the way we think about preparing workers and connecting workers to career opportunities. Kaitlin: Yeah, no, we're with you there, Brad. And I think appreciate that introduction. And I think building off of what Julian said regarding your bio, we'd love to hear a little bit more about your background and how you approach your work, especially, like you said, in light of this very complex present state that we all live in. Brad: I've had the opportunity, Julian and I have known each other for a number of years, I don't think because we're in podcasts. I don't know if ultimately it will be video or not, but Julian and I are both of an age where we've known each other for all of our time. Julian: Okay, okay. Brad: But, you know, so my career piece really is sort of all been grounded in and sort of centered on a fundamental belief in the power and dignity of work to transform lives and communities. In the intro you mentioned that I do have a master's of entity degree but it's focused in Christian social ministry and inside that is the important role that economic empowerment and economic freedom plays in the human experience as it relates to dignity and Contribution to community support a family. I think there's a really important element to the human experience to be able to contribute through work. And so I got my career has all been built on how can I think about sort of on the ground and at a systems level, what can we do better tomorrow than we did today that can create better ways for people, for individuals to provide for themselves and their families better tomorrow than they did today? And it's one of the things we talk about now here at NAWB because we don't do direct service delivery, right? We're not helping job seekers and businesses come together in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That's not our role. We serve and support and represent local workforce boards that do that. But it's important that we here at NNAWB ground our work in a commitment that more kids are gonna have dinner on the table tomorrow night than they do tonight. That's what we do this work for. When it all boils down, from overhauling public workforce infrastructure, through to thinking about building certain strategies in our space. You know, we talk about sector strategies and career pathing and all the, you know, and skills first hiring and advancement to transform the way that talent acquisition happens, right? All of that for me personally is grounded in a deep commitment. And I'll say it again, to make sure that more kids have dinner tomorrow night than they do tonight. Because that's really when it hits the ground and that's what it means. You know, I've done lots of different things to support sort of directly in the public workforce system and in partnership with the public workforce system over the course of my career. And it will be September, September 5th will be one year. So it's currently August the 6th. So I have little bit less than a month in this role. And it's been really exciting here. You know the National Association of Workforce Boards will be 50 years old in 2029. And we were founded by a lovely gentleman. I know Julian and I know Bob Knight well. And Kaitlin, I don't know if you have, but I have had the opportunity to meet Bob Knight, but Bob founded this organization nearly 50 years ago with a vision of really advocating for the public workforce system. And over the years, it's been led by wonderful people, most recently by Ron Painter for about 15 years. But as I've come in, we've been working on building on that legacy, but really thinking in new ways about how we can not just represent local workforce boards, but how we can serve, support, and represent. And so we're thinking about how do we build products, how do we deliver services, how do we build relationships that create value for local workforce boards to be able to have the kind of impact that they are deeply committed to in their communities. So we're building new capabilities here to better serve and support. And I would also argue, ultimately, to better represent the interest of the public workforce system with Congress, with the administration, and with other stakeholders. But it's a growth period, it's a transformation period for us here at NAWB, and it's been really exciting. It's been very challenging work, but it's the most fun thing I've ever done in my career. It's over 25 years in workforce development for me, and it's been very rewarding, and I'm excited about our future here. Julian: It is very exciting, Brad, and they're certainly lucky to have you. I mean, you've been a force in the field for many years since I've known you, and as you know, as we know, the world is changing. And as we've discussed, there's a lot of need for retooling in all aspects of workforce development. This is just this constant theme, I guess. And we try to kind of keep it, you know, keep it where you want it, which is to keep it real and practical. So it's really, it'd be really interesting to hear you describe some of the very specific steps you're taking as you lead NAWB into the future. Brad: Yeah, so I got, you know, we've really landed on three primary strategies that I wanna talk through a little bit as it relates to how we believe we can, in partnership with our members, better serve, support, and represent them. And then I'm gonna talk about one area that that really hits the ground and that we believe is critical to the evolution of this organization. So the first three things are, number one, we want to really lean in and understand and help advance what moves the needle. And so as a business, as a small business, even though I'm an association, I think it's important to understand, like I'm a small business, right? And I got to think about what my business capabilities are and how do I want to build those things to create value for my customer set, right? And so I need to, we've got to build capabilities to listen hard to what the local workforce board's experiences are, what really drives change and impact, and then find ways to not just understand it and codify it, but spread it across the country, right? After 25 years of system level type work, I've come to the place where the construct of scale, I think, becomes a problem oftentimes in our conversations. Because when I think about scale, like what comes to mind is, like, you know, how do, you know, when Samsung releases a new phone, they think about scale. How much market share can they garner, right? Of all the cell phones that are out there, right? We wanna scale this model. We wanna scale and approach. But there's such, you know, and you guys have known this, right? You've experienced it over the years, like, like the dynamics and the context and the environment and the politics of, I mentioned Tulsa earlier, like they're different than Tallahassee and they're different than Tacoma. I love using T examples because they're strong alliterations there, right? But they are different. But if I think about a concept of spreading things, right? And when you think about the ways that, you know, technologies have and the viralness of trending and X, it used to be Twitter and other sort of platforms, things spread, people get excited about it. They wanna grab onto it and then make it their own and build on it and make it better and things spread over time, right? And I think that because it's human driven. Right, and so I want us to think about how do we as NAWB help spread things across our nation's workforce infrastructure, right? And so that helps us think about what kind of products do we need to be building? How do we build things that are agile and flexible and customizable to make sense, but have some foundational sort of components that are really important to think about? So as an example, right? So as opposed to...Here's the actual, like, take this operating model and move it from Tulsa to Tacoma, right? Here is the guiding conversational framework for players to have, to come to an agreement about a problem or a situation or an opportunity. So the conversational framework can be taken from community to community, but the actual conversation is different. You see the difference there? So it's not telling people this worked in Tulsa, so it's gonna have to work in, I'm gonna switch it up, Buffalo. Because there's a natural resistance to that. So just circumvent the resistance and create an experience that people can have together where they can develop a shared aspiration for their community. Because people act locally and they wanna do things locally on the ground, but they wanna do it together. And so I have found that, you know, as opposed to here's a model, we're gonna move it from space to space. If you can take an approach that allows a community to come together and build out a shared aspiration, they'll figure it out. They'll figure out how to move the needle and they'll get other communities excited about that. And they're gonna wanna know, how did you have that conversation? How did you get there? Well, it began by us having, you know, having a structured experience around these sorts of issues that led us to this place. So I'm super excited about sort of part one. Part two is we need to be deeply committed to helping our system skate to where the puck is going. Right, in the words of the great Wayne Gretzky, although I probably butchered his quote. But that's another thing too, is that our system, you know, I mean, yes, we've, you know, the amount of federal investment in the public welfare system has, you know, has gone down annually for, you know, years. So we, I mean, that's probably part of our reality moving forward, which means we have to get more creative. We have to be more innovative with how we do the business. And I started off with thinking about, you know, my comments to the Acting Secretary. We've got to invest in experimentation around how boards operate. And I think that's really, really critical that we at NAWB, we have a unique view, right? We sit at a balcony level. We're not at the orchestra level. We can sort of see things a little differently. And I think it's our responsibility to sort of gaze out over the horizon and sort of identify things that can be, that we need to experiment in to help boards better achieve their missions on the ground in communities, local workforce boards to really be able to do that as they bring business and talent together. So there's the operational piece. There's also things like, you know, we're really involved in the skills first hiring and advancement, you know, sort of work that I know many, you know, National Governors Association, Walmart, Foundation, lots of different groups are kind of in this space around thinking about what does it mean to fundamentally transform how a job seeker communicates with the value they can create for a business and how the business understands what are the actual competencies that we need to do a certain job. And oftentimes, a degree requirement is a false equivalency to competency needed to do work. But there's so much more than just that part of skills, you know, skills, skills first agenda. So anyway, I think, you know, but that's on the horizon. So we need to be in that conversation and in that space. And then lastly, you know, I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I do think it's really important that that we that we at NAWB align with and engage with people, corporations, partners, whatever it may be, that where we can really discern a shared aspiration around economic vitality in communities, right? That benefits business and all of our neighbors alike. Right, so I think those, so, and that influences like how we wanna approach, you know, the relationships that we're in and what are we trying to achieve, right? And ultimately, if this is about having a thriving local economy, I think we can also rally around that because that's going to create more opportunities for people. And ultimately, that's going to mean more kids are going to have dinner tomorrow night than they do tonight. And so, you know, let's think creatively about how we do that. So anyway, those are kind of the big three pillars of our focus as we build and as we evolve as an organization. Absolutely retaining sort of our engagements around the representation part for workforce boards. In this particular moment in time, Congress is considering the reauthorization of the federal legislation that sort of sits on top of this whole system called the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. There's appropriations discussions going on. So we're deeply involved in those pieces, but we believe that there's so much more we can be doing to support boards. And that's really those first three pieces. The other thing that I wanted, and where this begins to really come together for me, Kaitlin, is in our deep commitment to helping build and equip leaders in the public workforce system. So local executive directors, local CEOs of workforce boards and the Boards themselves, sort of equipping them and building competencies and skills that really align with the kind of leader you need in the overall economy, right? One that is certainly able to execute from complying with regulatory frameworks or expectations in law, but really has competencies in the space of understanding how to navigate change, how to think differently about agility within an organization, and how to do organizational development that builds trust within the team, right? Because ultimately, the competency sets and the skills that we're gonna need 10 years from now, like that's really hard to project. There's gonna be technologies that don't exist or whatever, but I can guarantee you that, you know, one thing that will be needed in the workplace 10 years from now is trust. So how do we build trust with one another within teams and how do we help leaders within the workforce system build those kinds of competencies to do community engagement, to think strategically to lean into vision crafting and aspiration development and then build...
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BHEF's Kristen Fox on Bridging the Higher Ed-Business Gap
08/26/2024
BHEF's Kristen Fox on Bridging the Higher Ed-Business Gap
Kristen Fox, CEO of the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF), joins Work Forces to delve into the critical intersection of business and higher education. With extensive experience in education, digital learning, and workforce development, Kristen brings a contemporary lens to BHEF's mission of creating inclusive solutions for talent challenges. In this episode, Kristen shares BHEF's strategic focus areas, including illuminating skill gaps, developing new work-based learning models, and convening action-oriented forums. She also emphasizes the importance of strong leadership, clear signaling mechanisms, and effective intermediaries in fostering successful cross-sector collaboration. Kristen shares valuable insights into the practical steps needed to bridge the gap between education and employment and create a more inclusive and agile talent pipeline, ultimately connecting learners in the higher education ecosystem to opportunity and sharing what's working to achieve greater impact together. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine. And we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. We're excited to kick off today's conversation by welcoming Kristen Fox, CEO of the Business-Higher Education Forum, or BHEF, to the podcast. It feels like conversations at the intersection of business and higher ed are more critical than ever, especially as we think about the future of work and learning. Julian: Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Kaitlin. The world is changing so rapidly. And Kristen brings us a contemporary lens on what works. And I'm looking forward to hearing how she's applying this lens to the BHEF, which has been around since the late seventies, I believe. Kaitlin: Yeah, same here, Julian. To provide a bit of background, the Business-Higher Education Forum is a national nonprofit that brings together business and higher education leaders to create inclusive solutions for talent challenges. In Kristen's role as CEO, she brings 20 years of leadership experience working at the intersection of education, digital learning, and workforce development. Kristen has advised foundations, institutions, and companies on the design and implementation of successful strategies that drive impact, growth, and sustainability. She's also published research on the impact of digital learning and AI in higher ed, and prior to her role at BHEF, Kristen held leadership positions at Titan Partners, Northeastern University, and Edge Adventures. She holds a BA in International Relations and Chinese from Colgate University and an MA in International Affairs and Economic Development from the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. Thank you for joining us on the podcast today, Kristen. Kristen Fox: Thank you for having me. It's great to be with both of you. Julian: It's great to be with you as well, Kristen. So to kick us off, if you would, please tell us more about your background and how you approach your work at BHEF. Kristen: So as you mentioned a little bit in your intro, I've spent the last 20 years or so working across the higher education sector. And I'll give a little bit more detail around that because I think it's important to the lens that I bring and part of the things that I'm excited about and think are so important about the work that we're doing at the Business-Higher Education Forum. But I worked in three kinds of types of roles. So in consulting or advisory roles, in leadership roles at an institution, and at membership types of organizations, all focused on issues related to workforce development, digital learning, innovation, student success, and equity. And in consulting in those roles, I had the opportunity to really get on hundreds of campuses, both two-year and four-year institutions over a long period of time across many different states and regions, and to work with different regional and sector business leaders through that lens as well, and also to work at philanthropies as they've considered impact and scale across the space, as well as at tech firms and organizations as well. That's given me a really powerful 360 degree view of the shared challenges and effective and ineffective solutions that leaders, faculty, and staff are really grappling with and behind closed doors. And one of my key takeaways there has been there's always a unique local flavor, right? So labor market challenges, to institutional strategies, et cetera. But there's a lot more commonality there than difference in terms of what we're trying to solve for. In addition, I've also had the opportunity to work at an institution, Northeastern University, with a significant focus on workforce alignment and experiential learning. And some of my efforts there were really focused on leading innovation related to making the traditional, really strong and effective co-op experiential learning model more accessible through something we launched called the Experiential Network, which is now more project-based learning online, connecting part-time learners, non-traditional or the new majority learner to different types of opportunities, for example. And then in addition, I did that with faculty, with advisors, and really working to support systemic change throughout the institution, really giving me a sense of, you know, how you work collaboratively in traditional institutions to more agilely align to workforce, to drive innovation, and to also engage employers effectively throughout the process. And so, you know, that experience of working to drive change within an institution has also been really powerful, right, in understanding some of the different dynamics that both can support or prevent change and innovation. And then early in my career, I worked in an organization that developed a pretty unique membership model approach that brought together institutions for shared learning and best practices. So, you know, really got a sense as to how that can be powerful and transformational in leading sector change. And I would also say that early in my career, I had the opportunity to teach undergraduate courses at the UC system and that gave me a real appreciation for just the diversity of experiences that different students are bringing to that first year experience and also you know really the ability to see on the front lines as to where we as a higher ed sector were meeting their needs well and and where we are not. All of those different experiences and a real focus and passion for economic development, workforce development led me to believe that a platform that is collaborative and that is national like the Business-Higher Education Forum is really important because it's an opportunity to focus on and catalyze impact on one of the most important issues of our time–better and closer collaboration between businesses and education, to support economic mobility, economic growth, to build those more inclusive, effective, and affordable pathways that we seek to be built. And I'm really honored to be working with leaders across business and institutions that are doing that. So what that leads me to bring to our work, right, is that focus on collaborative models, proven approaches to support change, and understanding of and how to translate across the business and higher ed sector. One brief experience I had that's helpful oftentimes there is working in the state department as a diplomat, right? One of the things that you will find that, right, can hamper, I think, and we hear this frequently, collaboration between the business sector and the higher ed sector–it's just the translation, right? Even something as simple as skills and learning outcomes, right? It's a different language and a different vernacular. And so we play a really important role there in the translation. So those are some of the things about me that I bring to our work. And then I look forward to telling you more about some of the work that I'm excited about that we're doing at the Business-Higher Education Forum. Kaitlin: Great. Well, thank you so much for sharing more about your background, Kristen. And really appreciate the description of how you have this 360 degree view on this work. And so much of what you said rings true to me, especially that translation of really just, right, sometimes it's just definition of terms across higher ed and business and how it is that when we use these terms, what do we mean by them? So we're looking forward to diving in with you in this conversation. Recognizing that you've taken on your role at BHEF relatively recently, we're curious to learn more about the strategy you're putting in place as you work at the nexus of business and higher ed at BHEF? Kristen: I started in February of 2024, so just about at the six month mark. So definitely excited to share with you some of the work we're putting in motion while also continuing to make sure that we evolve agilely our work in ways that are responsive to the needs of the market, et cetera. Yes, so I mean, I left a great role and incredible colleagues at a boutique strategy consulting firm that I was at before because I again, I think that the mission and platform and work that our board of directors and our network and partners and team at the Business-Higher Education Forum are working on are the most important issues of our time. There's, as you know, what we are positioned to do is again, build those bridges and points of collaboration and points of partnership. Deep, sustained partnership between higher education and business. And so a couple of things that we're thinking about are obviously, there are huge transformations happening across our economy. Emerging technologies are accelerating those, and we continue to see significant shortages in key occupations, like cyber, advanced manufacturing, green jobs, and STEM. And those are roles that are really critical to the security and economic growth of our country as well as the economic mobility and opportunities of individuals. In addition, as you all know, the kind of half-life on skills is shortening. And so, one recent estimate from IBM is that 40% of the workforce will need to re-skill due to these disruptions in the next three years. I've seen estimates even more than that. But so, there's a real imperative to make sure that number one we as a sector are aligning talent supply and demand, so that both at an occupational level, as well as from a skills alignment level and acknowledging that that's a lifelong process. And we also believe, and I also believe, that higher education needs to and is a critical talent engine for economic development and can be a talent partner of choice for business. And so one of the things that's core to our work and mission is that we create spaces for higher education and business leaders to co-create and experiment with building those more inclusive, agile, and effective paradigms that enable us to recruit, develop, and connect talent to opportunity across those areas. A few of the things that we're really doubling down on to address those issues and that build on our history and legacy but refashion us for a new era. So for context, you know, and Kaitlin, you shared this at the outset, the Business-Higher Education Forum has operated as a national nonprofit organization that's comprised of really committed leaders from major corporations, as well as presidents and chancellors and their teams of innovative, agile colleges and universities, so inclusive of two-year and four-year institutions across the country. Those leaders have opted in to studying, co-designing, piloting, and building new pathways that close those critical talent gaps and emerging and in-demand skill areas. Some of the strategic areas of focus that we are either recommitting to or pursuing that are a little bit different than in the past, I'll walk you through. But we're committed as ever to our why of building those stronger pathways between education and employment. We are not a think tank or a research house. We do put out research and some insights and we put out toolkits. You can find some of those on our website. There's a lot of great, really well done reports and research assets there. But most importantly, we are working to catalyze and test, refine, and replicate what works in the field. So there's kind of four things that we're really focused on there and doing for our network, and then sharing also more broadly with the field at large. First, we continue to do work that we've done historically, both individually and with our partners, around illuminating and shining a light on those places where we need to close skill gaps. We've done and continue to do a significant amount of work looking at how AI is impacting the workforce, green jobs and skills, and you can find actually several blogs, etc. on that on our website to see more of what we're working on there. The second and a really major piece that we're also focused on is the development of new models. So as I said before, prototyping, implementing and scaling solutions that bridge learning and work. Two places there that I'll mention as examples: we're spending a lot of time right now focused on new work-based learning models. We're going to be coming out and releasing in September a national survey of over 2,500 employers, and focus groups around how to design work-based learning and scale work-based learning in ways that increase supply because it's responsive to employer needs in addition to being a high quality experience for the learner. We know how important internships are. We can talk more about that later in our conversation. But because of that, that's a place that we're really committed to not only sharing research around design and design models that can increase scale, but also supporting and being a part of the sets of solutions that enable institutions and employers to more effectively implement work-based learning models. We also continue to look at and help on the institution side in particular, think about how do you design and how do you implement more effective models for employer engagement. We know that's a real area of challenge in terms of higher ed really asking and how do we more effectively engage with employers and what does that look like? And then last but not least, a key piece of what we continue to do is convening and bringing together an action oriented forums leaders so that we can catalyze, we can sense make and then catalyze change and really sharing that with the field. And I think that's something that's a little bit different than you'll see in the past. We've launched a blog. We're really working to, you know, get out the work and insights that our team has been learning from 45 years of facilitating effective partnership, and making sure those best practices and solutions are out there. The last thing I'll say is there's three ways that we work and that we're committed to. One is around a membership network so institutions and businesses can work with us as part of an annual collaboration where we develop an annual research and impact agenda, have frequent virtual round tables and emerging topics and just really allow for peer to peer executive and team learning. And then secondly, we have a solutions lab where we build on our strong track record of working across our network and partners to do things like implement regional initiatives, cross-sector pilots, and to really work to again implement in the field. And we work with many philanthropic partners there as well in terms of implementing, again, regional initiatives and bringing together business and higher ed leaders to solve for talent gaps. And I can give you more examples as we talk today. The last thing I would just say that I think is important as we move forward, is we're really focused on expanding and growing our network of innovators. Historically, the forum had some convenings that were a little bit more exclusive and our philosophy and board has really taken the approach that to have the impact on the student experience and on the economy that we want to, we need to have a thriving and growing network of innovators. In addition to our incredibly strong board and leadership of Fortune 100, Fortune 500, and large public and private institutions, we also are continuing to expand our partnerships with the community college sector, for example, with regional public colleges, as well as with other corporate leaders. And for example, we've just named some new board members that represent those sectors and allow us to better serve their needs. Those are some of the things that we're really focused on. And I'm really excited about the work that our team continues to do. We've got an incredibly, we have a small but diverse team that includes experience from the Department of Commerce from workforce development boards, from working at institutions, from working in HR and talent roles. And so really have experienced both in building community, advising the stakeholders that we work with and having walked in their shoes. So really excited about the work that we continue to do and the opportunities to foster collaboration and impact across the business and higher education sectors because we know how important it is. Julian: Well, it sounds like you've really hit the ground running, Kristen, in the first six months, so congrats. It's amazing. You sound like you've been there for six years, maybe. But I'd like to dig a little bit deeper in terms of the modeling. One of the things we like to do on Work Force is people want specifics. They want to know what are examples and how to do it. And so we'd love to hear a little bit more. You've talked some, but about what learning models do you feel are working well as you look across business and higher ed partnerships? And then as well, you mentioned, for example, the language issue, which keeps coming up again and again with us. It's like so much of this is about language. And what do you see as challenges? So let's work in challenges, examples, please. Kristen: So I'm really encouraged at what I see around the role of, you know, in regions, business and higher ed working together to address talent gaps and mobilize, right, by whether it be state or fed record federal investments, and in certain cases, philanthropic investments as well to, you know, seed and scale work. So I think that, you know, place-based focus on solving specific regional economic development challenges is important. And there are a few examples of effective approaches that we've been working a part of that I'd be happy to share. And what I see as being some of the key ingredients around them. So a couple of things that I would say, so we've been doing, for example, our team in the state of Connecticut, working pretty expansively with the office of the governor's office, working with the business sector leadership, so really strong business sector leadership out of you know organizations that include but are not limited to. Accenture, Stanley Black and Decker, also working side by side with the and representing the broader business community. Also working side by side with the higher education community, the independent colleges and leadership in the state as well as the public colleges in the state, in the system, and the individual institutions. That was brought together, again, by strong higher ed...
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NextFlex's Becky Lewis: Bridging the Manufacturing Skills Gap
08/13/2024
NextFlex's Becky Lewis: Bridging the Manufacturing Skills Gap
Becky Lewis is Director of Education and Workforce Development at NextFlex, a manufacturing institute dedicated to innovation and workforce development in the flexible hybrid electronics sector. Becky shares her passion for creating pathways for untapped talent to access good-paying jobs and discusses the challenges and opportunities in addressing the skills gap in advanced manufacturing. The conversation delves into NextFlex's innovative learning programs, including the nationally scaled FlexFactor program for K-12 students and their initiatives to support incumbent worker training. Becky also highlights NextFlex's commitment to diversity and inclusion, with a special focus on expanding opportunities for women in STEM and manufacturing fields. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Julian: Today we're joined by Becky Lewis. Becky is Director of Education and Workforce Development at NextFlex. NextFlex is a flexible hybrid electronic manufacturing institute that facilitates innovation, addresses the manufacturing workforce gap, and promotes sustainable manufacturing ecosystems. Becky leads NextFlex learning programs with a focus on inspiring and training an inclusive advanced manufacturing workforce. Becky is a seasoned leader with diverse experience in education, workforce development, and health equity. With decades of experience in grant writing, grant management, and budget oversight, she secured over $10 million in federal grants for institutes of higher education and takes a data-driven approach to measuring program outcomes and their impacts on diverse learner populations. Welcome to Workforces, Becky. Becky Lewis: Thank you, I'm glad to be here. Kaitlin: Thank you for joining us today, Becky. It's such a privilege to have the chance to connect with you. As we get started today, can you please tell us about your background and how you approach your work? Becky: Of course. And it's so lovely to be on with you today as well. So I think one of the threads that's important in terms of my story is that I come from a family of folks that have always kind of given back. And I think some of that certainly comes from a certain level of privilege. So like everyone in my family is mostly doctors and healthcare professionals, social workers. And so I think there's definitely that thread of like, you know, whatever you're doing for a living should also be something that actually leaves the world and society, you know, a better place to some extent. And so I think I've always approached, you know, education and my work from that from that lens. I know, obviously, you read my bio, but part of where I started was really with community college and so teaching community college students for over 10 years. I really, really loved that work and I think that inspired me and gave me kind of a perspective and a platform upon which I've built my career. So I think the vision around that was really like how do we help equip people that might not otherwise have access to education, resources, social capital, to really have social and economic mobility and be able to live a quality, good life. Even though my background is really a lot of public health. And so with that lens, it's like, all right, well, we know that there's a really strong correlation between kind of the level of education that somebody has and actually their overall lifespan, their chronic disease rates, all of that. And so in my mind, there was always that idea of like, how can we ensure that people have as much education information, resources to support themselves and their families and not just survive, but thrive. So I think that's something that I've carried with me throughout my career and now really workforce development, I think it's gotten such a common…it’s become such a household name, particularly post-COVID with everything. But you know, I really think what's what's interesting about the work is that it's not just about getting people into jobs, right? Like it's really about giving folks the skills and knowledge and kind of ecosystem that allows them to be successful and thrive. And I think and also just, you know, have good physical health, have good mental health, I think particularly coming out of COVID those have been more like visible priorities, both from an employer standpoint and also from an employee standpoint, because you recognize that you can't actually do your job well unless you are well, you know, sound bodies, sound mind. So I think those are some things that are really important to me and that I'll continue to carry with me in the work with Nextflex. Julian: Becky, what is NextFlex? Tell us about the goals of the organization and your work within it. Becky: Yeah, absolutely. So you gave a little bit of an overview of NextFlex, but just to go into more depth. So NextFlex is one of the nine manufacturing innovation institutes that is funded by the Department of Defense to essentially reshore manufacturing capabilities within the United States. And one of our key tenants or kind of mission spaces is education and workforce development. And so that's where I fit in. We are nationally focused. As an institute, we have a specific technology focus. So for NextFlex, that is flexible hybrid electronics and hybrid electronics broadly. We're also kind of looking at adjacencies with the semiconductor field and advanced packaging. But our workforce mission really is to figure out how do we support the workforce that's needed to strengthen US manufacturing capabilities and particularly for the defense industrial base since the Department of Defense is our primary kind of customer and stakeholder. And one of the ways that we really try to think about doing that and also aligns with my personal passion space, you know, is by looking at kind of untapped, overlooked, underserved talent and how we can kind of create bridges and pathways and opportunities for folks to have access to some of these good paying jobs. Kaitlin: Great. So building on that, Becky, can you tell us a little bit about the learning portfolio that you offer that reaches K-12 students and adults as well? Becky: One of the things that I think is interesting is like if you look at kind of the numbers in the United States, so we know that we are still, you know, the labor market, according to the Department of Commerce, still has not returned to pre-pandemic employment levels. Interestingly, you know, women actually are right around pre pandemic employment levels. And part of that is because of the increase of hybrid work. And so because of that, it's allowed women to be in the workplace and work from home and have that flexibility. However, childcare is still a tremendous barrier to accessing work for, you know, many, many populations, you know, including women. And we also know that, nNot only is there a current shortage in terms of not having enough people to fill the jobs that we have posted now, but we're also making billions of dollars of investment with semiconductors, with the Chips and Science Act, with the Biden incentive funding, and building these, you know, fabs all over the country. And we don't have people to fill those jobs either. So we're going to have to figure this out and really from NextFlex's standpoint, and I think many of us in the workforce development space, the solution to that is really, how can we again build those bridges and look into increasing access to populations that have not traditionally had access to some of these jobs? And what are we missing, right? So I think a lot of the things that we've always done for workforce, like we really have to kind of reevaluate and pivot and think more creatively about that, because the world of work has changed, I think, since COVID and people want different things. People don't want to be working 70 hour weeks. They want more flexibility. They want to be able to prioritize their family and mental health. And all of those things are essential. And for better or worse, people are able to be a little more selective about the kind of work they choose. And so how do we create opportunities that align with those priorities? So I just wanted to like provide that landscape first because I think it's relevant to kind of some of the problems that we're trying to solve. NextFlex has really a kind of K to gray talent pipeline approach. So we have started with our K to 12 program which is FlexFactor that was originally created in 2016 I believe and kind of piloted in the Bay Area with you know kind of urban and really diverse high schools in that area and then really expanded. So now FlexFactor is actually, has been scaled nationally. It's all over the country. We have over 20,000 students. I think we hit 21,000 this, in the last few weeks. So that's a lot of students. You know, it's a really impressive program. And I think what we've found is that people that adopt it and implement it, you know, really have like a brand recognition, you know, and they really like it and get excited about it. And there's some really good kind of outcomes in terms of including, you know, diverse students and also military connected youth among others. So it's been a really positive component of the work that we've done. We also do have, we've done a couple local programs in the Bay Area, one with a community college where we built a technician training program and that was kind of an earn and learn model. So I'm sure you know, like the earn and learn model, they have really high retention rates and completion rates. So we've done that. We also are working on building out some options for incumbent worker training now, and also working at mapping kind of some of the specific competencies that are needed. So if you're an incumbent worker and you're employed at like a production facility, what kinds of skills do you need, like, because you might not even know, in order to move into kind of hyper electronics, advanced manufacturing or other areas. And a lot of what we're hearing from at least that, you know, what I understand from workforce priorities under CHIPS is it's not like we want to train a whole bunch of people to make like one widget, right? And like, we want to be able to give people the multidisciplinary skillset and ability to really adapt and evolve and keep pivoting as the technology keeps adjusting. So, you know, it's an opportunity and a challenge. I think it in some ways makes it harder because it's like you can't have a one program that's going to solve everything. But at the same time, how do you kind of take these competencies or skills and then overlay them within existing training programs to help meet that need? Julian: Becky, can you tell us a little bit more about how FlexFactor works and some of the very specific sort of outcomes. I mean, it's impressive that you've already served over 20,000 or 21,000 students interested to, I'm sure our audience would like to hear a little bit more about the actual program itself. Becky: FlexFactor is really ideally situated within middle school or early high school, although it's been adapted for as low as fourth graders all the way up through seniors in high school. It essentially is a project-based learning model where students kind of get exposed to the concept and the technology of flexible hybrid electronics. It can be situated within any discipline. So if a student's in an environmental science class, if they're in a healthcare class that concept of the technology can be integrated. And so they can kind of develop a project that's aligned with their areas of interest, which I'm sure as you know, too, from a best practices standpoint, kind of contextualized learning is always the most impactful. And so that was part of the design of the program. It also really mostly lands within a community college system. We have some programs that are adopted by like museums or nonprofits and they run the program, but for the most part are the folks that have adopted the program are community colleges. And the way that it works is that they essentially have a license from NextFlex. They hire a program manager. The program manager delivers the curriculum in the K-12 system, but they then have a direct path to the community college. So they do tours there. They learn about their programs as a next step. So it really kind of provides this opportunity not only for exposure to the technology, but also like, okay, and then what? Like, so I'm gonna do this project, I'm gonna participate in this judged experience and with industry and have fun. And then, I'm gonna look at, okay, these are the opportunities that I could pursue should I choose to go on in this area. Kaitlin: It's really interesting to hear you talk about how you're bridging these experiences, bridging the gaps between experiences really to make those connections for learners and perhaps encourage them to think, like, okay, here's what I'm learning now, but here's where I could be going with this knowledge. It's really interesting to hear how you're doing that through that program. Becky: I think that is the program's strength because I think, at least when I was teaching at the community college you have one conversation with a student, like that is not sufficient to help move the needle on anything, right? So it's like multiple repeated exposures, multiple conversations, and then showing people like the pathway. And that's really how, cause if you can't, if you don't have anyone in your family that's pursued a career in this area, you can't imagine what that could look like. And so I think this model really allows them to see that. I think we certainly can do even more, we always can, but I think that's part of the strength of the model. Kaitlin: Building off of that and maybe taking the conversation in a slightly different direction, we understand that NextFlex is also building out a fundraising initiative focused on expanding opportunities for women and other untapped talent in STEM and other manufacturing fields. Can you tell us a little bit about that effort as well? Becky: Absolutely. And this is, again, a passion project of mine. Particularly, I have three daughters, and so thinking about kind of their path through the educational system and then into employment and what that will look like and knowing that some of the barriers, you know, that they'll come up again. So part of the vision of this is that NextFlex will have a perpetual fundraising effort focused on untapped talent. And in year one, we're focusing on women. Part of the rationale for that is when we like, I'm an academic, right? So I kind of a nerd, I did a literature review and we did a bunch of interviews. What we found is that there's a ton of programming, and obviously not enough still, but there's a ton of programming happening at the K to 12 level. So Intel has a program like Million Girls Moonshot. There's a lot of stuff happening there. As you kind of inch further up into college and then even early career, there's Million Women Mentors. There are programs, but there's not enough. And what we see with the data, is that many women who even if you start off like in a bachelor's degree in engineering, even if you complete that bachelor's, their first jobs aren't always in engineering. Often they end up not even being retained within the workforce upon completion of their degree program. Or someone might complete the degree, go into the workplace, and then decide to have a child or take some time off or the workplace culture isn't a good fit and then they don't come back. So NextFlex's kind of sweet spot of focus for this effort is really looking at how can we help ensure that women are retained. So if someone's already in an engineering program, already in a computer science program, we know they're excited, they have the skills, they have the passion, how do we keep them and how do we help and what can we put in place to do that? So is it mentoring programs? Is it leadership opportunities, professional development? Is it, you know, working with industry to think about addressing some of the cultural needs, you know, and policies that are specific to women in the workplace. So all of those things are relevant and that specific kind of demographic is who we were looking to target for this. And in talking to, we did interviews with probably like 20 different women to tea that, you know, across all different stages of industry. And I think the thing that really struck me was, so we're in 2024, like I would think there are certain things that problems we would have solved in terms of workplace culture and other things. And we really haven't. We have so much work to do. And that was sobering for me and kind of, you know, because it's like, wow, we have a lot of work to do. And of course, Nextlex can't do this alone. Like this is, you know, requires all of us at all different levels and industry and academia and nonprofits and, you know, media and everybody addressing it. But I think it made me feel like, oh, if we can even just do a piece to help move the needle and even start some of the conversations that probably need to be had, that's a good start. Julian: Yeah, that's great. It's definitely important leadership for the field. Becky, before I ask you a question about lessons learned, it occurred to me that I want to ask you a question, which is, what are flexible hybrid electronics manufacturing jobs? So if you don't mind, I'd like to ask you that as a standalone. Becky: The interesting thing about flexible hybrid electronics is that it is a technology that is used. So any of like the smartwatches that you wear or even things in cell phones, like those devices contain flexible hybrid electronic components. However, it's not widely adopted and scaled yet. So there are places where it's used, actually health care is another space where it's often implemented. And essentially it involves printing electronic components on like in a 3D additive way on a substrate. So and the substrate is flexible so that essentially it can be small, it can be flexible, and it can have lots of different applications. The challenge with this from like a workforce standpoint is that there aren't job descriptions out there today, for the most part, that have these descriptions in them. So what we're, and it really is interdisciplinary, like additive manufacturing, electronics, some robotics in places, like lots of different things that are needed. So part of the challenge and opportunity is to think about like, how do you kind of position a workforce that is equipped to continuously evolve, adapt skills, problem solve, think critically, and have enough savvy to be able to implement and pivot to incorporating this technology once it's kind of at scale, because we're not there yet. So a lot of positions, we're working on writing a proposal right now with some partners and one of the jobs we're looking at is a mechatronics technician. So that's a position that has really diverse skill set, fixing machines, and that could be like really well poised to then implement either semiconductor technology or other adjacent technologies. So that's a good example. But there are probably like five or six, at least if not more, technician level roles where the skills align and are comparable. But you're not going to...
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Kermit Kaleba on Building Quality Credential Programs
07/24/2024
Kermit Kaleba on Building Quality Credential Programs
In this episode of Work Forces, Kaitlin LeMoine and Julian Alssid kick off season three with a conversation with Kermit Kaleba, Strategy Director of Employment Aligned Credential Programs at Lumina Foundation. Kermit delves into Lumina's mission to increase credential attainment and reduce racial disparities in education and employment. He discusses the challenges and opportunities surrounding the development of high-quality short-term credential programs and their alignment with labor market demand. Kermit also shares insights into the evolving landscape of workforce development and how Lumina is supporting community colleges and other partners in meeting the needs of the 21st-century workforce. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Welcome back. Julian, isn't it exciting to be kicking off season three of Work Forces? Julian: It is indeed, Caitlin. I can't believe it's been 21 episodes and I'm definitely looking forward to this season to continue to unpack the cross-cutting themes and opportunities and challenges that are shaping the future of work and learning. Absolutely. We aim to keep our audience ahead of the curve as the landscape continues to rapidly evolve across education, industry, and training really at the levels of both policy and practice. And we truly appreciate the feedback and engagement we're experiencing with our audience and our guests. So, to kick off this season, we're so glad to welcome Kermit Kaleba, Strategy Director of Employment Aligned Credential Programs for Lumina Foundation. Kermit has been a key player in workforce development and policy for many years. For Lumina, he leads a portfolio designed to increase the number of occupational short-term credential and associate degree programs. Kermit previously served as Managing Director for Policy at National Skills Coalition. He also served as Executive Director of the Washington DC Workforce Investment Council. Kermit has a JD and Bachelor’s Degree from the College of William and Mary, and we are so glad that he's able to join us on this podcast today. Thank you, Kermit. Kermit Kaleba: Thank you guys for having me here. I’m very excited. Julian: Yes, Kermit, thank you. And we're thrilled to have you. And I guess to kick us off, we'd love to have you tell us about your background and how you approach your work at Lumina. Kermit: Let me just, I guess, start by sharing a little bit about Lumina Foundation and the mission of Lumina, and then how I came to be a part of the organization. Lumina Foundation is one of the nation's largest private foundations focused exclusively on post-secondary education and training. We're headquartered in Indianapolis, but we work nationally. And Lumina is known for really for two north stars in our giving strategy. The first is our focus on credential attainment. Back in 2009, Lumina established or set out to establish a national goal of trying to get to 60% of US adults between the ages of 25 and 64 a post-secondary degree or high quality credential, quality post-secondary credential by the year 2025. And that goal has been, we think, very influential in helping to drive policy and practice in the higher education space. We've seen about a 16 percentage point increase in credential attainment since we announced that goal. So we still have progress to make, but I think we are making progress towards that goal. And the other North Star in our giving is our commitment to racial equity. We're an equity first organization. We know that one of the reasons why we haven't met the goal of the 60% goal is because of historical choices, barriers that we've created for learners of color in education and employment and in other spaces. And so in our grant making, in addition to looking to expand credential attainment, we are also looking to reduce racial disparities and make sure that learners of color have meaningful opportunities for education that leads to good jobs and further educational opportunities. A little bit about myself. So I, as you mentioned, I lead a portfolio called the Employment Aligned Credential Program Portfolio. And that portfolio is focusing on, we know that many adult learners are looking for shorter term credentials. Folks are looking to get into the labor market quickly, looking to update their skills. They're often facing family or work circumstances that make it difficult for them to do longer term educational pathways. And so we know a lot of adults are hoping to take short term credentials to be able to move quickly into the labor market or advance in the labor market. And our portfolio is really, how do we make those credentials, how do we identify those credentials that work? How do we help people get into those pathways? How do we make sure that they align with labor market demand? How do we make sure that they connect to further educational pathways? And how do we make sure that those opportunities are equally distributed or fairly and equitably distributed? I came to this work, my first real introduction to the world of short-term credentials. And it is really, it's kind of an interesting ecosphere. I started working on this back, you folks may remember in the last decade we had the federal government was funding what were known as the TAACCCT grants, the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants, I think is the acronym. And these were grants, federal grants that were meant to support industry community college partnerships. It was $2 billion over four years and these were really, really popular grants in obviously in the community college space as community colleges were looking to build partnerships with industry and build pathways into targeted sectors. And one of the, one thing we started hearing in 2015 or 2016 from our college partners was we are building, you know, these grants are great, we're building these programs and these pathways, we're working with employers, we think these are going to create good opportunities for workers in our area. But for a lot of the programs we're creating, they aren't eligible for federal Pell grants or financial assistance because they're 10-week programs, they're 12-week programs, they're designed to be quick, they're designed to get you quickly into a new job. And the Pell Grant program only covers programs of 16 weeks or longer. And so even though we're doing what we're supposed to be doing, we're building the kinds of programs that industry is asking for. We can't get people to get into these programs because of the financial barriers. And so I, at the time, you know, I was the, I was doing federal policy at National Skills Coalition and we thought, oh, this seems like a problem we can solve. If these are federally funded projects, we should be able to make it so that federal financial aid is available for these, for the credentials and the programs that we're creating. And, you know, here we are, you know, 10 years later and I'm still working on this issue. Julian: A century later, or not quite. Kermit: Well, so that led me to start working on Short-term Pell, or Workforce Pell as it's sometimes called. And so we worked with, when I was at National Skills Coalition, worked with Senator Kane's office around the introduction of what was called the JOBS Act. And one of the things that came out of the, you know, when once the JOBS Act was introduced and the conversation started to grow around the possibility of expanding Pell short-term programs, there were some natural questions that came up about quality, right? So as folks know, there are a lot of non-degree credentials that are out there in the ecosystem. Credential Engine put out an estimate of about a million separate individual credentials. For job seekers, for businesses, for institutions, there's often a lot of questions about how do we know what quality is, how do we define quality, how do we get good information about whether or not these credentials provide you with the skills and the competencies that you need to be successful. And that in turn led us to a project looking at how are states defining quality non-degree credentials in their workforce system, in their higher education system, in their secondary system. And that in turn led me when this opportunity came up at Lumina to make the leap and really start to think about how do we support better, how do we answer that question of what are quality credentials, what are the mechanisms that we need to have in place to identify those credentials and to build those credentials and to make sure that people have the supports that they need to, not just to get the credentials, but to be successful on the job. Kaitlin: We appreciate learning that story and that journey and can certainly see how it's brought you to this point. Can you describe some of the projects within your portfolio at Lumina? I'm sure some of them connect to what you just shared, but we'd love to hear a little bit more. Kermit: I have sort of three kind of discrete sets of projects that I support. I have one set of invest. One set of projects is what we sort of inside we call our supply side strategy. And that is, one of the things we've learned about non-degree credentials is that we don't have a particularly robust policy infrastructure in this country around non-degree credentials. What I mean by that is we don't have financial aid for a lot of these programs, particularly on the non-credit side of community colleges, even as those are important. We think they're pretty somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.7 million adults who are enrolled in the non-credit side of community colleges every year. But many of them are not eligible for federal or state financial aid. Institutions don't often many states don't don't fund workforce development or non-credit programs through their their institutional, their formula funding for institutions. Many states don't have particularly robust data on workforce or non-credit programs that offer through community colleges. And students often aren't offered the same level of support services that their counterparts on the for credit and the more traditional academic side are. And so one of the theories that we have is that this lack of policy infrastructure is sort of holding us back in a way. If we were to be more intentional about making dedicated investments and tracking those investments that we would see better outcomes in the workforce development space that if we had, if states and other stakeholders had skin in the game about the outcomes for these programs in a meaningful way that we would see, we would see better outcomes. And so in this set of projects, we invest in research to better understand the landscape of non-degree and non-credit programs and the policies that govern them. So for example, we've been funding the Association of Community College Trustees to look at funding formulas for dual enrollment and non-credit and for credit programming at the state level to better understand how are states investing. And we've also done some research around state credential definitions, quality credential definitions under Perkins, et cetera. And we fund some technical assistance with states that are looking at expanding their financial aid programs for non-credit to help them think about student eligibility, programmatic eligibility, and funding levels to make sure that they're being intentional about helping people get access to high quality credentials. The other two sets of work that we invest are fairly similar, but we also have a number of projects that are more on the programmatic side. So one of the things we know about non-degree credentials, workforce credentials, is that you need alignment with industry. And one of the best ways to think about aligning credentials with employer needs is what are often referred to as industry or sector partnerships. So bringing together multiple employers in a local or regional industry with their community college partners, and sometimes other partners, to build pathways into and through those industries. So we are funding a number of projects that are looking at this intersection between industry and community colleges and in many cases working with other stakeholders around diversification of those pipelines. So in addition to making sure that the colleges are delivering credentials that lead to good jobs or trying to lead to good jobs. We're also trying to think about how do we expand opportunities for learners of color in key industries like healthcare and in various manufacturing and IT sectors where we know there are good job opportunities, but those job opportunities have not always been available or readily accessible for particularly for workers of color. And then a third set of investments that we've been making is is in the infrastructure space. We knew when I first started in 2021, there was a lot of discussion about the possibility of a big new infrastructure bill coming from the federal government, Congress and the administration. And we wanted to see if we could help position community colleges in particular as partners in building the workforce that would be needed to help support those infrastructure projects. Do you hear President Biden talk a lot about the millions of jobs that we created through the IIJA and the IRA and the CHIPS Act and how many of those jobs won't require a four-year degree. Well, we wanna make sure that we have the training and workforce infrastructure to address those job opportunities. And so we have a set of investments that we've made in California and Virginia and other places around trying to better position community colleges and technical colleges as training partners in that space. Julian: So Kermit, given the investments, the portfolio, your experience, Lumina's experience more broadly, does Lumina, like what does Lumina see as credentials that work? Kermit: That's a great question. I'll speak for myself. And we do have a, as part of our credential attainment goal, when we calculate our credential attainment goal, we do include some non-degree credentials, certificates and certifications as long as they meet a particular wage threshold. So I always get this wrong, but I believe it's 15% above what you could earn with a high school diploma. So that's one way of thinking about defining value is does it offer a wage premium over not having a credential? I think there are other definitions of value that are also important. One of the things that I know we look at is, does it lead to further educational pathways? So a credential that gets you a job is important. We want to make sure that people can get employed. But does it stack to further educational pathways? And is there a good, are there are there reasonable policies and practices in place that allow people to stack? I think one of the things we've been talking about in this space for a long time is the importance of creating stackable credentials to ensure that learners who may not be able to stay in education for two years or four years at a time, giving them the opportunity to get education in bite-sized chunks and then come back at different points in their career and expand their skills. We know that's really important. We also know the data shows that it isn't happening as much as we'd hoped when we first started talking about stackability, Lumina has funded research around stackability. And we found that there are very few folks who, for example, start on the non-credit side, end out going on to the for-credit side. And I think that's something we as a field need to ask some deep questions about and try to better understand why that's not happening. It makes sense on paper, but I think one question is, is it really aligned with what people are experiencing when they're in the labor market and in life? And I would say the other, we're also interested in understanding, coming back to your question of what is a valuable credential? I think we're also interested in sort of understanding the value of the credential from the demand side. So how do we make sure that the credentials that are being, that are being created and offered really do provide the skills and the competencies that are necessary to do the job. So just as it's inefficient and wasteful for someone to spend time from a learner perspective getting a credential if it doesn't align with labor market value or align with labor market demand, the same is true from an employer perspective. You want to try to reduce the gap between what somebody needs to know to do the job on day one and what the credential is offering. And so I think we're also interested in looking at it from that perspective. Kaitlin: Thanks so much for that response, Kermit. And I think, you know, building on that, I think you're already starting to touch upon it. But, you know, as you're seeing your, these projects unfold under these different buckets or themes, what are some of the challenges and successes that you're seeing in the different projects? Kermit: One one obvious challenge that we uh... we have been running into is uh... you know as i mentioned Lumina is very committed to uh... reducing eliminating racial disparities and uh... and helping to dismantle the uh... structural racism that has impacted so many people in this country's history and continues to have impacts for for learners and workers of color today uh... anything one of the challenges that we have been facing is that there has been this backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion in many parts of the country. And that has, I think, limited the ability of some of our, certainly our higher education partners to fully participate in some of the projects that we want to support because of concerns about being, running afoul of policies or just the political climate in their states or in their parts of the country. While that has been a challenge, it also then creates an opportunity, particularly for our employer partners as we're making these investments, to, you know, employers will tell you that diversity, diversifying the workforce is not just the right thing to do, but it's the economically imperative thing to do. And so I think we are interested moving forward in thinking about how employers can be contributing to uh, uh, be contributing in this space and, and signaling the importance of diversifying their talent pipelines and making sure that they have, uh, that they are able to engage everyone in their community and, and, and not just, um, not just the folks who have always benefited from these investments. Um, I think that's so, so it is a challenge, but I think also, hopefully there's an opportunity here. Uh, I would say another challenge that we're seeing is candidly, and I think we're probably somewhat guilty of this, is initiative fatigue. Community colleges are really marvelous institutions. They do so much, right? They provide traditional academic instruction, leading to a two-year and in some cases, a four-year degree increasingly. They provide education and training. They provide dual enrollment. They provide community services. And they do so often without the level of resources that other higher education institutions get. They're positioned as the low cost option for both academic and workforce training. And I think we agree that...
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Work Forces Rewind: Paul LeBlanc on AI and the Future of Higher Ed
07/16/2024
Work Forces Rewind: Paul LeBlanc on AI and the Future of Higher Ed
is former President of Southern New Hampshire University. Over 20 years, he led SNHU’s explosive growth, expanding access to over 250,000 students, to become the largest nonprofit provider of online higher education in the U.S. Paul shares his perspective on how artificial intelligence and the rise of tools like ChatGPT will bring deep shifts for higher education. He outlines the need to reinvent learning models and curricula, deploy AI judiciously, and coordinate global data sharing. Ultimately, Paul expresses optimism that AI’s transformative potential can usher in positive change for society, if anchored by human relationships and wisdom. This forward-looking discussion provides higher education leaders timely insights on navigating AI-driven disruption through coordinated innovation that keeps learner needs at the center. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Julian: Hi y’all. With this episode we are winding down season 2 of Work Forces. We want to thank you, our listeners, for your likes, shares, and engagement with our podcast. Kaitlin: We wouldn’t have made it this far without your continued interest and encouragement and we look forward to bringing you a third season in short order. Julian: To wrap season 2 we re-airing our conversation with Paul LeBlanc about AI and the future of higher education. Kaitlin: This episode has resonated with individuals within and beyond those who contribute to the future of work and learning. We hope you will enjoy this conversation and will be back to kick off season 3 in our next episode. And here we go! Julian: Today, we're thrilled to be joined by Paul LeBlanc, President of Southern New Hampshire University. Paul joined SNHU in 2003 and has transformed the university into the largest nonprofit provider of online higher education in the country, expanding its student base from 2,800 to over 250,000. Paul's been recognized for his innovative leadership and has earned accolades from Fast Company, Forbes Magazine, and Washington Monthly. And in 2018, Paul won the prestigious TIA Institute Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence in Higher Education. Paul's work extends beyond SNHU. He served as senior policy advisor to Under Secretary Ted Mitchell at the US Department of Education, and on several national committees focused on education, quality, and innovation. As a first-generation college grad with degrees from Framingham State University, Boston College, and the University of Massachusetts, Paul's career has spanned from directing a technology startup for Hoetten Mifflin to presiding over Marlboro College before joining SNHU. And most recently, Paul announced that he is stepping down from his role at SNHU and is embarking on an exciting new chapter to focus on the integration of AI into higher education. Thanks so much for joining us today, Paul. Paul LeBlanc: It's really great to be with both of you. Kaitlin: So wonderful to see you, Paul. Thank you for joining our podcast. So though we've given this bio, can you please tell us a bit about your background in your own words and your journey of bringing SNHU to its current scale? Paul: Sure. Let me do the first one in broad strokes. So my family immigrated from a very sort of impoverished rural farming area of New Brunswick, Canada when I was just a kid. And I was the youngest of five and the first in my extended family to go to college. My father had an eighth grade education. My mother had a sixth grade education. And they were, you know, my mom worked in a factory until she was in her seventies, and my dad was a day laborer and a construction worker. And like all immigrant stories, you know, they came because it was work and a better life. And indeed there was. So I have a kind of schmaltzy love of the American dream story. And because I watched the way that my two grown daughters have a life now that their grandparents would scarcely imagine if they were still with us. And that was because I had access to high quality, affordable higher education and changed the whole trajectory of my life and thus theirs. I think that dream has increasingly slipped out of reach for too many Americans and new immigrants and working people. So SNHU has been…what I loved about this place when I came in 2003, almost 21 years ago now, was that that in its DNA had always focused on those learners. It wasn't a typical college that started with a campus and 17 year olds and that bucolic setting we see on view books. It started in the second floor over the Palace Fruit Company on Hanover Street in Manchester and wasn't until 1968 that it had a campus. So when I arrived in 2003, it had about 2,500 students and they had sort of continuing education centers and those were evening programs working adults, but it also has a small online program at a time when a lot of not-for-profit higher ed was still looking down its collective nose at online learning, thought it was inferior quality, couldn't be as good, you need to be in a classroom with our faculty to have a great experience, and yet we watched as for-profit higher ed just rushed to fill that vacuum and people forget that at its height the for-profit sector educated about 12% of all American college students. And I thought, A, we could do a better job. We learned a lot from them. And then I think, though, I tell people all the time, when Phoenix University first came along, they really did good work. They thought hard about what does a working adult need in terms of support and service. It really, they only started to go sideways when they became publicly traded, and quarterly reports and shareholder value trumped good behavior, and then we all know how they went off the rails. So we set out to really look hard at what would it take to grow a nonprofit online institution that was laser focused on that 32 year old with three kids and a dead-end job, maybe some credits. How do they improve their life? And that's really been the driving mission of this institution. We've never wavered from it, you know, even though we're very large now, as you said Julian, and while we're financially very robust and healthy, we didn't raise our tuition for 10 years. We're still an affordable option. And we also didn't get distracted by chasing status. Like we've never, sometimes because we do have a campus, we're like, why don't we do Division 1 sports? That would put us on the map. It was like, and how would that make the life of our students better? Like, tell me again how that works for us. Or across higher ed, people will say, we want to get to a place where we can be more selective and get better students. Like, no, I love the students we serve. I don't want better students. I want us to be better for our students. And that's been probably our big driver. So the rest of the story about how we get to the size has lots of good luck and missteps. And we didn't know how to scale when we started scaling. In 2012, I think, Babson University listed us as number 50 on their list of the 50 largest nonprofit providers of online education. And just three years later, we were number four. And in those three years, we were number four. And in those three years, we were hiring 40-50 people and every Monday we were onboarding. We had you know mountains of Dell computers out in the hallways and and more and God we had no idea what we were doing like we just broke everything we had no idea how to scale so we learned some lessons we had our stumbles, but I think you know part of it got us through all of that was this unwavering focus on our mission and doing really good work for our students. So that's really sort of the story of our growth. Julian: It really is such an amazing story, Paul, the theme of effectively leveraging technology in education has run through this story and contributed so much to the growth, right? As you've said. But reflecting on these last couple of decades, what are the trends and challenges that you've seen as a technology that has evolved and ushered in AI? Paul: So I think, you know, among the sort of challenges we've faced certainly is the regulatory framework, you know, where we are a heavily regulated industry, and I think regulators have often also shared some skepticism of what was possible in online education. And look at the skeptics weren't wholly wrong 20 years ago. Like Clay Christensen has taught us this lesson about disruptive innovation, is that it usually isn't as good as the incumbent thing it later comes to replace or compete with. It gets better though in a very steep curve. Like it gets better fast. And we get better fast. And we started to harness data and data analytics. And, you know, we have lots of...every month we have kind of open day for visiting institutions. We're very collaborative in terms of people who want to learn what we do. And I would say that the showstopper almost every time is when that visiting team hears how we use data and sees 75 people on our data analytics team and they realize we measure everything. We measure how long does it take to complete a financial aid package? How long does it take to get someone enrolled? How are they performing in their classes? We monitor every section of every course 24-7. We know when students are stumbling, eventually, almost always, there'll be a provost, our president who turns to his or her team and says, how come we can't do this? Why don't I get to ask these questions? So I think one of the things we grapple with is really the poor state of data in higher education at the institutional level, where it sits in silos, there's a lot of data collected, but there's not a lot of data analyzed and put to work, and there are data, generally speaking, in the industry. Like we don't, like when I look at the iPads, I don't recognize us, me, or you, right? It's a weird out of date, like it's not real time. So. So I think that's probably our biggest challenge related to that would be our legacy systems. You know, someone said to me recently, because I have worked my whole career in higher ed, that's sort of like the goldfish who sees the castle and like, oh, there he comes. I just assumed that we were like a big lucrative market and people would want to build great technology solutions for us. That's not the case. We are dwarfed by K-12. We are dwarfed by finance. We are dwarfed by healthcare. The legacy systems that we work with in higher education tend not to be the most cutting edge, the most up to date. So I think some of our progress was leveraging industry leaders like in CRM technology. We deploy Salesforce as a lot of people do now. But when we did it at first, there were a lot of like, what is Salesforce and how do you use it? And by the way, what's the CRM? Those are the things looking back that I think we were able to push through and move pretty quickly on. But I think moving forward, I am in the camp that thinks AI radically changes everything. Like, I think the world is not the same today after November 30th, 2022, with the advent of ChatGPT. And while AI has been around for a long time, it's been embedded in our phones and in our GPS and in our back office operations, the idea that any of us can now augment our intelligence with natural language by just speaking a prompt or typing a prompt in English is revolutionary. So looking ahead, I think massive challenges for higher education, because I think there'll be massive challenges for the workforce. I think the workforce will be utterly changed and transformed. And if university's primary job is to prepare people for a world of work, and while as an idealist, I think it's about a lot of other things as well, but that's its first job. It's why society funds higher education, is to prepare people to serve society. We are a knowledge factor and a knowledge economy and now knowledge has to be fundamentally redefined. By extension, we have to redefine universities. I've argued elsewhere that all curricula became instantly out of date on November 30th, ‘22. Like if you weren't looking at everything you teach to say, does this major still matter? Like would you advise people to go into accounting? I wouldn't. Someone said I think those jobs are gonna get enormously displaced. Will there be no accountants? No. But I think it might be 10% of the current number because AI does it so well and faster and smarter. And I think we go through, you know, field after field. And then as McKinsey argues, something like 65% of jobs won't go away, but they'll be radically redefined. Well, you better start redefining your major then, like what are you teaching? And I, you know, I chuckle when I hear faculty in some instances say, you know we need to ban the use of ChatGPT in our classes and I was like, wow, so you would actually ban the very tool that will get students jobs, right? I mean, it's sort of crazy, right? So yeah, I think it's so exciting. So a lot of things have to happen to go to your technology question. A, we have to sort of, we have a lot of work to do. We're very early. Like, we're not gonna figure this out overnight. So we have a lot of work to do to understand AI, how to best use it, what kinds of tools. We need to think about our policies. We need to think about, we think things like academic integrity, the use of writing, what counts for knowledge, and we can go deeper on this one if you like. And then we need to think about how we use data as a sector. And one of the things that I've been working on with George Siemens, who's joined us as a chief scientist on our new venture, is a proposal for a global data consortium. And the idea is that you build better AI applications, you get new and better insights when you have more data. And as a sector, we're terrible at our data, so could we create a global data consortium where large-scale providers would make their data available. It would be pooled, protected in a synthetic layer to protect student privacy and individual data, but that we could all then have better insights. So the Gates Foundation has given us initial funding on the design. ACE, the American Council of Education, has agreed to house it. It shouldn't live with an institution, right? It needs to have a neutral home, so ACE is going to house it. And in the initial conversations we've had with various large-scale providers, if everyone joined who says they want to, the devil’s in the details, and that's what we're working on now, we would have more than 30 million students represented globally in that data consortium. So I think it's a very powerful idea. And with that, we can start to counter things like algorithmic bias. We can ask different kinds of questions. We can combat cultural hegemony in the data. Like there's just lots of things that get better when you can do this globally. So yeah, it's an exciting, exciting time. I fret over all the ways we could get it wrong. But I do think there's a version of this that is incredibly optimistic and hopeful. So much of the AI discussion I hear is about real fears and well-founded fears, by the way, but a lot of fear about, you know, the ways in which it will disrupt our society and maybe displace human beings in various ways. And I'm looking around and thinking, is this working really well for us? Like what part of society is working well today? Like, I don't know, maybe human intelligence is overrated. And maybe a little bit of augmentation would be a good thing. I'm not looking forward to like our robot overlords, but there is an argument that says if we train people less around the issue of, and I know this is grossly oversimplified, but if the fundamental notion of the university and the college major is to answer the question, what do I need to know in order to be an X? What if you can know everything? What if it's all a prompt away? So maybe the better question we should be answering is, what do we need to know, or how do we need to think about the world so that we're better human beings, so there are better societies, there are better communities. And George Siemens argues, and I've come to agree with him, that the fundamental shift facing us, and it's a profoundly existential one for universities, is that we will spend less time worrying about epistemological questions of knowledge, because we're no longer the most powerful knowledge entities on the planet, but maybe a lot more time on ontological questions of being. What does it mean to be in this world? What does it mean to be a good human? And honestly, that would be sort of refreshing to my mind. And it might be that we see things like the decline in status for a lot of STEM and maybe a resurgence of the humanities. Looking very different than they do. I think they're kind of super out of date, but isn't that really what the questions of the humanities are about? So I think it's potentially a super exciting time. Julian: As you're talking, one of the issues we're dealing with in the workforce world is there are a lot of very esteemed researchers, for example, looking at taxonomies related to skills and well, if we have the skills, we have the technology to see them all and read them all, then maybe our jobs are going to shift a little bit and it'll have all sorts of implications for the kind of dissertations we write and the kind of research we do. And as you say, maybe we can focus on making this world a better place. Not that we're not doing that already, but really focus our efforts on how can we improve quality of life and work and ensure that more and more people have productive and happy careers. Paul: If you think about knowledge work, Julian, Stuart Russell is the wonderful computer scientist from Berkeley. He does a wonderful, if your listeners haven't heard it, the BBC has something called the Reflectors and there are four of them that Stuart Russell did in 2023. And he says, he makes a wonderful point, he said, if you had told our ancestors that someday in the future, this thing called a knowledge economy, you go to work into a big sealed box called an office building. And then you'll sit in a small glass box called a cubicle and stare at a really little box that has a bright thing called a computer screen. And they would say, and you'll do that all day, they would say, that sounds like hell. Right, like the work that's wonderful is can I be with people, can I be in nature, can I be making a difference in my community? And honestly, we have enormous need for those human jobs. I’ve argued this in lots of places like we should fill, we should flood our schools with great teachers and coaches and social workers, right? We should rebuild a mental health care system that is broken. I mean just decimated. We don't have a health care system in America anymore…mental health care system, excuse me. That's gone. We need to fix our whole notions of criminal justice. System after system in what I call in my 2022 book called Broken, what I call symptoms of care, those are all jobs that AI can't and won't do. They may be helped by AI, but these are distinctly human jobs. But if you think about all the jobs I just listed, our society doesn't like to pay very much for them. It doesn't want, it tries to have as few of them as possible, and they don't enjoy the status or support. That's what I think could shift. I think it'll have to shift because...
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